Live-streaming Activity and Relaxation Breaks: a (Home-)Office-Compatible Approach to Promote Break Recovery, Mood, and Attention?

Abstract

The aim of this study is to investigate whether short, live-streaming activity and relaxation lunch breaks have positive associations with office workers’ mood (calmness, valence, and energetic arousal), back pain, and attention after break and whether these associations are mediated by better break recovery. Additionally, we considered the two respite interventions as resources possibly buffering the effects of elevated situational job demands. Ten-minute break exercises were conducted during lunch breaks via Zoom live-stream, and data on those days were compared with data on days on which participants spent their breaks as usual. Our sample of 34 office workers provided data for 277 work days (209 in the home office and 68 on site at the company). Multilevel path models revealed positive total associations of both respite interventions with the mood dimension of calmness. Activity breaks additionally showed a positive association with the energetic arousal dimension of mood, while relaxation breaks were positively related to objectively measured cognitive performance. Interestingly, activity breaks moderated the relationships of job demands with calmness and valence, indicating their function as a stress-buffering resource. There were no significant associations between the two respite interventions and back pain. Supplemented by participants’ feedback, the findings of this study suggest that offering short virtually guided break exercises may represent a feasible and office-compatible approach to promote break recovery, mood and functionality at work, especially regarding home-office work. Possible advantages and disadvantages of the live-streaming format are discussed.

Measuring Situational Cognitive Performance in the Wild: A Psychometric Evaluation of Three Brief Smartphone-Based Test Procedures

“…In line with the ACT (Eysenck et al, 2007) and former studies that used the SART in recovery research (Pasanen et al, 2018;Riedl et al, 2023), calmness was significantly associated with a reduced number of commission errors in the SART, which indicates enhanced cognitive inhibition. Sliwinski et al (2006) noted that stress effects do not become evident in simple tasks, such as the PVT.…”

“…For further analyses, the shortest measurement duration that provided at least a fair reliability of change for errors ( R c > 0.40) and at least a moderate reliability of change for reaction time ( R c > 0.60) was selected for each test ( Shrout, 1998 ). Based on the literature ( Schmidt-Atzert et al, 2004 ) and in line with prior studies (e.g., T. Chung et al, 2020 ; Daniëls et al, 2020 ; Grant et al, 2017 ; Riedl et al, 2023 ), we focused on the most prominent outcomes for each test. For the DSST, we focused on the number of errors indicating response accuracy, and response efficiency was defined as the number of correct trials achieved within a pure reaction time of 1 second.…”

“…For example, SART performance improvement was observed by Pasanen et al (2018) following nature walks and restoration-enhancement tasks. To our knowledge, the study by Riedl et al (2023) is the only one in which the SART was provided ambulatorily on smartphones in the work context and used with a measurement duration of under 3 minutes. In this study, it was shown that live-streaming break interventions can have positive effects on SART performance after a work break.…”