Originally published at rootastro.org: https://www.rootastro.org/journal/dont-forget-to-breathe
Marsha and I saw our first bear on the land this week.
Not in person (I would have run!). On the security cameras. A black bear working up the treeline, unhurried, completely at home. What sticks with me about this sighting: the cameras only pick up the big animals when we’ve been away for a few days (the deer come frolicking too). They know when we’re there. The woods read our presence long before we see anything, and the wildest things in them wait until we’re gone.
Our security camera, October 2026: the first black bear we have seen on the land. Watch the clip here.
I’ll come back to the bear, because it turned out to be about work.
First, the thing I see in leaders, usually said with a half-held breath and disappointment, the posture a busy person holds: the day is full and the work is empty. Every hour accounted for, every message answered, and at the end of it nothing you could point to and say, that felt like it mattered. In the book I call this Busy but Hollow. It is not the exhaustion of effort. It is the exhaustion of fragmentation, the particular despair of having been productive all day at the wrong level. I wrote a sentence about my own desk that readers keep sending back to me: I have processed noise. I have not found the signal.
This half-held breath is common, and it has a name: “email apnea,” coined by the writer and former tech executive Linda Stone. We inhale in anticipation of the next message and forget to exhale. That “anticipatory tension” is what knowledge workers carry as a physical tightness and shallow breathing when deep in “busy mode.” It happens below conscious awareness, and the held breath nudges the body toward fight-or-flight, as if a flooded inbox, Slack pings, or a long to-do list were a micro-threat.
Here is the cause. During the last twenty years the job quietly changed from directing work to processing it. Every system in the company routes through your attention, and every ping is a micro-dose of something that feels like productivity. The research says it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back to a task after a single interruption. Check your phone every ten minutes, which one large survey found is the average for Americans, and you are not just less capable of deep thought, you are incapable of it. As I put it in Chapter 3: if you are interrupted more frequently than you can recover from, you are not doing knowledge work. You are performing the appearance of it.
Now the bear.
We did not make the bear happen. What we did was set conditions: left the land wild, placed the cameras, stayed patient, and got out of the way. The output arrived on its own schedule, and only when we were not standing in the middle of it.
Outputs arrive where you are not standing in the way.
There is a leadership discipline called Commander’s Intent you can adopt to help with this, and it is in Chapter 13 of Hard. We do not give step-by-step instructions. We define the End State, what success looks like, and the inputs, including the important why, alongside what information and resources should be considered. Then the team makes the micro-decisions themselves, and our cognitive energy is reserved for the twenty percent of decisions that actually matter. The executives I know who work this way, on impact, deep thinking, inputs, and real motivation for their people, get outputs that compound while their calendars stay humane. The ones who stand in the middle of everything get fragmented days and hollow years.
And here is the part I find genuinely profound. This exact posture is what the new AI agentic tools can help you with. You do not sit inside an agent’s work any more than you stand in the woods making bears happen. You give it an End State, the inputs, and a standard, and you judge what comes back. Commander’s Intent, applied to software. A leader who only knows how to process will use these tools to process faster: more empty work at higher speed. A leader who has trained the other posture is about to be handed something rare. The busy work goes to the machines, and what is left is the deep, cumulative work only a human can do. One early reader of Hard, a GTM director, said it better than I can: “The author makes a compelling biological case that nature isn’t a luxury - it’s the environment our hardware was actually built for. In an AI-first world… Going back to our roots isn’t escape. It’s rescue.”
So breathe. The interesting thing about this anticipatory tension is that you can train yourself to be immune. In Linda Stone’s observations of around 200 people, the ones who kept breathing normally included a former military test pilot, a triathlete, dancers, and musicians (like a cellist). The mastery of their craft meant they had to train for specific, conscious breathing mechanics under stress. Marsha encourages breathing techniques as part of her coaching practice for this very reason, shifting busy executives out of fight or flight to a state of focused calm.
Coping with the often hostile digital work environment is what everything at Root Astro is built to train for, and why the resources are one system, not a shelf of tips. We call the resource map the Lodestone, which if you look it up here you will see why. Its resources include The Original Stack: five nature groundings you need. It’s the natural operating environment your hardware was built for. Back to Human Practices build your resilience and courage. Creating Communitas is the team layer that moves the work from empty to heart-full and satisfied: chosen “hard” things done together, which is where real motivation comes from. The Instrument measures where you actually are right now, as a fully embodied leader. Truth, Health, Wealth sets the aim; as humans, we love and react well to goals. And the 90-Day Bearing resource turns all of it into the plan you carry back to work: the self-commitment in your own hand.
Walk the map here: rootastro.org/resources
The bear was always out there. All that changed was that we finally set the conditions and stopped standing in the clearing.
Lee
P.S. Here is a proven breathing exercise you can try to build your own immunity.
The research is unusually clear for this field. In 2023, Stanford researchers ran a month-long trial: five minutes a day of structured breathing against five minutes of mindfulness meditation. The winner was the simplest thing in the study, a pattern your body already runs on its own every few minutes. Two inhales through the nose, the second one short, topping up the first. Then one long, slow exhale through the mouth, longer than the inhale. Five minutes of that daily improved mood more than meditation and lowered resting breathing rate, a marker of a calmer baseline. The double inhale matters: it helps reopen the small air sacs in the lungs that sag under shallow breathing, and the long exhale clears carbon dioxide on the way out.
What works, distilled to four lines: exhale longer than you inhale. Slow toward six breaths a minute. Use the nose when you can. Five quiet minutes a day beats an occasional heroic session.
And in the middle of the meeting, when none of that is available, one cycle still works: two inhales, one long exhale, under thirty seconds, hands never leaving the table.
No single protocol is magic. The common engine in all of them is the long exhale. The ancient practices found it by feel; the laboratory has now confirmed the wiring.
You cannot always walk out the door with the question. You can always take the next breath slower than the last.
Sources
Linda Stone, “Just Breathe: Building the Case for Email Apnea,” HuffPost, 2008. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/just-breathe-building-the_b_85651
Linda Stone, “Are You Breathing? Do You Have Email Apnea?,” lindastone.net, 2014. https://lindastone.net/2014/11/24/are-you-breathing-do-you-have-email-apnea/
Gloria Mark, Victor M. Gonzalez, Justin Harris, “No Task Left Behind? Examining the Nature of Fragmented Work,” Proceedings of CHI 2005. https://doi.org/10.1145/1054972.1055017
Gallup, “Too Many Interruptions at Work?” (interview with Gloria Mark), Gallup Management Journal, 2006. https://news.gallup.com/businessjournal/23146/too-many-interruptions-work.aspx
Asurion, “Americans Check Their Phones 96 Times a Day,” 2019. https://www.asurion.com/press-releases/americans-check-their-phones-96-times-a-day/
Melis Yilmaz Balban, Eric Neri, Manuela M. Kogon, et al., “Brief structured respiration practices enhance mood and reduce physiological arousal,” Cell Reports Medicine, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.xcrm.2022.100895
Peng Li, Wiktor A. Janczewski, Kevin Yackle, et al., “The peptidergic control circuit for sighing,” Nature, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature16964
Paul M. Lehrer, Richard Gevirtz, “Heart rate variability biofeedback: how and why does it work?,” Frontiers in Psychology, 2014. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00756
Christina Zelano, Heidi Jiang, Guangyu Zhou, et al., “Nasal Respiration Entrains Human Limbic Oscillations and Modulates Cognitive Function,” Journal of Neuroscience, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2586-16.2016
This essay first went out as Issue #7 of the Fieldstone Letter, our fortnightly letter from the land. Subscribe here.