Productivity

In his seminal work The Twenty Minute Break, Ernest L. Rossi highlights the psychological background and necessity of breaks. What he refers to as everyday trance is something that everyone has experienced or observed at some point. Someone stares into space and appears hypnotized and absent-minded. Or you want to concentrate on a problem and keep drifting off into daydreams. 

Everything in the universe has a rhythm, including us humans. The most obvious rhythm is the alternation of day and night. The tides ebb and flow periodically. The moon waxes and wanes regularly. We humans sleep or are awake. But there is an even finer rhythm: ultradian rhythm. From the moment we get up, we oscillate between 90-120 minute periods of activity, followed by 15-20 minute periods of rest. But that doesn't mean you have to take a break. No, quite the opposite. Nature is flexible enough to skip these breaks when it's not possible. For example, 10,000 years ago, while hunting, you couldn't lie down to rest if you were attacked by an animal. But consistently skipping all breaks comes at a price: stress!

In the short term, catecholamines (adrenaline, dopamine, etc.) are an excellent form of doping, but they are not designed by nature for continuous use. Many people are under constant stress and use caffeine, nicotine, etc. to help them cope. However, this reduces concentration and leads to more mistakes. The higher up the hierarchy mistakes are made, the more costly they are. It is also fatal that the errors have to be corrected the next day, while you are still fresh, which means that effective productivity declines even more. 

The solution could be so simple. A walk after lunch, a short siesta, or for the chronically stressed person who can't relax at all: the technical solution - an audio mix. You can listen to an audio file below. In the foreground, you hear the sound of the sea, which is louder than the binaural beats. Binaural beats slowly lower the brain frequency to a state of deep meditation. In 20 minutes, you will be gently guided into a trance and then awakened again. Most people don't notice at first that they have fallen asleep, but wake up feeling very refreshed and wonder if it actually worked ;-)

lthough the studies on binaural beats are inconclusive, the audio mix works extremely well. On the one hand, this is because the body automatically enters rest mode as soon as it is given the chance. Listening to the audio mix with headphones also shields you from your surroundings, allowing you to switch off completely. Binaural beats help to slow down brain frequencies. In the worst case, they are just a placebo that you can hardly hear. If you don't have epilepsy, just give it a try and see if it works for you.
Please use headphones and close your eyes!