Here’s How Many Extra Days You End up Working When You Skip Your Lunch Break (aka Don’t Do It!)

When was the last time you took a proper lunch break? We’re not talking about eating a Pret salad at your desk or a quick dash to Chipotle while you fire off a few emails, but a proper sit-down away from the office. Probably not recently, right?

While the majority of job contracts stipulate an hour-long lunch break, the reality is most offices have a culture where taking a full 60 minutes is frowned upon. New research from Workthere.com supports this theory with their findings, suggesting that the average worker takes just 34 minutes for their lunch.

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As Refinery 29 pointed out, that’s 26 whole minutes of stolen time, which when multiplied by the number of days in a working year (252) comes to a whopping 6,032 minutes. That’s 12 whole days of unpaid work. If that doesn’t make you want to reclaim your midday break, we don’t know what will!

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In fact, their study found that 52% of workers revealed they skip their lunch break completely at least once a week, and 37% claim that they rarely leave the office at lunchtime. Interestingly, despite their stats, over a quarter of people surveyed believed they would be more productive in the afternoon if they left the office at lunch.

The research also identified the industries where lunch-skipping is most common. Coming in on top was HR, where 70% of people bypass lunch. That was closely followed by banking (68%), and arts and culture (62%). Moral of the story… go eat, people!

This story originally appeared on Grazia Daily.