Fitness gurus and weekend warriors alike are sold on the benefits of high-intensity interval training (HIIT). The research is clear: Break your training into high-intensity spurts of activity followed by slower or resting activities and you will maximize your training effort. The message is compelling: With HIIT, you can achieve greater fitness with a shorter investment of “sweat” time.

It turns out, you can apply a similar training mentality to increase your productivity at work. Like interval training at the gym, interval thinking at the office requires an intentional struggle to improve your performance.

While interval training is about stressing your body to its limit, interval thinking is about stretching your cognitive capacity. And, just like you need to take breaks at the gym during HIIT, you need to take mental breaks after purposely stressing your brain. It makes sense: To successfully organize and process all the new data you have taken in, your brain needs time to relax. This requirement parallels research on the importance of sleep for both physical recovery and deep learning.

The Ideal: Your Brain Optimized

Our daily tasks require us to use different parts of our brains. Strategic planning, number crunching and writing all give our brains a different kind of workout. And, just like muscles at the gym, our mental muscles get fatigued. Thinking is hard work, too. Although our brains are roughly 2% of our body weight, they can consume up to 20% of our calories.

To perform at our best, we need to learn to engage in a series of mini-mental sprints each day. These are high-intensity periods of deep thinking — what we call purposeful struggle — followed by periods of release, during which we shift our attention. Research shows that toggling between high-intensity thinking and periods of rest results in higher quality thoughts. When we engage in interval thinking, our capacity for analytical, creative and collaborative thinking also expands.

The Reality: Wired, But Tired