‘Email apnea’: Reading work emails makes us forget to breathe |
Reading or sending emails may seem like an innocuous task, but sometimes, this simple act can trigger a dramatic bodily response. Like forgetting to literally breathe.
“Many of us have heard of sleep apnea: the condition where breathing gets interrupted during sleep.” Dora Kamau, Lead Mindfulness and Meditation Teacher at mental health app Headspace, told Fast Company. “Email apnea is a similar idea—just happening in the middle of your workday,”
When we’re intensely focused on a task, the brain will “switch off” certain unconscious functions to redirect its processing power to the task at hand. In that state, a lot of people unknowingly alter their breathing, taking short sips of breath, or sometimes holding it altogether.
The term for this phenomenon was first coined by Linda Stone in the late 2000s in an article published by HuffPost. After noticing her own breathing became shallow when sat at her computer checking her emails, she decided to invite 200 participants to take part in a study at her home.
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She found that 80% of the participants also breathed more shallowly when stationed in front of a screen. Those who didn’t had received some kind of formal training in breathing as either athletes, dancers or musicians.
“When we open an inbox, scroll through a feed, or get pulled into something on a screen, our nervous system shifts into low-grade alert mode,” explains Kamau. “In these moments, the body is doing what has been designed to do: to protect us. It’s a human, biological response to perceived uncertainty, threat or danger, which in the modern world, an overflowing inbox can feel like.”
If you don’t think you do this, the tricky thing about email apnea is that it’s easy to miss, “because it happens in the background of something else you’re doing,” says Kamau.
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