Hold your breath.
No, don’t actually hold your breath on purpose. But notice something. Were you already holding it a little? Were you breathing shallowly, barely moving your lower ribs, pulling small sips of air into the top of your chest?
You’re reading this on a screen right now. And there’s a very good chance that the act of focusing on this screen has already altered your breathing pattern.
Try this. Put one hand on your chest and one hand on your belly. Keep reading. Just notice what’s moving.
If you’re like most people reading on a device, your chest hand is doing most of the work. Your belly hand is relatively still. Your breath is centered up high, in the neck and upper chest, rather than down low in the diaphragm where it belongs.
Now look away from the screen. Look out a window, or across the room, or at nothing in particular. Take three breaths. Just easy, unfocused breaths.
Did something shift? Did your belly hand start moving more? Did the breath drop lower?
That shift you just felt is the difference between screen breathing and normal breathing. And most of us spend the majority of our waking hours in the screen version.
Screen Apnea Is Real
In 2008, former Apple and Microsoft executive Linda Stone coined the term “email apnea” after noticing that she unconsciously held her breath or breathed shallowly while checking email. She spent months informally observing others and estimated that a large majority of people alter their breathing while working on screens.
Her observation, while not from a controlled study, resonated widely because it described something most people recognize immediately when they check. Subsequent research has supported the general finding. A 2020 study in the journal Biofeedback found measurable changes in breathing patterns during computer use, including reduced respiratory variability and increased breath-holding during email and texting (Peper et al., 2020).
This isn’t a fluke of email specifically. It’s a response to focused visual attention. When your eyes lock onto a screen, when you’re reading, processing, responding, your body shifts into a state of attentional focus that suppresses the natural rhythm of breathing. Your breath gets smaller. Sometimes it stops altogether for several seconds.
You’ve probably experienced the extreme version of this. Watching a tense scene in a movie and realizing you haven’t breathed. Getting absorbed in a video game and suddenly gasping. Reading an upsetting email and noticing your chest is locked.
Those are the dramatic moments. But the subtle version is happening all day, every day, for anyone who spends significant time on screens. And the subtle version is what reshapes your body over time.
What Screen Breathing Does to Your Diaphragm
Your diaphragm is a dome-shaped muscle that separates your thoracic cavity from your abdominal cavity. When it contracts, it pulls downward, creating negative pressure in the lungs that draws air in. This is primary respiration. It’s efficient, it’s calming to the nervous system, and it massages the organs below it.
When you breathe shallowly for hours at a time, the diaphragm barely moves. The accessory breathing muscles in the neck and upper chest, the scalenes, the SCM, the upper traps, take over. These muscles are designed to assist during heavy exertion, when you need maximum air intake. They’re not designed to be the primary breathing muscles for eight hours of desk work.
Here’s where it gets structural. A diaphragm that doesn’t fully contract and release for hours every day begins to lose its range of motion. The fascial connections around the diaphragm, which attach to the lower ribs, the lumbar spine, and the central tendon, stiffen and restrict. The lower ribs lose their ability to expand laterally. The thoracolumbar junction, where the diaphragm’s crura attach to the lumbar vertebrae, becomes a site of compression and restricted mobility.
Over years, this creates a diaphragm that can’t fully do its job even when you try. I see this in my practice constantly. I’ll ask a client to take a deep breath, and their shoulders rise, their neck tenses, their upper chest expands, but their lower ribs barely move. They’re trying to breathe deeply. The tissue won’t let them.
The Cascade
The effects of chronic shallow breathing ripple outward through the body in ways most people never connect to breathing.
Posture. A restricted diaphragm can’t properly support the lumbar spine from the front. The deep stabilizing function of the diaphragm, which works in concert with the pelvic floor, the transversus abdominis, and the multifidus to create intra-abdominal pressure, is compromised. Posture degrades not because of weak muscles but because the core pressure system that holds the spine up from the inside isn’t working.
Neck and shoulder tension. When the accessory breathing muscles become the primary breathing muscles, they’re working all day. Every breath is a tiny contraction of the scalenes, the SCM, the upper traps. Multiply that by 15,000 to 20,000 breaths per day. Is it any wonder that neck and shoulder tension is epidemic among screen workers? You’re asking your neck muscles to do 20,000 reps a day of a job that isn’t theirs.
Anxiety and nervous system dysregulation. This is a big one. Shallow, upper-chest breathing activates the sympathetic nervous system, your fight-or-flight response. Deep, diaphragmatic breathing activates the parasympathetic nervous system, your rest-and-digest response. When you breathe shallowly for hours at a time, you’re essentially telling your nervous system that something is wrong. That you need to be alert. That danger is present.
This creates a feedback loop. Screen focus triggers shallow breathing. Shallow breathing triggers a mild stress response. The stress response makes the breathing even shallower. The shallower breathing increases the stress response. By the end of a workday, many people are in a low-grade state of sympathetic activation that they’ve been marinating in since morning. They feel “wired,” anxious, unable to relax, and they have no idea that their breathing pattern is the engine driving it.
Digestion. The diaphragm’s rhythmic movement massages the stomach, liver, and intestines with every breath. When the diaphragm is restricted, this massage diminishes. Motility decreases. People develop bloating, acid reflux, constipation, and other digestive issues that never get connected to their breathing pattern. I’m not saying breathing fixes all digestive problems. But I’ve seen digestive symptoms improve noticeably in clients whose diaphragmatic function was restored.
Movement quality. The diaphragm is a core muscle. Not in the “six-pack abs” sense, but in the true biomechanical sense. It’s part of the pressure canister that stabilizes the spine during movement. When it’s restricted, the entire core stabilization strategy is compromised. This shows up as poor balance, reduced rotational power, and a general sense that movement requires more effort than it should.
