Checking email? You’re probably not breathing

In 2007, Linda Stone, a former Microsoft executive, realized that even though she did breathing exercises every morning, when she sat down at her laptop and opened up her inbox, it all went out the window. "I would be like, 'Huh, I was just breathing, but I'm not breathing anymore,'" she said. Her inhales and exhales became barely detectable and shallow, she noticed.

Stone decided to conduct an informal study ("dining room table science," she called it), inviting 200 people into her home - friends, neighbors, family members - and monitoring their heart rate and breathing while they checked their email. Roughly 80% of participants periodically held their breath or altered their breathing, she said. She named the phenomenon "email apnea" and described her findings in a widely read 2008 piece in The Huffington Post.

Stone has since expanded the concept and renamed it ...