Summertime outdoor breaks can affect your productivity; finds Japan-based study

A brief walk after lunch might boost your metabolism and motor or even interpersonal skills with your colleagues but it is not doing any good to your cognitive performance.  A Japan-based study has found that the hot environment reduces a person’s cognitive skills like reasoning, thinking, etc. The study conducted by the researchers at the University of Tsukuba further finds that it is better off avoiding the heat after lunch on hot summer days as so many office workers or students do.  Even 15 minutes of walking can affect one’s cognitive performance, especially for men who don’t get enough sleep at night.

Employers or students in urban heat islands in large cities usually have the convenience of air-conditioned rooms during the sweltering summer months that largely helps in countering the effects of heat on productivity. Brief exposure like breaks or commutation is inevitable; there is not much evidence to prove if it affects cognition.

Previous experiments were conducted only in specialized chambers with varying temperatures. But the outdoor environment is a combination of radiation and winds and hence a real outdoor environment is required to know how heat can be stressful, finds senior author of the latest study, Professor Hiroyunki Kusaka.

Hence researchers this time in a real-world scenario. Subjects were asked to take a simple arithmetic test and then take a break or walk in a hot outdoor urban environment and then return after 15 minutes and take a second test inside their office or college in an AC environment to compare their performance.

Hot environment did affect their performance but there were also other factors in play like walking and being outside in summer heat. The effect was more visible in men who had slept less than five hours the night before.

The researchers hope that the findings will boost productivity at workplaces and educational institutes  in Japan and further even afield the impact of climate change on cognitive abilities of the generation and the ones to come.