Additionally, a break might be an opportunity for your mind to continue working on whatever it was you left off with, whereas an interruption explicitly redirects your attention to another topic.
When I’m deep in the weeds on a task, stepping away for a walk in the park, a workout, or to prepare a meal or some coffee, affords me the opportunity to clear the micro details of the task from my mind while retaining the macro at the tip of my attention. This state is very frequently where the best insights on the task emerge, whereas an interruption resets both micro and macro attention entirely to something else.
> I find taking mini breaks, whether visiting the restroom or being interrupted by my kids to be quite beneficial actually.
For me, it depends. When working at home with kids around, I actually dread the restroom break or making myself a cup of tea, because in those two minutes I'm out of the home office, it's virtually guaranteed they'll drag me into whatever is happening at home at the given moment, wiping my focus entirely.
Sometimes this does break me out of being fixated on doing the wrong thing, but more often than not, it just plain prevents me from doing any thing at all.
It gives my mind a few seconds or a minute or two to do background processing and potentially come up with a better way of doing something.
Or to realize that I’m not working on the most important thing in the first place.