Are You Holding Your Breath While You Work? (The Hidden Stress of Email Apnea)
The Weird Reason You’re So Stressed at Work
Email apnea is real—and common. Discover how shallow breathing affects your energy, focus, and joy at work (plus six simple ways to retrain your breath).
Are You Holding Your Breath While You Work?
It sounds strange—but for many midlife professionals, it’s true. They sit down to reply to an email or tackle a spreadsheet… and they stop breathing.
In this episode of the Joy At Work podcast, career design consultant Lucia Knight introduces a surprisingly common phenomenon called email apnea. It’s the tendency to unconsciously hold your breath—or breathe very shallowly—while engaging with screens. And it might be silently draining energy, lowering mood, and clouding decision-making for thousands of experienced professionals.
What Is Email Apnea?
The term was coined in 2007 by former Microsoft executive Linda Stone. One day, she noticed herself inhaling before opening her inbox—but never exhaling. Curious, she observed others and found that 80% of people also held their breath or breathed shallowly while working at a screen. The minority who didn’t? Dancers, singers, test pilots—people trained to breathe with awareness under pressure.
Science journalist James Nestor, author of Breath, adds that most modern adults have forgotten how to breathe properly. They mouth-breathe. They chest-breathe. And they often don’t notice when stress, posture, or focus hijacks their natural rhythm.
Why It Matters at Work
When we hold our breath or breathe too shallowly:
The brain receives stress signals
Focus becomes foggy
Energy dips unexpectedly
Decision-making becomes reactive, not intentional
Joy at work feels further out of reach
And for professionals already feeling stuck, misaligned, or burned out, these invisible stressors compound quickly.
Six Tiny Experiments to Reset Your Breath
Lucia shares six small, practical experiments to help midlife professionals retrain their breathing—even during a busy workday:
1. Become Aware
Notice when you’re holding your breath—especially while emailing or scrolling. Catch it once and reset with a few slow, deep breaths through your nose.
2. Watch a Dog (or a Baby)
Healthy dogs and infants breathe perfectly: belly first, soft and steady. Mimic that rhythm.
3. Try an Instrument or Movement
Lucia recommends mindful activities like swimming, ballroom dancing, or even learning an instrument. They build breath awareness and improve posture.
4. Step Away from the Screen
Even a minute of movement or stretching breaks the breath-holding cycle and resets the nervous system.
5. Try a Breathing App
Lucia shares her experience with Aeri (a free app by holistic movement expert Lawrence van Lingen) as a gentle tool for guided breathing at work.
6. Use Breathing Resets
Simple tools like the physiological sigh (two short inhales followed by one long exhale) or five-second nasal breathing can restore calm instantly.
Real Tools, Real Change
Lucia also points listeners to past episodes featuring Rune Abo and Jon Field—guests who share additional strategies for movement and stress relief in sedentary work.
“With just a little awareness and a few simple tools, we can breathe better, feel better—and maybe even make better decisions while we work.”
The best part? These breathing experiments take less than five minutes and require no equipment—just curiosity and intention.
Explore Further
🎧 Listen to the Full Episode: Email Apnea on Joy At Work
🎬 Watch the Joy At Work Experiments on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzowKQPaxP6Z8JZCY2lg7ItLGRX3zAPTL
📚 Referenced Episodes & Tools:
Curious What Joy Might Look Like for You?
👉 Check out the full Joy At Work Experiments — each one designed to be tried in under 10 minutes.
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[00:00:00] Introduction – Why tiny work experiments matter
Hey there, I'm Lucia Knight and this is the Joy At Work Podcast.
If you've been listening for a while, you'll know that experimentation is a philosophy that underpins my method of career design. I believe it's the only way to make big and small changes likely at our age. It's so easy to try out new things that when we do it often enough, we build a certain work life dynamism that often gets lost when we work for 20 or 30 years.
I believe there's so much that in season two of the podcast I gave you about 25 experiments that you could try out at work. Most of those could be done in less than 10 minutes. So go check them out if you want to build in some lean muscled adaptability into your work life. And today I've got a new experiment for you to try out.
[00:00:59] The surprising story behind the term “email apnea”
Now, this might be a weird topic, but we've covered lots of seemingly weird topics that impact stress and joy at work. This week I want to talk about something that I've been trying to change for myself since I discovered it, and it's been so hard.
And I wonder if maybe you've noticed it yourself. Let me start with a story about how this weird thing was discovered. Back in 2007 Linda Stone, a former Microsoft executive, sits down to tackle her inbox and realizes she's doing something weird. She's inhaling in anticipation, but not exhaling.
Emails keep pouring in, and she's just holding her breath. This is where I leaned in. She started wondering, is this just me or are other people doing this too? So she did a little kitchen table experiment. She recruited friends and she said at monitors, and guess what, 80% of them were also holding their breath or breathing really shallowly while working on a screen.
