You’ve done it today. You read a Slack message, an email, or a notification, and realized you were holding your breath. Writer Linda Stone gave this a name: she coined “email apnea” after catching it in herself, then spent months watching and talking with more than 200 people. By her informal count, roughly 80% of them appeared to hold their breath or breathe shallowly at the computer [1]. That’s an observation, not a measured finding. It wasn’t a controlled study. But it matches what many of us notice once we start looking, and she later widened the label to “screen apnea.”
Why it happens is less settled than the name suggests. Screen apnea isn’t a bad breathing habit you need to scold yourself about. One plausible reading, and it’s only a reading, is that holding your breath is a small bracing response: your nervous system treating incoming information as an unknown and getting ready before your conscious brain has finished the subject line.
That idea borrows from something that is well studied. Startle is a fast protective reflex to sudden, intense stimuli, run by a short circuit in the lower brainstem, and fear can turn its strength up [2]. Whether an unopened email triggers a mild version of the same bracing is a hypothesis. I couldn’t find research that has tested it directly, so please hold it loosely.
Email is a good candidate for this kind of bracing because it combines uncertainty with the possibility of social judgment. It arrives unpredictably, and it might carry demands, criticism, commitments, or conflict. Polyvagal theory, a framework proposing that the autonomic nervous system shifts between states depending on perceived safety or threat, is one lens people use for this [3]. It’s a theory, not a settled mechanism, and it doesn’t address email directly. If the lens is useful at all, the takeaway is modest: unclear signals plus constant arrival may keep your system on alert, and breath-holding could be one visible sign.
Screen apnea is different from sleep apnea, which is a medical condition. If you snore, stop breathing in your sleep, or wake unrefreshed, talk to a doctor. Screen apnea is a daytime habit you can observe in yourself. Most advice suggests breathing exercises while checking email – pause, inhale, exhale, then read. That addresses the symptom. A more durable approach may be to notice when your body is bracing and then change how information reaches you.
Here’s a simple way to check: for the next hour of processing email, periodically notice your breath. If you catch yourself holding it, make a note of which message it was. It might not feel stressful on a conscious level, but your body is giving you information, and that’s worth taking seriously, not brushing off.
The practical fixes are familiar: batch your email, cut notifications, and set specific response windows. My reasoning for why they might help here is predictability. When messages arrive on your schedule rather than at random, there’s less uncertainty about when demands will show up, so your system may get more room to settle in between. That’s my reasoning, not a tested result for screen apnea.
A brief pause in your breathing while you concentrate is probably nothing. What’s worth addressing is the pattern that runs through the whole day, especially when it comes with tension in your neck, shoulders, or jaw. There’s no established threshold for when it matters, so let your own noticing be the guide.
If you want a breathing tool anyway, here is the honest state of the evidence. Mather and Thayer proposed that large, slow oscillations in heart rate may strengthen the brain networks involved in emotion regulation, and noted early studies using daily biofeedback sessions that increase those oscillations [4]. That’s a hypothesis about emotional well-being in general. It isn’t proof that any breathing practice fixes email-related breath-holding.
Linda Stone’s original observation was a diagnostic gift, not a set of instructions. Naming screen apnea isn’t valuable because it gives you something to fix. It’s valuable because it shows you what may have been happening without you noticing. Once you can see it, you can experiment with how your information reaches you, and see whether your breath follows.
References
↑︎ Stone L. Diagnosis: Email Apnea. lindastone.net, November 30, 2009 (describes observations begun in 2007). https://lindastone.net/2009/11/30/diagnosis-email-apnea/. Finding as used: after about 6-7 months of observing and interviewing more than 200 people, Stone reports that roughly 80% of the sample “appeared to have” email apnea. This is an informal, self-reported observation, not a controlled or peer-reviewed study.
↑︎ Koch M. The neurobiology of startle. Progress in Neurobiology, 1999;59:107-128. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/s0301-0082(98)00098-7. Finding as used: startle is a fast response to sudden, intense stimuli that probably protects the organism from injury; the acoustic startle response is mediated by a relatively simple lower-brainstem circuit, and its magnitude can be increased by fear. The review does not address email or screen use.
↑︎ Porges SW. The polyvagal theory: phylogenetic substrates of a social nervous system. International Journal of Psychophysiology, 2001;42:123-146. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/s0167-8760(01)00162-3. Finding as used: the polyvagal theory proposes that the autonomic nervous system evolved through stages tied to different behavioral strategies, including responses to threat and social engagement. It is presented here as a theoretical framework; the paper does not study email or breath-holding.
↑︎ Mather M, Thayer JF. How heart rate variability affects emotion regulation brain networks. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, 2018;19:98-104. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cobeha.2017.12.017. Finding as used: the authors propose the hypothesis that high-amplitude oscillations in heart rate enhance functional connectivity in emotion-regulation brain networks, citing recent biofeedback studies as suggestive of a causal effect on emotional well-being. It is a hypothesis paper and does not address email or screen apnea.
Kurt Greiner
Kurt is a digital strategist and IT professional blending emerging technology with practical application, exploring how individuals can leverage modern tools to navigate the second half of life with purpose.
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