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Only when recovery is insufficient and/or demands continue to be (too) high, strain reactions may accumulate and lead to a prolonged impairment of well‐being and health. Strain reactions associated with demanding tasks and/or increased effort are reversible during phases of recovery, thus maintaining long‐term well‐being. The effort‐recovery model (Meijman & Mulder, 1998) introduces recovery to the model.
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If fatigue exceeds a certain level and the compensatory increase in effort is insufficient or if the individual's motivation to invest effort weakens, performance deteriorates, leading to a decline in output and/or an increase in errors or accidents (Folkard & Lombardi, 2006 Hopstaken, 2015 Rosa & Colligan, 1988 Tucker, Folkard, & Macdonald, 2003). However, increased effort is associated with an activation of the sympathetic nervous system causing strain reactions such as a rise in blood pressure or in epinephrine (Schellekens, Sijtsma, Vegter, & Meijman, 2000 Wright, Patrick, Thomas, & Barreto, 2013). According to the compensatory control theory of fatigue (Hockey, 1997, 2011), individuals increase effort to compensate for the fatigue caused by mentally demanding tasks to maintain performance. The complex association between work demands and fatigue has been addressed by two theories.
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For students, the demanding nature of academic lectures has been observed in a number of variables, including an increase in perceived mental workload and mind‐wandering (Young, Robinson, & Alberts, 2009) and a decrease in perceived concentration and the retention of lecture content (Risko et al., 2012 Stuart & Rutherford, 1978). Another non work‐related mental task heavily relying on vigilance is learning in an academic class (Risko, Anderson, Sarwal, Engelhardt, & Kingstone, 2012). Work‐related tasks typically requiring high amounts of vigilance are, for example, air traffic control, cockpit monitoring, and industrial process control, apart from experimental vigilance tasks such as the Mackworth Clock. Vigilance has been shown to deteriorate over time, causing mind wandering, performance decrement, and fatigue (Thomson, Besner, & Smilek, 2015 Warm et al., 2008). One reason for mental work to be demanding is the necessity to display at least some degree of vigilance, which is “the ability of organisms to maintain their focus of attention and to remain alert to stimuli over prolonged periods of time” (Warm et al., 2008). Increases in subjective and/or objective measures of fatigue have been observed for a variety of different tasks such as mental arithmetic (Hopstaken, 2015), driving (Ting, Hwang, Doong, & Jeng, 2008), data entry (Rosa & Colligan, 1988), academic tests (Ackerman & Kanfer, 2009), driving examinations (Meijman, 1997), surgery (Engelmann et al., 2011), and vigilance tasks (Warm, Parasuraman, & Matthews, 2008). Alternatively, demanding mental tasks can lead to a decrease in the willingness to engage in the task and a deterioration of work performance, that is, a decrease in output and/or an increase in errors (Hockey, 1997). This not only affects well‐being directly by increasing a sense of weariness and lack of energy but is also accompanied by an increase in the amount of effort invested in the task to be able to keep up the level of performance (Hockey, 1997). Working on demanding mental tasks leads to a progressive increase in fatigue. Thus, the effects of rest breaks during mentally demanding tasks can be enhanced by engaging in physical activity or relaxation exercises, with effects lasting at least as long as 20 min into the continuation of the task. Compared with the unstructured break, exercise led to an (additional) increase in vigor and relaxation to an (additional) decrease in fatigue at 20‐min post break. Compared with the nonbreak condition, the unstructured rest break led to an increase in vigor, the exercise break as well as the relaxation break both to an increase in vigor and a decrease in fatigue at 20‐min post break. A control condition without a break as well as an unstructured break was compared with breaks either encompassing physical activity or a relaxation exercise. Two measures of well‐being (fatigue and vigor) were assessed immediately before, after, and 20 minutes after the break. Sixty‐six students (53 females, mean age 22.5 years) enrolled in two different university classes of 4‐hr duration participated in the study. The present study investigated the effectiveness of two rest‐break interventions on well‐being during an academic lecture. Research is scarce on ways to enhance the effect of rest breaks during mentally demanding tasks.