Just finished another day of constant meetings? Beware. Multiple meetings back-to-back without a break can quickly raise your stress levels.
We’re all keenly aware that a constant barrage of meetings doesn’t have much of a positive effect on our general levels of concentration. Microsoft’s Human Factors Lab recently carried out a study that measured peoples’ brainwaves during meetings to determine their stress levels. The researchers worked with two different test groups. The first had to have four half-hour video calls covering different topics on a single day – back-to-back without a break. The second group had the same, but with ten-minute gaps between meetings.
Breaks: The magic bullet.
While the participants’ stress levels rose and rose during the relentless meetings, the brief breaks reduced them to the extent that the subjects felt a similar amount of motivation for the last meeting as they did for the first.
The highest level of stress was recorded shortly before the transition to a new meeting, as the person had to start thinking about a completely different topic. And during the meetings, the group who had no breaks were less engaged and became increasingly withdrawn.
Adding to this stress was having to plan in particularly challenging, focused tasks between the onslaught of meetings, all themselves requiring a high degree of concentration. The better solution here is to combine simple individual tasks with complex meetings, or brief and less demanding meetings with tasks that require greater concentration. A research team at Yale University also found that online meetings over Zoom or Teams further fatigue the brain due to the lack of natural and dynamic interaction between participants, and feeds dropping in and out and buffering requiring greater concentration.
So what can you do to stem the negative impacts of an uninterrupted meeting marathon? If possible, the recommendation is to not plan in too many meetings on the same day, and not to rely solely on virtual meetings. But as this is often impossible to control or avoid, you need to plan wisely and – above all – ensure there are breaks. And what’s the best way to use these breaks? The most important thing is to get some distance from your desk and work. It also makes sense to do something that distracts and relaxes you. Meditating, taking a short walk, small talk, stretching exercises and getting a bit of fresh air are just a few examples of ways we can give our brains a much-deserved rest.
Source: Research proves your brain needs breaks; Microsoft Human Factors Lab, 2021