I hold my breath. Do you?

I was browsing the Internet looking for more information on continuous partial attention and how Linda Stone defines it, when I found this interesting issue of "email apnea". This post explains better what I am talking about. One day, Linda Stone realized that while checking emails, exploring the messages and thinking what to answer first, what to do next, etc., she was holding her breath.
She wondered if this could have somehow some effect on her (and I wonder it too). So she called Dr. Margaret Chesney at the National Institute of Health (NIH). In brief, Chesney explained that breath-holding and hyperventilating can affect our body's balance of oxygen, CO2, and NO.
NO is Nitric oxide, which is used by our body to fight different kinds of infections, and tumors. It is associated with learning, memory, sleeping, feeling pain, and probably depression, and it also mediates inflammations and rheumatism.

Breath-holding seems also to be related to the vagus nerv, which goes from the head to the neck, chest and abdomen, and mediates the autonomic nervous system, which is formed by the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous system. Now, shallow breathing, breath-holding and hyperventilating "activate" our sympathetic nervous system in a "fight or flight" response, which causes the liver to dump glucose and cholesterol into our blood, our heart rate to increase, our sense of satiety to be compromised, and our body to anticipate the physical activity that once was associated with a physical fight or flight response. Quite ironically, when our only physical activity is sitting and responding to email, we're sort of "all dressed up with nowhere to go."

Well, moral of the story: breathe!