"It's my break"

Here's the last defence and I think it's the most human. The three o'clock coffee is a break. You stand up, go to the kitchen, boil the kettle, look out of the window, and for four minutes nobody wants anything. It's the coffee that gives you permission to stop. Take the coffee away and you'd sit at the desk until six.

I'd grant every part of that except the last sentence. The break is real and you need it. What follows is my reasoning.

The break is made of standing up, walking, the kettle and the window. The coffee is the excuse. If you made a decaf, or a peppermint tea, or a glass of water, and stood at the same window for the same four minutes, you'd have had the same break. What you'd have lost is the dose, and the dose isn't what's restful about it. Some people find this hard to believe until they try it, so try it. One afternoon this week, take the break with something else in the mug, and see whether the break was still a break.

The coffee also does something to the break that's worth noticing. It turns a rest into a stimulant. The point of a break at three, if you're flagging, is to let the system settle for a few minutes. What you're doing instead is settling for four minutes and then loading up. It works, in the pick-up sense. It's not rest.

There's another thing that some people get from coffee that isn't rest and isn't alertness, and that's a feeling of being keyed up in a way they enjoy. That's real too, and worth a word. In the Bristol experiments, caffeine raised anxiety and jitteriness in the people who didn't normally drink it, and with regular use that effect largely wore off. So the buzz mostly belongs to people who drink little, and regular drinkers have traded it for tolerance. If what you notice from the three o'clock cup is a slightly tight, restless feeling that you've come to associate with getting things done, it may be worth asking whether it's helping or whether it's the feeling that's keeping you awake at half past eleven.

Keep the break. Keep the kettle and the window. Change what's in the mug, in the afternoon, and see what the break was made of.