Life Kit - "Screen apnea": How our use of tech affects our breathing

Episode Date: June 29, 2024

Do you have "screen apnea?" Former Microsoft executive Linda Stone coined this term in 2007 after noticing she'd developed an unhealthy habit while answering emails: She held her breath. Body Electric host Manoush Zomorodi talks to Stone about this phenomenon — and gets insight from James Nestor, author of "Breath," on how to reset our breath and relieve screen time stress. Binge the whole Body Electric series here. Sign up for the Body Electric Challenge and their newsletter here.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey, Life Kit listener. This is Manoush Zomorodi, host of NPR's TED Radio Hour and the new-ish podcast, Body Electric. So this is a series about how our technology is impacting our physical health. And today, the Life Kit team invited me to share an episode that we did about the relationship between our screens and how we breathe. Because a lot of people don't realize that as they type and scroll, they hold their breath or take shallow breaths. But there's actually a pretty easy fix. So please take a listen. And if you like the episode, join me over at the Body Electric feed for more investigations into how we can live better and healthier with our devices.

Enjoy. Hey, it's Manoush. I've been a journalist covering technology and how it changes us for over a decade. And a woman named Linda Stone was someone I had read about and would occasionally bump into pretty much from the beginning. My name is Linda Stone, and I worked at Apple for seven and a half or eight years, and I worked at Microsoft for a little over eight years. Linda has a background in educational psychology. She did marketing, innovation, and research all those years.

But what made her well-known in certain nerdy circles was what she did outside of her work at those tech companies. It all started in 2007. In 2007, I was experiencing some health challenges. And as a result of that, I began to work with someone on breathing techniques and breathing exercises. And I noticed day after day that once I got to my computer, I was either holding my breath for long periods of time or I was breathing very shallowly. And this would go on for hours. You know, as I would open my email and the email would stream in, I would inhale because we tend to inhale in

anticipation, but I wouldn't exhale because so many emails would be streaming in. And I'm guessing you can relate to that. I'm getting stressed out just hearing you describe all your emails coming in. Yeah. And it didn't change unless I interrupted myself very consciously or stood up, walked around and did my breathing exercises again. And I wondered, was this just me or was this a more universal experience? So you are someone who likes to get to the bottom of the things that you observe. And you embarked on what you have referred to as kitchen table science. I love this so much. Kitchen table science or citizen science. And so I went out and got a piece of technology that had an ear clip that would allow me to see pulse and heart rate variability displayed on the computer.

And I decided that anyone brave enough to come over and visit me was going to be tested. So Linda invited people over. Friends, friends of friends, former colleagues from Microsoft, random people that I just thought were interesting. And she'd hook them up to the health monitoring gadgets she had and then sit them down at her computer. I would have them do email and I would have them do web browsing randomly and also web browsing around specific assignments that I gave them. And I think it's important to tell you that almost always I gave them cookies or some kind of dessert afterwards. Because you were like, oh, thank you for being my guinea pig.

Thank you for allowing me to observe you for the last 30 minutes. And yes, thank you for being my guinea pig. Linda observed dozens of people. And the only ones who didn't hold their breath or take shallow breaths were a former military test pilot, a triathlete, and professional performers, including dancers, singers, and a cellist. Who was really the most impressive. Those were the people who stayed embodied. They were people who had learned to breathe and do something at the same time as part of their training. So you observed this happening. You're not surprised, it sounds like.

And you gave it a name. Yes. Email apnea or screen apnea. What I really wanted to communicate was that there was disturbed breathing when we were in front of screens. We've all heard for years that taking deep breaths is a way of calming ourselves, taking life down a notch. But what if we're not breathing properly, or much at all, when we probably need calming down the most, all those hours when we're on our screens? I'm Manoush Zomorodi, and this is season two of NPR's Body Electric. This season,

