Why You Hold Your Breath at a Screen (Screen Apnea)
Low Tide Blog · Screen Apnea
Why You Hold Your Breath Without Realising It
Screen apnea, your nervous system, and the hours you are spending in low-grade stress without noticing.
You are probably not breathing properly right now. Not because anything is wrong with you. But because you are reading this on a screen, and screens have a strange, well-observed effect on the way we breathe.
It is called screen apnea, or email apnea. The term was coined by Linda Stone, a former senior executive at Apple and later Microsoft, who noticed in 2007 that she was unconsciously holding her breath every time she sat down at her computer. Not occasionally. Routinely. For hours.
Where the term came from
Stone's observation did not happen in a vacuum. Earlier that year she had started training in the Buteyko method on the advice of her doctor, for chronic respiratory infections. Every morning she would do her Buteyko practice, then sit down to work on email. The contrast was what made her notice: the calm, regulated breathing she had just spent twenty minutes building collapsed within minutes of opening her inbox.
Curious whether this was just her, Stone spent roughly seven months observing friends, colleagues and volunteers while they used screens, using a simple pulse and heart rate variability monitor. Around 200 people in total. By her account, roughly 80% either held their breath or breathed in a shallow, restricted pattern while they worked.
The 20% who did not? Former military test pilots, triathletes, and professional performers like dancers, singers, and a cellist. People who had been explicitly trained to maintain their breathing while concentrating under pressure. The rest of us were never taught that.
Be honest about what this is
Stone herself has always described this as informal observation, not formal research. She is a writer and technology commentator, not a scientist. Her 80% figure comes from dining-room-table testing with a simple HRV monitor, and has not been independently replicated in peer-reviewed literature. That does not make the observation wrong. It does mean it should be treated as a useful pattern to recognise, not a published clinical finding. The underlying physiology of what happens when you hold your breath, which is where the post goes next, is much better established.
What actually happens when you hold your breath at a screen
Here is the basic chain reaction. You sit down at your laptop, open your inbox, and a cluster of emails arrives. You inhale in anticipation. You do not fully exhale. More emails come in, another notification pops up, and your breath stays suspended. Your posture collapses forward. Your diaphragm compresses. Your breathing becomes shallow and chest-based rather than slow and abdominal.
This is not a neutral event. Shallow, upper-chest breathing and breath-holding shift your autonomic nervous system toward sympathetic dominance, the body's fight-or-flight response. Multiple lines of physiological research support this: when breathing becomes rapid, shallow, or irregular, the brain registers a pattern that resembles threat and responds accordingly. Cortisol and adrenaline release, heart rate increases, blood pressure rises, and digestion slows.
Your stress engine is idling all day, quietly, in the background.
Consumer research suggests that the average adult spends roughly six to seven hours a day in front of screens. Even if Stone's 80% is an overestimate, even if the real number is 50% or 40%, that is still hours per day in which breathing is measurably worse than it would be otherwise, for a large portion of the population. That quietly adds up.
The vagus nerve connection
The vagus nerve is the 10th of 12 cranial nerves and the main parasympathetic nerve in the body. It contributes roughly 75% of all parasympathetic outflow, carrying signals between the brainstem, heart, lungs, and digestive tract. The parasympathetic system is the one responsible for "rest and digest," for bringing the body back to baseline after stress.
When you breathe slowly and deeply, particularly with a longer exhale than inhale, you stimulate the vagus nerve. This signals the brain that conditions are safe, heart rate slows, blood pressure drops, and the body shifts from sympathetic (alert) to parasympathetic (settled) dominance. When you hold your breath or breathe shallowly for hours at a time, you are doing the opposite. Not at full intensity like a panic attack, but at a constant low hum.
This is one of the reasons why the breathwork approaches that actually work for nervous system regulation lean heavily on slow, gentle exhalation. More on the physiology of the breath and why the holding matters elsewhere on the blog.
Why this matters more than you think
Most conversations about breathing focus on what to do when you are already stressed. Box breathing during a panic attack. A body scan before bed. A guided exercise when you are overwhelmed. Those tools are genuinely useful and worth having.
But screen apnea points to a different, quieter problem. It is not about the acute moments of stress. It is about the six or seven hours a day where your nervous system is being nudged into alert mode without your knowledge or consent. Chronic low-level sympathetic activation of that kind has been connected in the wider physiological literature to elevated cortisol, reduced heart rate variability, disrupted digestion, poor sleep, and that familiar "tired and wired" state that a lot of people have come to accept as normal.
