The Myth of ‘I’ll Take a Break Later’
How micro-breaks help you avoid burnout while working from home.
The Accidental Trap of Sitting
I genuinely enjoy working from home. Even now, years later, I still do. But back when we first made the change to working at home during covid, I underestimated just how much invisible social glue office-life used to provide.
The casual chats while waiting for the kettle to boil. The quick question as you passed someone’s desk. The small decompression walks to and from meetings where you quietly vented with a trusted colleague before stepping back into diplomacy mode.
Those accidental collisions weren’t scheduled, but they were essential movement breaks that helped counteract sedentary habits.
But when you go fully remote? Work becomes oddly… bland.
All those micro-interactions vanished. There were no casual collisions anymore. No kettle chats. No corridor resets. No coffee queue camaraderie. Just pure, concentrated efficiency.
Suddenly, every conversation requires deliberate effort, a scheduled call, a formal meeting invite, a Teams message pinged across the void.
And because communication now took more intentional effort, I did what many of us did, I compensated. I made myself more available. I squeezed calls into every available corner of the day to keep relationships strong. After all, good working relationships don’t maintain themselves.
That’s how I first realised I was trapped at my desk, slowly building my own burnout machine.
The Trade-Off: When Movement Disappeared
Little by little, I sat at my desk longer to make time for those conversations. I wanted to maintain relationships, keep communication open, support my colleagues. I was doing what felt responsible, trying to recreate, virtually, all the casual touchpoints we once had in-person.
But while I was focused on investing in communication and relationships I didn’t notice or realise that physical inactivity had quietly taken over my day.
In the office, I would never have described myself as active. But in retrospect I moved far more than I realised:
Walking between meetings.
Popping to a colleague’s desk instead of sending yet another email.
Heading to the kitchen to make a coffee or get some water.
Even wrestling paper jams out of the clutches of printer.
All of it added up, dozens of tiny movement breaks scattered through the day. None of them registered as "exercise," but collectively they interrupted the long stretches of sitting, giving my body a chance to move, reset and protect against burnout and fatigue.
At home? These were all gone.
We might think that the phrase “sitting is the new smoking” might be a bit dramatic, but the World Health Organisation reports that physical inactivity is the 4th leading reason for early death.
The more we sit, the less we move, and the higher the health risks of sitting become.
Even short, regular micro-breaks at work, just standing, stretching, or walking briefly, can help mitigate many of these health risks as well as:
boost focus
restore mental energy
prevent the slow build-up of tension and fatigue
improve mood and productivity
contribute to weight management
support long-term workplace wellbeing
When those tiny interruptions vanished from my workday, so did my natural opportunities to move.
And, as I worked harder to maintain communication, I created a workday that left me more physically inactive, struggling to focus and exhausted at the end of the day.
The Wait-a-Minute Moment
Oddly, much of this started with good intentions. I wanted to maintain relationships, keep communication open, support my colleagues.
Every check-in became a scheduled call. Every conversation required effort and calendar space. It helped preserve our working relationships, kept us all a little sane, gave us space to laugh as well as time to work through complex problems.
But it also kept us trapped in our chairs and at our desks. Nesting in my desk chair like some sort of sedentary barnacle.
At the time, it felt helpful. Trying to find a way to translate what we used to have in-person to the virtual world, the kettle chats, corridor conversations, decompression walks to meetings. So, as I made space for the conversations, I didn’t realise that I was trading away the 5-minutes here and there when I used to move.
The more meetings there were meant the less time for movement there was, the more fatigued I felt, the harder it became to step away and my stress levels grew.
Eventually, I caught myself at the end of yet another workday, realising I hadn’t stepped outside the boat.
Like so many people experiencing work-from-home burnout, my entire wellbeing plan was based on the optimistic fantasy that one day I’d be ‘caught up.’ and then I would have time to take care of myself.
That’s when it finally registered, if I kept waiting for things to calm down before taking care of my own wellbeing, I might be waiting a long time.
The Shift: Drawing a Small Line
There was always another urgent project, another last-minute meeting, another “quick chat” that somehow took 45 minutes.
The more I tried to catch up, the more I postponed taking care of myself, convinced that I just had to clear the backlog. But the permanent sitting habit wasn’t going to break itself.