She called it screen apnea like sleep apnea, but with your eyes wide open and staring at your screen.
Now, I don't get it with all screens, but when I analyze my own breath, it only seems to happen when I'm reading or writing emails. And emails are how I run my business. I suffer from email apnea.
Here's the really intriguing thing in Linda's experiment, the 20% who were not holding their breaths were trained performers, dancers, singers, a test pilot, even a cellist.
People who had learned to breathe while focused.
[00:03:05] How email apnea affects your mood, energy, and focus
So what's going on with the rest of us? Science journalist, James Nestor, who wrote the book Breath. Says, most of us have forgotten how to breathe properly. We breathe through our mouths, we breathe into our chests. We hold our breath without realizing. And when we're hunched over our screens all day, our bodies literally can't take a breath.
So what happens? We go shallow. Our brains get stress signals. Suddenly focus is gone. Moods are low. Decision making gets foggy and energy depletes. But here's the good news. You can retrain your body to breathe well, even when emailing. I've been doing a little work on this daily and it's really hard. How is something so natural, so hard?
So if you think you might be holding your breath while emailing or just looking at screens, here's some ideas to experiment with getting your breath back.
[00:04:18] Experiment 1: Become aware of your breath
Experiment one. Become aware. Just check in with yourself a few times a day. Are you holding your breath while scrolling? While reading emails, while writing emails, or while doing some other online activity? Are you breathing shallowly? If you are, try and catch it. If you catch it once, take a few slow. Deep nose breaths as a reset.
[00:04:50] Experiment 2: Watch a dog or a baby breathe
Experiment number two, watch a baby or a dog. Seriously. Healthy dogs and infants breathe perfectly. Their bellies rise and fall. Their breath is soft, slow, and through the nose. That's the gold standard.
[00:05:10] Experiment 3: Try an instrument or mindful movement
Experiment number three, try out an instrument. Linda Stone, the person who coined the phrase screen apnea, took up an instrument. Then ballroom dancing both helped with her posture and awareness of mindful breathing. Now, I'm a swimmer, and one of the reasons I feel so good after even the shortest of swims is that I've been doing big deliberate breaths and I feel more relaxed, more able to deal with stress and just happier after swimming.
[00:05:44] Experiment 4: Step away from the screen
Experiment number four. Step away from the blue light. Move away from the screen. Do it now. Stand up, stretch out, and breathe even a minute or two. Helps calm the nervous system and refreshes your brain. Maybe also check out the podcast with Rune Abo, a Norwegian health expert and the episode with John Field from Field of Fitness.
They both share ideas on movement. For those of us whose work involves lots of screen time.
[00:06:17] Experiment 5: Try a breathing app (and my fave)
Experiment five, try out a breathing app. There are a load of them out there. They'll play a sound or a tone that guides your breathing while you work. Now, years ago, I tried out the Vim Hof app, but I got so frustrated by being sold too constantly. I deleted it.
I am currently totally obsessed with Lawrence Van Lingen, who's more my vibe as my teenagers would say. He has released a free breathing app called Aeri, A-E-R-I, which is a super simple place to retrain yourself.
I admit it, I've totally fallen down a Lawrence Van Lingen shaped rabbit hole on YouTube. He's got me walking backwards, doing his Happy Hips mobility training every morning, strengthening my feet, flow roping, and trying to source a tire to pull up hills. The man is a genius of holistic body movement, you've been warned.
[00:07:25] Experiment 6: Two quick breathing resets
Experiment number six. Two little reset breathing exercises.
Here's the simplest breathing exercise from Jane's Nester. Breathe in through your nose for five to six seconds. Feel your belly expand. Then your chest. Nice and gentle. Now exhale through your nose for the same amount of time. Repeat for two minutes. Done. See how you feel.
And then there's another simple breathing technique called the physiological sigh, which is so simple. It goes like this. Take two short in heels through the nose. Followed by one long, slow exhale through the mouth.
I play with this a lot during my day and I find it most helpful to do when someone has just cut me up in the car. Or when I've accidentally seen a disturbing image on the news or when I've heard some bad news on email or in real life, I find the physiological sigh a real pattern disruptor. And it's great to have in your daily life toolkit. It just works.
When you do either of these breathing exercises or your own, your body starts to remember how to breathe naturally, even. When we're knee deep in spreadsheets or slack messages.
[00:09:08] Final thoughts – Awareness, joy, and your next breath
Screen apnea and email apnea are a real problem in lives where we spend so much time looking at screens. I'm even doing it now, but with just a little awareness and a few simple tools, we can breathe better, we can feel better, and maybe even make better decisions while we work.
Try a few of these little experiments this week, see what difference they make. I hope you fall down a breathing improvement rabbit hole because it's so foundational, but so many of us miss out on the benefits that could form a solid base for a long and enjoyable life at work and beyond, and you absolutely deserve that.