we've been doing two kinds of episodes for you. A weekly five-minute episode to entice you to take a break from your screen, but we're also continuing our investigations into the relationship between our technology and our bodies. Today, our tech habits and our breath. How we can retrain our bodies to be more resilient and better deal with all the screen time stress coming at us. So back to Linda Stone. She figures out she's not breathing well when she's on her computer and neither are a lot of other people she knows. But so what? Like, what's the big deal? Well, the big deal is when I discovered that there was this compromise in breathing, I

did reach out to people in health care and researchers that I knew. And boy, did I get a lot of information. The body becomes acidic. The kidneys begin to reabsorb sodium. And as oxygen, carbon dioxide, and nitric oxide balance are undermined, our whole biochemistry is thrown off. So all of these chronic diseases that have been on the rise and probably follow the same trajectory as the ubiquity of our adoption of personal technology, I began to see that it was probably related. At the time, did you change any of your habits, your tech habits?

Oh boy, did I ever try. It's not that easy. So I tried taking actually inspiration from the cellist. Observing the cellist was probably one of the most powerful things that I had witnessed when I was doing all this testing because I could see that his whole body stayed enlivened energetic and he was fully present when he was sitting in front of a screen So I began to pick up different instruments to see if there was some instrument that I would enjoy playing that would help me in terms of relating to an object while I was maintaining posture and breathing. I started to take ballroom dancing lessons, which was the most fun. That's awesome. Because that was both rhythmic and I had to stay completely embodied and present in relation to a dance partner. I got up more frequently.

First, I got up for five minutes once an hour, but I really realized that it was really five minutes every 30 minutes that mattered. What also strikes me is the fact that here we are, you know, 16, 17 years since you first did this, and I just read an article in the New York Times that mentioned your work. It still makes me think that, you know, in a society that's obsessed with mindfulness and meditation and breath work, why we are not really making the connection as you did. Especially if every time you talk about it or I read about you and your work, everyone's like, yes, yes. We all resonate with it. Yeah. But I'll tell you, I'm humbled by the continued interest in this. And I really believe that the more aware we are of how our relationship with technology is impacting our personal health and our personal relationships, the more that we will take steps to discover ways to improve that.

As Linda pointed out all those years ago, when we're on our devices, we do two things that affect our breath. We change our posture. So as Linda puts it, we melt into our technology. We become one with it. And when we do that, we also get a steady stream of interruptions, pings, and information. So, what's a gal to do if she doesn't want to take up an instrument and she's already trying to take breaks? I think you can absolutely be a healthy breather looking at a screen, without a doubt. When we come back, James Nestor, author of the mega bestseller, Breath, the new science of a lost art. Talk to James on finding out if you have screen apnea, and he'll explain how to reset your breath. We'll be right back. And I just want to note that a lot of people are talking about breath, right?

It's kind of trendy, especially in the world of bro podcasts. I don't think that most people realize just how important how we breathe is. This is the land of cold plunges. Day one, cold plunges. Tell me if you were ever in a bad mood getting out of a cold plunge. Intermittent fasting. Just eat all the food you want to eat, but just eat it in that window. And other wellness trends taken to the extreme.

Video and polyphasic sleeping. How would you guys like to learn a 60-second breathwork technique? I just finished up like a seven-minute guided breathing session. Oh my God, bro. Why am I shaking? Whose idea was this? Yeah. Writer James Nestor has no time for this.

Most of those bros who claim to be at absolute peak health are the worst breathers you can find out there. Really? I'm being serious because a lot of them are completely vain and they do not allow their stomachs to relax. If you are constantly inhaling and sucking up your gut, you're inhibiting the extension of the diaphragm. You're inhibiting blood flow. You're inhibiting the ability of the body to pump lymph fluid, you are causing stress because you are clenching your stomach and sending signals up to your brain that you are in a state of stress. So don't look to those bros for healthy breathing. James is a science journalist, but he embarked on trying to better understand

what happens when we breathe properly because of personal problems. I was suffering from chronic bronchitis. I was getting mild bouts of pneumonia every year. I was starting to wheeze when I was working out, and I thought I was doing everything right, you know, eating the right foods, exercising, sleeping eight hours a night, all of that. But I just kept getting sick with breathing problems. So it wasn't until a doctor friend suggested I look into my breathing habits, which is something I had never thought about

before. And once I adjusted those habits and started understanding that it's not just that we're breathing, but how we're breathing. It had a huge transformational effect, not only on my respiration, but on other aspects of my health. Yeah. Can you explain like what is poor breathing and what is good breathing? Poor breathing is what you see when you look at around 90% of the population. It includes breathing through the mouth. It includes breathing up into the chest. It includes unconsciously holding your breath, breathing too much, snoring, sleep apnea, asthma, on and on and on. And what are the consequences of that?