Your Body Right Now
I want you to try something else. This will take about sixty seconds.
Sit up, but don’t force it. Just find a relatively upright position that doesn’t feel strained.
Now put both hands on the sides of your lower ribcage. Thumbs toward your back, fingers pointing forward. Wrap around the sides of the ribs.
Breathe in through your nose, slowly, and try to push your hands apart. Not by puffing your belly out. By expanding the lower ribs sideways, into your hands.
Can you feel the ribs move? Some people feel significant expansion. Others feel almost nothing, just the upper chest lifting while the lower ribs stay locked.
If your lower ribs barely moved, your diaphragm is restricted. The fascial sleeve around it has tightened from years of disuse. This is incredibly common, and it’s directly related to the hours you’ve spent breathing shallowly in front of screens.
Now try three more breaths, slower, trying to find even a little more movement in those lower ribs. You might feel some resistance, almost like wearing a tight belt. That resistance is fascial restriction, and it’s exactly what I work with in structural integration.
Where Breathing Lives in the 12-Series
In the Anatomy Trains framework and in the 12-series of structural integration, breathing is not treated as one thing among many. It’s foundational.
Tom Myers identifies the Deep Front Line as the fascial continuity that runs from the inner arch of the foot, up through the inner leg, through the pelvic floor, up through the psoas and diaphragm, and into the throat and base of the skull. This is the body’s deepest line of support, and the diaphragm sits right in the middle of it.
When I work with the breathing and core connection, I’m not just working on one muscle. I’m addressing the entire deep front line and its relationship to the surrounding structures. The lower ribs. The thoracolumbar fascia. The psoas, which shares fascial connections with the diaphragm. The pelvic floor, which moves reciprocally with the diaphragm during healthy breathing.
In the 12-series, we typically address breathing explicitly in sessions that focus on the core and the deep front line, but its influence shows up in almost every session. Opening the hip flexors improves breathing by freeing the psoas-diaphragm connection. Opening the thoracic spine improves breathing by giving the ribs more room to move. Releasing the neck and shoulders improves breathing by reducing the overactivity of the accessory breathing muscles.
Everything is connected. Breathing is at the center of it.
What This Looks Like
A pattern I see frequently: someone comes in describing chronic anxiety and persistent mid-back pain between the shoulder blades. They’ve tried therapy, meditation apps, and medication.
When I assess the breathing, the connection is clear. The lower ribs are almost immobile. Diaphragm excursion is minimal. Breathing is almost entirely upper chest, 16 to 18 breaths per minute (normal adult respiratory rate is 12 to 20, with calm diaphragmatic breathing typically at the lower end). The mid-back pain is exactly where the overworked accessory muscles and restricted thoracic spine are bearing the load of compensatory breathing.
Think of it like this: imagine trying to inflate a beach ball while wearing a tight wetsuit vest. The air has to go somewhere, so it goes up into the neck and shoulders instead of out into the lower ribs. That’s what a restricted diaphragm does. It forces every breath into the wrong muscles.
As we work through the 12-series, particularly the deep front line and thoracic structures, resting breathing rate drops toward 12 breaths per minute. The mid-back pain decreases because those muscles stop doing emergency breathing duty. And the chronic anxiety often decreases noticeably, not because this is psychological work, but because the nervous system is no longer being driven into a sympathetic state by thousands of shallow breaths every day.
What You Can Do
Practice lateral rib breathing. The exercise I described above. Hands on lower ribs. Breathe into the hands. Three minutes, three times a day. It sounds too simple to be effective, but over weeks, it starts to remobilize the diaphragm and retrain the breathing pattern. Consistency matters more than duration.
Set breathing reminders. Not to remind yourself to breathe (you’re not going to stop). But to remind yourself to check in. Am I breathing into my belly and lower ribs, or just my upper chest? Am I holding my breath while reading this email? The awareness itself begins to interrupt the pattern.
Take screen breaks that include breathing. When you stand up from your desk every 30 to 45 minutes, don’t just stand. Take five conscious breaths. Full inhale into the lower ribs. Slow exhale. This resets the diaphragm and gives your nervous system a brief parasympathetic signal that counteracts the sympathetic accumulation of screen work.
Breathe through your nose. Nasal breathing naturally slows the breath and activates the diaphragm more effectively than mouth breathing. If you notice you’re mouth-breathing while working (many people do, especially when concentrating), gently close your mouth and shift to the nose.
Get structural help if you need it. If your lower ribs barely move despite consistent practice, the fascial restriction may be beyond what breathing exercises alone can address. This is where hands-on work, specifically structural integration work that addresses the deep front line, can make a meaningful difference. It’s hard to breathe into a cage that won’t expand. Sometimes you need help opening the cage.
Breathing Is Not Optional
I know that sounds obvious. Of course breathing isn’t optional. But what I mean is that breathing well isn’t optional if you want a body that works well. It’s not a nice-to-have wellness addition. It’s the foundation.
Every posture change, every movement pattern, every stress response, every sleep cycle, every digestive function is influenced by how you breathe. And if screen use has been restricting your breathing for years or decades, addressing that restriction is one of the highest-leverage changes you can make.
You don’t need to become a breathing guru. You don’t need a special app or a week-long retreat. You need your diaphragm to move, your lower ribs to expand, and your nervous system to remember what a full breath feels like.
Next week, we’ll look at another daily habit that reshapes your body in ways most people never consider: driving. If you spend 30 to 90 minutes a day in a car, your body is keeping a record of every mile.
If you’re in Santa Cruz and you’d like to find out what your breathing pattern is doing to your body, come in for a session. Sometimes the most important thing we discover is the one you didn’t know you were looking for.