Why You Should’t Work More Than 90 Minutes Without Taking A Break

We often discuss the importance of taking more breaks to be more productive, but the folks at PayScale have put together a great explanation for exactly why you shouldn’t work more than 90 minutes at a time, and part of it has to do with our basic rest activity cycle.

The Basic Rest Activity Cycle, also called BRAC, may be more familiar to most people as a term that describes the normal human sleep cycle, which is (roughly) 90 minutes in length, where you’re close to wakefulness, descend into REM sleep, and then come back up again and start the process all over.

Of course, extrapolating this to waking activities like work is a bit of a stretch, but it’s not a bad excuse, as PayScale notes:

We’ve known for more than 50 years that we sleep in 90-minute cycles. (If you have a sleep tracker, likely as a feature of an activity band, you might have noticed this yourself.) We move from light sleep, to deep sleep (and restorative REM state) in roughly 90-minute waves. About a decade after we learned about this natural sleep cycle, researchers began to realize that we follow a similar pattern in our waking lives as well.

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