How does that impact a person's health? Because I think people think, well, as long I'm like breathing, I'm alive, right? Well, on the milder spectrum, the consequences are more asthma, more panic, more anxiety, more stress. On the more severe spectrum, if you continue having very dysfunctional breathing habits throughout your life, especially at night, that can lead to increased risk of stroke, heart disease, periodontal disease, diabetes. So all of these major chronic diseases that we're contending with have some sort of connection to how we're breathing. You call breathing like this a lost art. When did we lose it? It's hard to trace the exact moment, but you can trace a lot of this to the age of industrialization. We lost so much

400 years ago, 300 years ago. So we lost our food supply that used to be whole foods and natural and require a bunch of chewing, which allowed us to expand our mouths and tone our airways and breathe better. But we've also lost our ability to have proper posture. And without having proper posture, it is very difficult to take a proper breath. If you are hunched over, you can't extend your belly. You can't take that soft, slow, deep breath. All your breath gets caught up in your chest. And that is extremely inefficient. You're right.

There's no room. I just caught myself. Like I'm leaned over my laptop and there's nowhere for it to go. The air just has to go up because whatever happened to stomachs and shoulders back? That's what I used to be told. The old days, yeah. So if you are ever apprehensive about how you're breathing, look at how a healthy dog breathes, healthy infant breathes, a cheetah, a horse, a cow.

They breathe very deep. Their stomachs expand very gently when they breathe. They breathe very slowly, and they breathe in and out of their noses. So the problem with chest breathing is that the majority of the area of the lungs that absorbs oxygen are those lower lobes. So if you're just breathing into your chest, you're taking air in that you never use. About 50% of that air you won't be using. And so that causes you to breathe more. And the more you breathe, you start sending stress signals to the brain.

And if you have dysfunctional breathing habits in the day, absolutely it's going to affect your ability to focus, to get oxygen efficiently, to regulate your emotions and more. I'm thinking someone might be listening and wondering, do I do this? I don't even know if I do this. What is a way that we can really see how well we're breathing during the day while we are trying to do our work? It's hard.

You know, you can go into a lab and be assessed that way. Few people are going to do that. HRV is one thing that can provide a good general outlook of your stress levels. HRV, heart rate variability, right? Heart rate variability. This is the latest craze in wearables. Everybody's measuring it nowadays. So right now, if you were to place your hand over your heart, if you're really focusing as you inhale, your heart rate speeds up. And as you exhale, it slows down. So the more space you have between those heartbeats on the inhale and exhale are indicative of your stress levels. You want more of a difference, more of a variability between those two things.

That's funny also because I always thought a nice steady heartbeat is what you want. But actually you don't. That is a harbinger of disease and future death. That's what I've been told by cardiologists. Once they start hearing a heartbeat that sounds like a clock, they get really scared. I worry about, well, I worry about adding more worries to people's plates. There's a lot to worry about these days. And I don't want people to be like, oh my God, please tell me, don't tell me one more thing that I need to measure or need technology for, or I need to think about. What is, I don't know, a more holistic, somatic, internal way of checking

in with yourself during the day? So nobody needs more boxes to check, right? I think that breathing doesn't have to become a burden. Maybe for a couple of weeks as you develop better habits, that might require you to spend a little more time and energy. But once you develop those habits, you don't have to think about it because no one wants to have to think about the 20,000 breaths they're taking every single day. You want to have good habits so your body automatically does that. When we come back, James takes us through the reset breathing exercise that you can do to get back on track with your breath. You'll also hear my manifesto for breathing while typing. We'll see you in a sec.