If I was going to have to commit to making time for myself to step away from my desk. But standing up for five minutes between meetings felt dangerously subversive, like I was violating the unspoken rule of remote working.
It started with a lunchtime walk, a change to get out of the boat and go for a walk along the river. I started blocking out my lunch break.
Not pencilling it in. Not a “soft hold.”
Blocked. Booked. Non-negotiable.
It sat in my calendar like any other meeting, except this meeting was with myself. (A surprisingly difficult person to schedule with, as it turns out.)
Did people still try to book over it? Of course.
Did urgent requests still appear? Obviously.
But instead of defaulting to “yes,” I started offering two choices:
We can chat after my walk.
Or we can do a voice call while I walk.
Some days, of course, even an hour wasn’t possible. But because it was a recurring calendar entry, tomorrow’s meeting with myself and my trainers and the river was pre-planned for me.
And the surprise. The difference in my energy, mood and productivity was immediate.
The work got done, I was more pleasant to work with (an undoubted relief for my colleagues) and I was able to focus and contribute more effectively. My brain, which had been operating on low power mode for months, finally had enough oxygen to function like something useful human being again.
The world didn’t fall apart because I’d taken an hour to go for a lunchtime walk.
The Turning Point
The lunchtime walk was a definite turning point in my work-from-home journey. I noticed that I felt better in myself and was more productive at work when I took a walk at lunchtime.
The next breakthrough came when I realised just how much movement had quietly been stripped from my day by working remotely. That realisation brought me back to something I’d actually designed at university: Active Break, an intervention for office workers that encouraged 5-minute breaks every hour to disrupt physical inactivity and prevent burnout.
The irony is not wasted on me. Having written an entire project about breaking sedentary habits, I personally became a test case for what happens when you don’t.
Apparently, knowing the science isn’t enough if you schedule meetings like a caffeinated octopus. After spending months designing a public health intervention to disrupt sedentary habits, here I was, shackled to my desk, barely moving, and suffering the consequences I’d written papers about.
But instead of waiting for perfect gaps to magically appear, I started looking for tiny opportunities in my schedule, just five minutes here and there. Between meetings. After calls. Before I opened my inbox again.
What did I do in these 5-minutes? Nothing dramatic. Sometimes it was standing stretches. Sometimes walking a few laps up and down the boat. And sometimes, especially on the more stressful days, I dusted off the resistance bands: the sadistic bungee cords of wellness.
(For the record, I do not enjoy resistance band exercises. But oddly enough, they’re remarkably effective when I’m stressed. The physical effort somehow cuts through the mental fog. A hundred reps later, I feel calmer, less irritable, and far less likely to snap at innocent colleagues simply asking the same question for the third time!)
The beauty of the five-minute active breaks is it’s your choice what you do with the time. What’s important is that you move more and sit less.
The moment you stand up and move, your brain and body both register the change:
Blood starts circulating again.
Shoulders relax.
Mental energy rebounds.
The irritability softens.
No, it doesn’t fix the workload. But it changes how you face it.
The Takeaway: Build Wellbeing Into Your 9 to 5
In the end, it wasn’t about discovering some grand new secret. It was about finally noticing what had quietly vanished.
The walks, the movement, the tiny resets that used to be built into the workday had slowly disappeared. And, like most things, I hadn’t missed them, until I did.
What I’ve learned is that waiting for work to calm down before you make space for your wellbeing is like waiting for your inbox to empty. In theory, it’s possible. In practice… well, we both know how that story ends.
That’s why I stopped trying to find the perfect moment. Instead, I started building small, consistent interruptions into the chaos, five minutes here and there, 5-minute active breaks that quietly added up to feeling more like myself again.
This isn’t about chasing some perfect balance or becoming a shining example of workplace wellbeing. I still get it wrong. I still sit for longer than is good for me, and my neck still lets me know about it.
But if work is filling every corner of your day, you don’t need to wait for permission.
Seize control. Start making room for your wellbeing.
Build it into your 9 to 5.
Be intentional. Stand up. Stretch your legs.
Walk. Dance. Do whatever gives your body a break from the chair.
Five minutes at a time is enough to start your active break journey. It might just be the most powerful habit you build for your health, focus, and burnout prevention.
Enrol today and unlock the key to a more dynamic and engaging workday.
