Why Stepping Back Actually Gives You More Time

TL;DR: Getting up, moving, or sitting still for five minute isn't time lost. It's what keeps you from redoing work you already did once. Nicole Hollar, behavior change expert and integrative life coach, explains why the busiest hours of your day are often the ones where you're doing the least useful thinking. The real question isn't whether you have five minutes. It's whether you'll admit that you do.

You've been at your desk for four hours. You skipped lunch, didn't refill your water, and you're still on the same email you started at nine because every time you almost finish it, something else interrupts. You tell yourself you don't have time to stop. That's usually the moment stopping would help most.

Time doesn't disappear when you take a break. It disappears when you keep working past the point where the work is any good. Most people don't budget for that. They measure the day in hours logged, not decisions made well, so four hours spent circling the same email feels productive even though nothing got finished — at least not well.

Step Away from the Canvas

I've used this comparison before: an artist working on a large canvas eventually has to step back from it. Not because the painting is done, but because standing three inches from it for six hours straight means losing track of the whole picture. Up close, every brushstroke looks urgent. From across the room, half of them don't matter. Nobody would tell that artist to keep painting closer and closer because there's no time to walk backward. Yet that's exactly what most people do to a full inbox.

What Getting Up Does

There's a reason movement gets recommended at intervals of roughly an hour, not once at the end of the day. Sitting in the same position, staring at the same screen, thinking about the same three problems for hours at a stretch narrows your field of view. You stop noticing options. You stop noticing that you already answered this exact question in an email two days ago. Standing up, walking to get water, or stretching for two minutes isn't a reward for finishing something. It's what lets you see the thing you're working on with fresh eyes instead of the eyes that have been staring at it since nine a.m.

This is where people conflate laziness with recovery. Getting up isn't quitting. It's changing your vantage point long enough to come back and do the next hour better than you would have done it otherwise.

The Five Minutes You Say You Don't Have

Self-care gets treated like a bonus round — something you'll get to once the real list is finished. Except the list is never finished. If you're waiting for a clear runway to take care of yourself, you're waiting for a day that isn't coming, and in the meantime, you're making decisions with whatever mental bandwidth is left over after everything else takes its share.

A five-minute pause doesn't need incense or an app subscription. Sit down. Close your eyes if that's available to you, or don't if it isn't. Take ten slow breaths, in through the nose, out through the mouth, and notice where you're holding tension — jaw, shoulders, hands. Spend the rest of the five minutes doing nothing else but breathing. That's it. The point isn't to reach some elevated state. The point is to stop feeding the same loop of thought long enough for your brain to reset.

Five minutes feels like a cost when you're staring at a task list. It stops feeling like one once you account for the alternative: the terse email you walk back the next day, the meeting you entered unprepared, the decision made irritated that you now have to unmake. That's where the time really goes — not into the break you skipped, but into cleaning up after the hour you spent making things worse.

You can't always control your workload, your deadlines, or how many things land on your desk in a single afternoon. What you can control is whether you keep treating a pause as something you'll earn later. Nobody schedules the five minutes; it just doesn't happen, and the day gets labeled busy instead of unproductive; a more comfortable way to describe the same thing.

Listen to the discussion about this topic on The OWN IT Podcast

Questions for Reflection

• Where in your day do you push through discomfort or fatigue because stopping feels like falling behind? And what has that cost you this week?
• What decision have you made recently that you had to walk back later? Were you rested or reactive when you made it?
• If getting up for five minutes is genuinely available to you today, what's the real reason you haven't done it?

Frequently Asked Questions

Does taking short breaks improve productivity, or is that just an excuse to avoid work?

Breaks and avoidance can look identical from the outside, but they function differently. Avoidance postpones a task you don't want to face; a real break interrupts fatigue so you return with better judgment. The difference shows up in what you do during the break, and whether you come back to the work afterward.

How long should a break be to really help?

There's no magic number, but five minutes of stillness or a short walk every 50 to 75 minutes is usually enough to interrupt tunnel vision without derailing the day. Length matters less than whether the break disengages your attention from the problem, instead of just relocating the same thoughts to a different chair.

What's the difference between self-care and avoidance?

Self-care restores your capacity to handle what's in front of you; avoidance is used to escape it. The test is what happens afterward. If you return to the task with more clarity, that was self-care. If you keep finding new things to do instead of the task, that's avoidance wearing self-care's clothes.