If you recognise any of this in yourself, it probably is not because you are broken or because you need a complete lifestyle overhaul. It may just be that nobody ever taught you to notice what your breath does when your attention moves elsewhere. That is a learnable skill. And for people already sitting close to burnout, it is one of the most underrated ones.
What you can actually do about it
The first step is just noticing. Right now, as you read this, check:
Quick body scan
Is your jaw clenched?
Are your shoulders lifted toward your ears?
Is your breath sitting in the top of your chest?
Are you breathing through your mouth?
Is your belly soft, or locked tight?
Most people who learn about screen apnea recognise it in themselves immediately. That recognition alone starts to shift the pattern. Beyond awareness, there are a few practical things that help.
Practice 1
Exhale longer than you inhale
The single most reliable way to activate the vagus nerve and shift your nervous system toward rest. A pattern like breathing in for 3 counts, holding for 2, and exhaling for 6 is a good starting point. Takes about 60 seconds. You can do it at your desk without anyone around you noticing.
Practice 2
Set a breathing checkpoint
Every time you open email or unlock your phone, take one conscious breath. Not a dramatic deep one. Just a normal, full inhale and a slow exhale. Attaching the habit to something you already do dozens of times a day makes it more likely to stick.
Practice 3
Fix your posture before you fix your breath
When you collapse forward over a screen, your diaphragm compresses and your breathing becomes chest-based by default. Sitting upright or standing does not guarantee good breathing, but it is the precondition that makes it physically possible for the diaphragm to move freely.
Practice 4
Use a guided breathing tool
When you do have a few minutes, using a guided exercise takes the thinking out of it. You follow the cue, the breath slows, and the nervous system gets the reset it has been missing. The Low Tide Calm app is free and has short guided breathing exercises designed for exactly this kind of desk-based intervention.
The bottom line
You do not need to overhaul your life to breathe better. But you probably do need to become aware that something is happening to your breathing every time you sit down at a screen. Screen apnea is not a diagnosis. It is a pattern. And once you see it, you can interrupt it.
The people in Stone's observation who breathed freely had one thing in common: at some point, someone had taught them how to stay in their body while their attention was elsewhere. That is the whole offer of structured breathwork and somatic mindfulness. Not a new belief system. Not a lifestyle overhaul. Just the skill of noticing the body while you are busy doing something else.
Work with it
Learn the practical tools, one-to-one
Online and in-person breathwork and mindfulness sessions from Wicklow. Grounded, practical, no wellness theatre. Built for adults whose nervous systems do not hand them regulation for free. See sessions and pricing or book a free 15-minute screening call.
Book a screening callCian O'Driscoll is a breathwork facilitator, certified mindfulness teacher (Mindfulness Now UK), and complementary therapist based in Wicklow, Ireland. He is trained in the Buteyko method. Nothing in this post is medical advice. If you are experiencing persistent breathlessness, chronic respiratory symptoms, or untreated sleep apnoea, see a GP first: this is not a substitute for a medical workup.
Where the screen apnea concept comes from
Stone, L. (2008). Just Breathe: Building the Case for Email Apnea. Huffington Post. huffpost.com. Self-described informal observational work by a former Apple and Microsoft executive, not a peer-reviewed study.
Stone, L. (2014). Are You Breathing? Do You Have Email Apnea? lindastone.net. Stone's own fuller write-up including her Buteyko background and the 20% she identified as unaffected.
NPR Body Electric (2024). Screen time causes shallow breathing. Here's how to fix screen apnea. npr.org. Popular coverage that further spread the term, still based largely on Stone's original observation.
Peer-reviewed physiology and clinical references
Waxenbaum, J.A., Reddy, V. & Varacallo, M. Anatomy, Autonomic Nervous System. StatPearls. National Library of Medicine. View on NCBI. Standard reference for the claim that the vagus nerve constitutes approximately 75% of parasympathetic outflow.
Chu, B., Marwaha, K., Sanvictores, T. & Ayers, D. Physiology, Stress Reaction. StatPearls. National Library of Medicine. View on NCBI. Standard reference for chronic sympathetic activation, HPA axis, cortisol, and downstream effects on cardiovascular health, sleep, and metabolism.
Cleveland Clinic. Vagus Nerve: What It Is, Function, Location & Conditions. clevelandclinic.org. Confirms vagal contribution to parasympathetic nervous system.
Harvard Health Publishing (2024). Understanding the Stress Response. health.harvard.edu. Accessible overview of the fight-or-flight response and chronic low-level activation.
American Psychological Association (2023). Stress Effects on the Body. apa.org. Overview of how chronic stress affects major body systems.