Dr. Gleb Tsipursky – The Office Whisperer
Nirit Cohen – WorkFutures
Angela Howard – Culture Expert
Drew Jones – Design & Innovation
Jonathan Price – CRE & Flex Expert
Do you unconsciously hold your breath while reading an email or waiting for a reply? If so, you’re far from alone. This seemingly harmless habit, known as email apnea, affects an estimated 80 percent of workers.
A brief pause in your breathing may seem insignificant, but to your brain, it signals distress.
The way we breathe often mirrors workplace pressures. Unconscious breath-holding, for instance, reflects the constant demand to respond and deliver urgently in a fast-paced environment.
Over time, these shallow or held breaths can lock the body into survival mode, draining energy and paving the way for chronic stress and burnout. We’ve long known burnout often begins quietly, long before obvious signs of exhaustion, such as disengagement or declining performance, appear.
With growing evidence linking disordered breathing to stress and cognitive fatigue, it’s no surprise that more organizations are now incorporating breathwork into their mental health and wellness initiatives.
Email Apnea and Its Role in Workplace Burnout
First observed by researcher Linda Stone in 2007 among tech professionals, email apnea has grown increasingly common.
To better understand its impact, Allwork.Space spoke with Sam Kabert, a certified breathwork practitioner, bestselling author, and keynote speaker. As a Neuro Performance Expert, Kabert works with high-performing leaders to reset their nervous systems and optimize cognitive function, stress responses, and energy levels. He explains that this seemingly small habit is actually the body’s way of raising a red flag:
“When we’re staring at screens, typing fast, switching between tabs, and we suddenly realize, ‘Whoa… I’m not even breathing?’ — that’s not just a bad habit. That’s your nervous system saying, ‘I’m under pressure and I don’t feel safe enough to relax,’” he says.
Unconscious stress responses, including email apnea, are shaped by workplace norms that reward constant urgency and nonstop communication. Kabert points out that most people do not even notice the effects of digital stress because modern work culture has normalized being in a near-constant state of fight-or-flight.
“We call it ‘productivity,’ but the body reads it as a threat.” He also stresses that, “High performers are usually the last to admit they’re overwhelmed, but the body tells the truth before the mind does.”
Kabert urges organizations to recognize email apnea as an early sign of systemic strain. “Email apnea is like the body’s early warning system. People don’t burn out overnight; there are subtle physical signs long before the emotional crash appears.”
Kabert believes that by paying attention to these subtle cues of stress, companies can implement strategies to prevent outcomes such as panic attacks, excessive sick days, or quiet quitting, rather than reacting after the effects have already set in.
Providing employees with the tools to support their own emotional and physiological regulation is becoming increasingly essential.
Addressing this issue requires leaders to model calm focus, rather than responding with constant busyness. Positive leadership can create ripple effects across the organization.
“If leaders want to change that, it starts with modeling paced urgency — not scrambling, not reacting to everything in real time, but actually slowing down enough to think clearly,” states Kabert.
The Cost of Ignoring Email Apnea and Workplace Stress
On an individual level, persistent breath-holding can disrupt the body’s delicate balance of oxygen, carbon dioxide, and nitric oxide, repeatedly triggering the fight-or-flight response. Left unchecked, chronic email apnea can escalate, intensifying anxiety, tension, and fatigue while also eroding mental clarity and overall wellbeing.
In the workplace, Kabert warns that chronic stress does more than drain energy; it immediately impairs the brain’s ability to make sound decisions, think strategically, and regulate emotions.
When the nervous system is overloaded, leaders react impulsively, teams lose creativity, and even top performers begin to falter, putting both day-to-day performance and critical outcomes at risk.
On a broader scale, Kurtis Lee Thomas, founder of Breathwork Detox and the Just Breathe Foundation, explained in a recent Allwork.Space podcast that stress, anxiety, and burnout can quickly spiral, creating a domino effect of missed workdays and plummeting productivity.
Research shows that roughly eight in ten employees report feeling stressed — a crisis costing employers an estimated $300 billion annually in lost workdays, staff turnover, reduced productivity, and rising healthcare expenses.
Ignoring warning signs such as email apnea is wellness oversight as well as a financial liability. Companies that neglect employee wellbeing risk eroding morale, undermining performance, and jeopardizing long-term survival.
