What to Do on a 5-Minute Study Break, According to Science

A study break is not wasted time. It is part of the session, and what you do with it decides whether you come back sharper or come back 20 minutes later with your phone still in your hand. Here is what research says about the five minutes between study blocks, with the caveats included.

The short answer

1. Move. Stand up, walk, stretch, do stairs.
2. Rest your mind. Sit quietly, look out a window, refill your water.
3. Skip the scroll. Social media during a break tends to pull you into content that follows you back into the next block.

Why breaks help at all

A 2022 meta-analysis of micro-breaks (breaks of 10 minutes or less) found they reliably raised energy and lowered fatigue. The boost to performance was smaller and clearest on easier tasks. So think of a break as maintenance: it keeps your attention from running down, rather than making you smarter in the moment. For why fixed break schedules like the Pomodoro technique help some students, see the science behind the Pomodoro technique.

1. Moving your body: the best-supported break

In a study by Fenesi and colleagues (2018), first-year university students watched a 50-minute lecture. Students who took three 5-minute exercise breaks stayed on task better and scored higher on immediate and delayed tests than students who took video-game breaks or no breaks at all. It was a single lecture in a lab, but it is one of the most directly relevant studies: 5-minute breaks, students, and a real learning test.

You do not need a workout. Jumping jacks, a lap around the building or a flight of stairs is enough to change your state.

2. Quiet rest: give new memories room

In a well-known experiment by Dewar and colleagues (2012), people who sat quietly with their eyes closed for 10 minutes after hearing a story remembered more of it, even a week later, than people who played a spot-the-difference game instead. The idea is that the brain keeps working on new information when you stop feeding it more.

Brain research points the same way. In skill learning, much of the early improvement showed up during short rests, not during practice, and the brain was seen “replaying” the skill at high speed during those rests.

The caveat: those brain studies were about typing-style motor skills, not pharmacology. And a 2026 meta-analysis of 51 wakeful-rest studies found the memory effect is real but smaller and less consistent in healthy young adults than in older adults and patients. Quiet rest is a good break, not a memory hack.

3. Go outside, or at least look at something green

Berman, Jonides and Kaplan (2008) found that a walk in a park, and even looking at photos of nature, improved scores on a demanding attention task compared with city scenes. The samples were small, but a short walk outside combines this with movement, so it is an easy win.

What about your phone?

Using a phone while studying clearly costs you. In one study, students who multitasked on laptops during a lecture scored lower, and so did the classmates who could see their screens. In a large survey, texting and Facebook use while doing schoolwork were linked to a lower GPA (a correlation, not proof of cause).

You may have heard that a phone sitting on your desk drains your brain even when it is off. That comes from a 2017 “brain drain” study, but a careful replication did not find the effect. The honest version: phone use distracts; the effect of its mere presence is contested. Putting it in another room is still the simplest way to avoid using it.

On a break, a quick text is fine. The risk is the feed: five minutes becomes twenty, and the last video is what you think about when the next block starts.

Do the 20-20-20 eye breaks work?

The rule says every 20 minutes, look at something 20 feet away for 20 seconds. Looking into the distance is harmless and may feel good, but the numbers are not well supported. In one test, 20-second breaks every 5, 10, 20 or 40 minutes made no difference to eye-strain symptoms or reading. A 5-minute break away from the screen covers it anyway.

A 5-minute break menu

• Walk to refill your water and take the long way back.
• Do 20 squats or a flight of stairs.
• Step outside and look at trees or the sky.
• Sit with your eyes closed and let the last block settle.
• Stretch your neck, shoulders and wrists (care plans are hard on them).

NurseSavvy’s focus mode builds this in on desktop: after a 25-minute round the screen turns a calm green and counts down your 5-minute break, so you can step away without watching the clock.

References

1. Dewar, M., Alber, J., Butler, C., Cowan, N., & Della Sala, S. (2012). Brief wakeful resting boosts new memories over the long term. Psychological Science, 23(9), 955–960.
2. Parra, Zhang, & Radvansky (2026). Meta-analysis of wakeful rest and memory (51 studies). Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 33, 49.
3. Bönstrup, M., et al. (2019). A rapid form of offline consolidation in skill learning. Current Biology, 29(8), 1346–1351.
4. Buch, E. R., et al. (2021). Consolidation of human skill linked to waking hippocampo-neocortical replay. Cell Reports, 35(10), 109193.
5. Fenesi, B., Lucibello, K., Kim, J. A., & Heisz, J. J. (2018). Sweat so you don’t forget: Exercise breaks during a university lecture increase on-task attention and learning. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 7(2), 261–269.
6. Berman, M. G., Jonides, J., & Kaplan, S. (2008). The cognitive benefits of interacting with nature. Psychological Science, 19(12), 1207–1212.
7. Sana, F., Weston, T., & Cepeda, N. J. (2013). Laptop multitasking hinders classroom learning for both users and nearby peers. Computers & Education, 62, 24–31.
8. Junco, R., & Cotten, S. R. (2012). No A 4 U: The relationship between multitasking and academic performance. Computers & Education, 59(2), 505–514.
9. Ward, A. F., Duke, K., Gneezy, A., & Bos, M. W. (2017). Brain drain: The mere presence of one’s own smartphone reduces available cognitive capacity. Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, 2(2), 140–154.
10. Ruiz Pardo, A. C., & Minda, J. P. (2022). Preregistered direct replication of Ward et al. (2017). Acta Psychologica, 230, 103717.
11. Albulescu, P., et al. (2022). “Give me a break!” A systematic review and meta-analysis on micro-breaks. PLOS ONE, 17(8), e0272460.
12. Johnson, S., & Rosenfield, M. (2023). 20-20-20 rule: Are these numbers justified? Optometry and Vision Science, 100(1), 52–56.