The good news is that vigilance breaks can loosen the trough’s grip on our behavior. As the doctors at the University of Michigan demonstrate, inserting regular mandatory vigilance breaks into tasks helps us regain the focus needed to proceed with challenging work that must be done in the afternoon. Imagine if Captain Turner, who hadn’t slept the night before his fateful decisions, had taken a brief vigilance break with other crew members to review how fast the Lusitania needed to travel and how best to calculate the ship’s position in order to avoid U-boats.
This simple intervention is backed by heartening evidence. For instance, the largest health care system in the United States is the Veterans Health Administration, which operates about 170 hospitals across the country. In response to the persistence of medical errors (many of which occurred in afternoons), a team of physicians at the VA implemented a comprehensive training system across the hospitals (on which Michigan modeled its own efforts) that was built around the concept of more intentional and more frequent breaks, and featured such tools as “laminated checklist cards, whiteboards, paper forms, and wall mounted posters.” One year after the training began, the surgical mortality rate (how often people died during or shortly after surgery) dropped 18 percent.11
Still, for most people, work doesn’t involve paralyzing others and cutting them open—or other life-on-the-line responsibilities such as flying a twenty-seven-ton jet or guiding troops into battle. For the rest of us, another type of break offers a simple way to steer around the dangers of the trough. Call them “restorative breaks.” And to understand them, let’s leave the American Midwest and head to Scandinavia and the Middle East.
FROM THE SCHOOLHOUSE TO THE COURTHOUSE: THE POWER OF RESTORATIVE BREAKS
In chapter 1 we learned about some curious results on Denmark’s national standardized exams. Danish schoolchildren who take the tests in the afternoon score significantly worse than those who take the exams earlier in the day. To a school principal or education policy maker, the response seems obvious: Whatever it takes, move all the tests to the morning. However, the researchers also discovered another remedy, one with applications beyond schools and tests, that is remarkably easy to explain and implement.
When the Danish students had a twenty- to thirty-minute break “to eat, play, and chat” before a test, their scores did not decline. In fact, they increased. As the researchers note, “A break causes an improvement that is larger than the hourly deterioration.”12 That is, scores go down after noon. But scores go up by a higher amount after breaks.
Taking a test in the afternoon without a break produces scores that are equivalent to spending less time in school each year and having parents with lower incomes and less education. But taking the same test after a twenty- to thirty-minute break leads to scores that are equivalent to students spending three additional weeks in the classroom and having somewhat wealthier and better-educated parents. And the benefits were the greatest for the lowest-performing students.
Unfortunately, Danish schools, like many around the world, offer only two breaks each day. Worse, legions of school systems are cutting back on recess and other restorative pauses for students in the name of rigor and—get ready for the irony—higher test scores. But as Harvard’s Francesca Gino, one of the study’s authors, puts it, “If there were a break after every hour, test scores would actually improve over the course of the day.”13
Many younger students underperform during the trough, which risks both providing teachers with an inaccurate sense of their progress and prompting administrators to attribute to what and how students are learning something that is really an issue of when they’re taking a test. “We believe these results to have two important policy implications,” say the researchers who studied the Danish experience. “[F]irst, cognitive fatigue should be taken into consideration when deciding on the length of the school day and the frequency and duration of breaks. Our results show that longer school days can be justified, if they include an appropriate number of breaks. Second, school accountability systems should control for the influence of external factors on test scores . . . a more straightforward approach would be to plan tests as closely after breaks as possible.”14
Perhaps it makes sense that a cup of apple juice and a few minutes to run around works wonders for eight-year-olds solving arithmetic problems. But restorative breaks have a similar power for adults with weightier responsibilities.
In Israel, two judicial boards process about 40 percent of the country’s parole requests. At their helm are individual judges whose job is to hear prisoners’ cases one after another and make decisions about their fate. Should this prisoner be released because she’s served enough time on her sentence and shown sufficient signs of rehabilitation? Should that one, already granted parole, now be permitted to move about without his tracking device?
Judges aspire to be rational, deliberative, and wise, to mete out justice based on the facts and the law. But judges are also human beings subject to the same daily rhythms as the rest of us. Their black robes don’t shelter them from the trough. In 2011 three social scientists (two Israelis and one American) used data from these two parole boards to examine judicial decision-making. They found that, in general, judges were more likely to issue a favorable ruling— granting the prisoner parole or allowing him to remove an ankle monitor—in the morning than in the afternoon. (The study controlled for the type of prisoner, the severity of the offense, and other factors.) But the pattern of decision-making was more complicated, and more intriguing, than a simple a.m./p.m. divide.
The following chart shows what happened. Early in the day, judges ruled in favor of prisoners about 65 percent of the time. But as the morning wore on, that rate declined. And by late morning, their favorable rulings dropped to nearly zero. So a prisoner slotted for a 9 a.m. hearing was likely to get parole while one slotted for 11:45 a.m. had essentially no chance at all—regardless of the facts of the case. Put another way, since the default decision on boards is typically not to grant parole, judges deviated from the status quo during some hours and reinforced it during others.
But look what happens after the judges take a break. Immediately after that first break, for lunch, they become more forgiving— more willing to deviate from the default—only to sink into a more hard-line attitude after a few hours. But, as happened with the Danish schoolchildren, look what occurs when those judges then get a second break—a midafternoon restorative pause to drink some juice or play on the judicial jungle gym. They return to the same rate of favorable decisions they displayed first thing in the morning.
Ponder the consequences: If you happen to appear before a parole board just before a break rather than just after one, you’ll likely spend a few more years in jail—not because of the facts of the case but because of the time of day. The researchers say they cannot identify precisely what’s driving this phenomenon. It could be that eating restored judges’ glucose levels and replenished their mental reserves. It could be that a little time away from the bench lifted their mood. It could be that the judges were tired and that rest reduced their fatigue. (Another study of U.S. federal courts found that on the Mondays after the switch to Daylight Saving Time, when people on average lose roughly forty minutes of sleep, judges rendered prison sentences that were about 5 percent longer than the ones they handed down on typical Mondays.15)
Whatever the explanation, a factor that should have been extraneous to judicial decision-making and irrelevant to justice itself—whether