Personal Strategies to Prevent Email Apnea
While organizational initiatives are important, daily habits have the greatest impact on managing stress. Small, consistent actions, including mindful deep breathing, short screen-free breaks, sitting upright to open the lungs, and slow nasal breathing, can make a significant difference to our stress levels at work.
Allwork.Space asked Sam Kabert how targeted breathwork can enhance cognitive performance. He emphasizes that breathwork is a built-in control system for the body and brain.
By consciously adjusting your breath, you can actively reduce stress, prevent email apnea, and sharpen focus, leaving your mind clearer and more alert.
Kabert recommends evidence-based techniques that enable employees to “reset their nervous systems in real time.” One such method is the cyclic sigh: a ten-second sequence involving a full inhalation through the nose, a brief top-up inhalation, and a complete exhalation through the mouth. Just one or two rounds can shift the body from heightened stress to a state of calm, focused alertness — all without leaving one’s desk.
Slow exhalation breathing is another powerful tool for calming the nervous system, flushing out stress hormones, and restoring blood flow to the prefrontal cortex — the part of the brain that drives focus, problem-solving, and leadership.
Even 60 to 90 seconds of intentional breathing, Kabert notes, can transform how someone performs in a meeting, delivers a sales pitch, or navigates a difficult conversation.
“It’s not about breathing more. It’s about breathing better,” he says.
Kabert’s own B.R.E.A.T.H. Method™ provides a structured framework for self-regulation. By combining neuroscience, breathwork, and subconscious reprogramming, it creates a repeatable process for managing emotions before they spiral out of control.
“While neuroscience shows it takes about 90 seconds for the body to metabolize an emotion,” he explains, “most people don’t know what to do in those 90 seconds.” This method helps employees recover quickly and respond with clarity rather than react impulsively.
Organizational Responsibility and Strategies to Mitigate Email Apnea
Supporting employees’ brain health, Kabert told Allwork.Space, enhances innovation, emotional intelligence, and productivity. The real return on investment comes from cultivating an environment that enables people to perform at their best.
Organizations that nurture what Kabert refers to as emotional fitness see measurable improvements in performance, clarity of thought, and overall wellbeing.
Kabert emphasizes that simply telling employees to “take care of themselves” is not enough when workplace systems leave no room to pause. When a company’s pace, expectations, and communication style continually trigger stress responses, token wellness perks cannot address ongoing overload.
“You can’t fix chronic overwhelm with after-hours yoga,” he says, stressing that recovery must be built into the daily workflow.
He recommends practical steps such as beginning meetings with a 90-second breathing reset, scheduling brief pause reminders throughout the day, and providing short, on-demand breathwork sessions to manage stressful moments.
Ultimately, he advocates for a workplace culture that values balance and recovery over constant speed and urgency.
Breathwork helps regulate the nervous system and interrupt stress cycles, allowing people to make better decisions, communicate more effectively, and act proactively. For workplace integration, simplicity and accessibility are key.
“The best wellness tools,” Kabert notes, “are the ones people actually use in real time — not a 30-minute workshop they forget two hours later.”
One of Kabert’s most favored techniques, the 90-Second Rule, draws on Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor’s research showing that stress chemicals leave the body within around 90 seconds. When combined with intentional breathing, this method helps employees regain calm before stress escalates.
Looking ahead, predictive wellness metrics could help organizations identify stress risks early.
“We’re heading toward a world where companies can track stress signals like sleep or steps,” Kabert says. “Breath patterns are one of the clearest indicators of whether someone is regulated or overwhelmed.”
He cautions that such data should empower, not control, employees. Over-reliance on technology risks disconnecting people from their own internal cues.
Kabert sees the future of workplace wellness in emotional fitness. Traditional mental health models often focus on treatment, whereas emotional fitness trains the nervous system to regulate in real time and focuses on prevention. This strategy empowers teams to remain focused, resilient, and innovative, preventing burnout before it begins.
Enabling employees to “pause, breathe, and check in with their own nervous system,” Kabert concludes, is the foundation of sustainable performance. “The real future of wellness isn’t more tracking — it’s helping humans reconnect to the intelligence they already have.”
Above all, even during the busiest workdays, remember to pause to breathe properly — your body, mind, and wellbeing all depend on it.
