Breaks are terribly important. Not only are they mandated by law, they’re necessary for the safety of the worker. The body needs rest every now and again, or it will force rest upon you by making you sick. The body, famously, keeps the score. Taking breaks also makes working go by faster and more efficiently. Remember the Pomodoro method from school, where you’d set a tomato timer to work in 25-minute chunks? By golly, it worked. There’s a reason for that. 

I’m a proponent of taking a break whenever you need one, whether it’s from a conversation, from an activity, or from a stretch of work. This is especially true if it involves manual labor. You don’t want to hurt yourself, so you need to rest regularly. Some bosses haven’t quite internalized this, though, and take a strange stance toward breaks. They see them as a hindrance to work, rather than a form of work itself.