How do I get a thread to pause?

The static sleep() method of the Thread class will let your thread sleep for a set number of milliseconds (or nanoseconds). When the thread wakes up, it will be scheduled to execute in the future. It may not start executing immediately after the timeout.

try {
  Thread.sleep(3000); // 3 seconds
} catch (InterruptedException e) {
  System.err.prinlnt("You interrupted me");
}

You can have another thread wake up the sleeping thread prematurely by calling t.interrupt() (where "t" is a pointer to the thread object).

Note that since Thread.sleep is a static method, the following code will not do what you expect it to:

Thread t = new MyThread();
t.start();
try {
  t.sleep(3000);
} catch (InterruptedException e) {
  System.err.prinlnt("You interrupted me");
}