We're back. James Nestor is a science journalist who ended up writing a best-selling book about the art of breathing, The Lost Art. But first, he had to teach himself to breathe better. He did one exercise regularly until his body learned to do it automatically. To breathe better without him having to constantly remind himself while he was working. Are you ready to give it a try? The first thing I would ask people to do is taking your hand, placing it around where your belly button is, just lightly over your stomach. And as you inhale, you want to feel that slight expansion of that abdominal region.

And then as you continue inhaling, try to lift that breath up to your chest area. So you start low and you work it up a little higher. And then if you slow that down, breathing in and out of your nose at a rate of around five to six seconds in. Five to six seconds out, you'll start to notice your shoulders relaxing. You'll start to notice the muscles in your face relaxing. You'll feel your heart rate lower if you are looking at your blood pressure most people see a significant drop in blood pressure because this is your body re-entering its natural state the state in which it was designed to be

in that we are so divorced from today. So this is taking some concentration on my part, and it's lovely. It's going to take some concentration at the beginning, especially with people who have never taken a focused, deep, easy, soft breath. But then tomorrow when you do it, you're going to say, hmm, this is a little bit easier. And then the next day it gets easier. And a few weeks from now, you're going to be doing this unconsciously. I cannot tell you what a difference this is going to make for your stress levels at work, for your ability to focus. There's been studies that have found that people make significantly

better decisions when they are breathing slowly, when they are breathing calmly. It helps you regulate your emotions better. Breathe this way for two minutes a day. And I think even that's going to make a difference. What I love about our conversation is that it feels like it's something that you could work on and then maybe your body would take over in some ways. That feels like a relief to me. That's exactly the point of so many of these practices. Once you establish it, you don't have to think about it.

And once you don't have to think about it, you start to notice that you're feeling different. And this is backed up by any wearable that you happen to have on your body. And then you feel so much better that you want to go further into this. You want to explore what else breathing can do. That's James Nestor. His book is called Breath, the new science of a lost art. So in preparation for this episode, I started collecting the results

of my own heart rate variability monitoring. I started wearing an Apple Watch, gathering data on my phone. Look, I'll be honest, the numbers are not terribly encouraging, but I have decided not to engage with more tracking and data on this one. Keep thinking about the cellist that Linda talked about. What strikes me is that this person has made peace with her work instrument. I mean, granted, that is way easier and enticing than me making peace with my laptop. But I do love what my technology makes possible. Maybe I'm not producing soothing sonatas, but hey, I wrote this episode on it.

So what if I started thinking of myself as a professional performer who needs to regulate their body in order to do their best work? What if we take inspiration from the pilot who is able to keep his anxiety and stress in check for the well-being of himself and therefore his passengers?

What if, like the dancer, we accept that we do our best work when we feel loose and limber? We are information workers. And instead of that sounding depressing and like a total grind, what if we treat ourselves like the mental athletes we kind of are and accept that there is a body attached to our brains and it needs oxygen and listen to as you hopefully take brief breaks from your work. Check out the Body Electric feed to hear from all kinds of different people who are trying to balance work, technology, and their health. This is not a one-size-fits-all. You know, some people are counting the steps. Other people absolutely are not. I hope you will listen along as you take a break from your screen. If you

are not taking breaks, we have a quick start guide to get you going and a weekly newsletter with more info and motivation to keep you going. Go to npr.org slash body electric to sign up. And if it's your thing, I'm on Instagram at Manoush Z. I am posting more there about this episode and tips from all the other topics that we cover on Body Electric. I'd love to see you over there too. Again, only if it's your thing. Okay, this episode was produced by Katie Monteleone and edited by Sanaz Meshkenpour. Original music comes from David Herman. Our audio engineer was Robert Rodriguez. Special thanks to Colin Campbell, Fiona Geeran, and Ariel Redding.

I'm Manoush Zomorodi, and you've been listening to Body Electric from NPR.