Lunch breaks don’t work for leaders

Lunch breaks don’t work for leaders (and that’s not the real problem)

We all know the advice.

Take regular breaks. Step away from your desk. Go for a walk. Come back refreshed.

The science is sound, movement supports brain function, energy, even longevity and yet, for many leaders (myself included), it just doesn’t land. Not because they don’t care, or don’t know better, but because in reality, it doesn’t work that way.

Some people can step away from a task and return to it easily. Others can’t and many of the people running businesses fall firmly into the second camp.

When you’re deep in something, solving a problem, making decisions, building momentum stopping can cost more than it gives back. Getting back into that flow isn’t always quick or easy. For some, it’s the hardest part of the day.

So telling a founder or CEO to “just take a proper lunch break” isn’t always helpful. In some cases, it’s irrelevant.

That doesn’t mean the advice is wrong. It means it’s not universal. I learnt this the hard way.

A few years ago, I was told I’d likely need to manage a chronic condition long term, with medication and a reduced lifespan as part of the deal. I didn’t accept that at face value. I went looking for alternatives and tried most of them.

Some were sensible. Some were… less so. Cold water, obscure diets, standing on my head and gruelling movement regimes.

But through all of it, one thing remained oddly consistent: I still couldn’t reliably take a proper lunch break. Not because I didn’t want to but because my brain doesn’t switch off and on like that and once I understood that, things started to change.

Here’s what I see now, working with leaders.

We’ve built a narrative around “best practice” ways of working. But those practices are often based on averages not on how high-performing individuals actually operate.

Many leaders:

• Work in long, focused stretches

• Find interruption more disruptive than helpful

• Struggle to re-engage once they’ve stepped away

That’s not a flaw. In many cases, it’s exactly what made them successful in the first place.

The issue isn’t that they’re doing it wrong. It’s that we keep trying to fit them into a model that doesn’t suit them.

So if the traditional break structure doesn’t work, what then? You don’t ignore your physiology. You work with it differently.

For leaders who don’t naturally break their day, the focus shifts from stepping away to sustaining performance while staying in it.

That looks more like:

Consistency over perfection
Eating at roughly the same times each day, even if it’s quick. Not because it’s “healthy” in a general sense, but because stable energy supports clearer thinking and better decisions.

Spacing, not grazing
Allowing proper gaps between meals so your system isn’t constantly processing. For many, that translates to more stable energy rather than peaks and crashes.

Hydration that actually happens
Not the ideal version, the practical one. Water within reach, in meetings, in the car. Small habits that don’t rely on willpower throughout a busy day.

None of this is ground breaking, but that’s the point.

High-performing environments don’t fail because people lack information. They fail because the advice they’re given doesn’t fit how they actually work.

There’s also something else worth saying. We’re quick to judge working styles.

The person who takes a full lunch break might be seen as less driven. The one who works through it might be seen as unsustainable. In reality, both can be right or wrong depending on the individual.

People are not uniform, the more responsibility someone carries, the more costly it becomes to ignore how they personally function.

The goal isn’t to follow best practice, it’s to understand how you operate at your best — and build your working day around that, rather than forcing yourself into something that looks right on paper.

Because for some leaders, the problem isn’t that they don’t take breaks. It’s that we keep giving them advice designed for people who don’t think like them and that’s where performance starts to slip quietly, over time, in ways that are easy to miss and expensive to ignore.

Amy Wray | June 2026