The secret to making the lunch break feel longer: Leaving the office and walking down a street can change perceptions of time away from work, study suggests
- When you’re on a busy street, you feel like you’ve taken a longer lunch, a study finds
- Researchers showed videos of busy streets and a sleepy office to 40 people
- Dr. Maxine Sherman said, ‘When you look back at all those things…it feels longer.’
- MRI scans of subjects showed that brain activity could predict perception of time
To make a lunch break seem just that little bit longer, don’t grab a sandwich at your desk, go outside.
When you’re on a busy street, one study suggests, you feel like you’re eating lunch longer.
But staying in a quiet office can make your lunch time seem shorter.
People in the study said that when they watched the street scenes, they felt like they had spent more time watching the videos, but when they watched a boring office, they felt like they had less time.
The findings come after researchers showed videos of busy streets and a sleepy office to 40 people.
When they watched the street scenes, they usually felt like they had spent more time watching the videos. But looking at a boring office made them feel like they had less time.
Experts believe that we calculate time internally by counting the number of things that happen to us. In a busy environment we have the feeling that we have been there for a long time.
dr. Maxine Sherman, of Sussex University, who led the study, said: ‘Taking a walk on your lunch break exposes you to people passing by, wire tapping, shop signs, traffic and your own thoughts about the day.
To make a lunch break seem just that little bit longer, no sandwich at your desk, go for a walk
“It makes sense that when you look back at all those things that happened during that lunch break, it seems like it took longer.”
MRI scans of people in the study, published in the journal PLOS Computational Biology, found that brain activity could predict perception of time.