In 2008, Linda Stone He decided to conduct an informal study by inviting 200 people to his home and monitoring their heart rate and breathing while they checked their emails. According to the former executive of Microsoft, approximately 80 percent of the visitors (friends, neighbors, relatives, among other acquaintances) held their breath at that moment. The administration of the multinational baptized the phenomenon as “email apnea” and described his findings in a widely read article in The Huffington Post.
Since then, Stone has expanded on the concept and renamed it “screen apnea”, in reference to the interruption of breathing that many of us experience when performing all kinds of tasks in front of the screen of a device. “If you have 10 screens open. Someone texts you, someone calls you, someone sends you an email, we are constantly stimulated,” he explained. James Nestor, who examined the phenomenon in his 2020 book, “Breathe: The New Science of a Forgotten Art”.
“Screen apnea is a manifestation of our body’s response to stress,” he said. stephen porges, professor of psychiatry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill specialized in the autonomic nervous system, to the portal of The New York Times and added: “When we face any type of stimulus, our nervous system looks for signals to decipher whether or not it is a threat.”
“That kind of concentration and attention requires mental effort, which triggers a series of physiological changes, such as shallower breathing and a decrease in heart rate to ‘calm down’ the body and divert resources away from helping us focus,” Porges explained. . In this sense, the specialist gives the example of cats that stalk their prey when “often, just before attacking, they remain immobile and their breathing becomes shallow. That’s what happens when you get an email, a text or a Slack message: you freeze, read and come up with a plan of action.
The more unexpected a stimulus is, for example receiving a text notification out of the blue, the more likely the body is to perceive it as a threat. While these reflexes aren’t harmful, they sometimes become a problem if they’re activated all day, every day, because “the nervous system goes into a chronic state of threat,” Porges explained. Hours of shallow breathing can leave you feeling drained after a day’s work, she added, even if that job isn’t particularly stressful.
According to david spiegeldirector of Stanford Medicine Center for Stress and Health, the lack of movement that occurs when sitting in front of a screen can also contribute to screen apnea. The shortness of breath is the result of “a combination of not only what is done, but also what is not done,” he said, adding that he has seen screen apnea in patients with very stressful jobs for many hours without doing anything. much exercise or sleep.
There are some simple practices you can adopt to improve your breathing habits, even in our increasingly screen-bound lives. According to Nestor, a few soft sound alerts throughout the day can remind you to control your breathing. In a study published in January, Spiegel and his team found that while many breathing techniques are valuable, the cyclical sigh—in which the exhalation lasts longer than the inhalation—is especially effective in improving mood.
Porges’s hypothesis is that the larger the screen, the lower the mental load. “As the visual field shrinks, the demand on the nervous system to exclude everything outside of it increases,” he said. Responding to messages on a desktop monitor is often easier than responding to messages on a phone, which “involves a more intense constriction of movement,” Spiegel revealed.
It is also suggested to spend a few minutes doing things that do not require too much mental effort, such as listening to music, so that the nervous system can go from a state of concentration and vigilance to another of relaxation. “Adding physical activity to breaks, such as walking in nature, is another way to restore balance,” Spiegel explained, concluding: “It’s something simple that can help our bodies function better.”
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