29 Sept 2026 · @Tara Minchin
“Sometimes it feels like I don’t have time to breathe.”
That was how a conversation with a leader began this week at the end of a normal busy day; not a crisis. It was not a dramatic confession. Just a quiet, honest observation from someone whose days are filled with documentation, contracts, and risk management — the necessary scaffolding of modern organisational life.
I’ve heard versions of this sentence many times. Perhaps you’ve said it yourself?
It’s worth pausing on, because it’s rarely just a figure of speech. When we say we don’t have time to breathe, we are often telling the literal truth. So the question becomes: What would it take to be the change we want to be — starting with the very next breath?
What happens when we don’t breathe
More than fifteen years ago, technologist Linda Stone noticed something about herself: when she sat down to read her email, she held her breath or breathed shallowly. When she asked others, most recognised the same pattern. She named it email apnea (Stone, 2008).
Now add contracts, risk registers, compliance reviews, and a constant stream of messages that each seem to demand an answer. Many of us spend whole days in a low-grade breath-hold — and never notice.
The body notices though.
Shallow, held breathing is the physiology of vigilance. It tells the nervous system that something is wrong and we need to be ready. Attention narrows. We scan for threat. We see risk everywhere — including in places where there is actually opportunity.
The good news is that the reverse is also true. Slow, deliberate breathing is associated with greater parasympathetic activity, better emotional regulation, and improved wellbeing (Zaccaro et al., 2018). In one randomised study, just five minutes a day of structured breathing with an emphasis on a long, slow exhale improved mood and reduced physiological arousal (Balban et al., 2023). Five minutes. Not a retreat. Not a sabbatical.
The irony is hard to miss. The body we stop breathing into is the very instrument we rely on for judgement.
When the system holds its breath
Systems breathe too. Every healthy living system has a rhythm of taking in and letting go, contracting and expanding, effort and rest.
A team that only inhales — more documents, more actions, more controls, more reporting, more sign-offs — gradually becomes rigid. Nothing is released. Everything is held. And what is held for too long becomes heavy.
You can often see it in the patterns:
An expanding action register as meetings end with more actions but less clarity
Documentation written to protect rather than to inform
Decisions escalated or reversed because no one feels safe enough to make them and stick to them
A culture where pausing looks like falling behind
When self-protection becomes the dominant rhythm, trust quietly thins and creativity shrinks. The system has forgotten how to exhale. Heifetz and Linsky (2002) describe the leadership discipline of moving from the dance floor to the balcony — stepping back far enough to see the patterns you are part of. But you can’t get to the balcony if you never pause. The breath is the staircase.
The AI invitation we may be missing
Here is where it gets interesting. AI can now draft the contract, summarise the fifty-page report, populate the risk register, and suggest an email reply before we’ve finished our coffee. On paper, it is exactly what my colleague needs: the heavy lifting of documentation handled by a machine, so the human can hold the meaning.
But that isn’t what’s happening for most of us.
An eight-month study of around 200 employees at a US technology company found that generative AI didn’t reduce work — it intensified it. People worked at a faster pace, took on a broader scope of tasks, and stretched work into more hours of the day, often without anyone asking them to (Ranganathan & Ye, 2026). As the tools got faster, expectations of speed rose with them.
In other words, we took the space AI created and filled it with more of the same.
The machine’s pace quietly became our pace. And a nervous system matching the tempo of a machine is a nervous system that has stopped breathing. What if the real opportunity isn’t to respond faster, but to reclaim the pause? A few questions worth sitting with:
If AI drafted this in thirty seconds, what will I do with the time I just saved?
Which part of this work needs my judgement, my relationships, my presence — rather than my speed?
Where am I matching the machine’s rhythm when the situation calls for a human one?
AI can’t breathe for us. But it can give us room to. A friend told me that she measures the success of her AI tools by the improvements in her golf game. Time saved was time spent on the course.
What it means to let go
In a world of contracts and risk management, letting go can sound reckless. What if it isn’t… Letting go is not abandoning responsibility. It’s releasing what we’ve been gripping that no longer serves the responsibility itself:
• The belief that more documentation always equals more safety
• The illusion that we can control every variable
• The need to be the one who holds everything
• The urgency that says every response must be immediate
The story underneath — “if I stop for a moment, it will all fall apart” — is something else. That’s the suffering we add on top of the weight of leading. Risk management at its best is an act of care. At its worst, it becomes a way of never having to feel uncertain. The difference often lies in whether we are breathing while we do it.
Letting go is an exhale. And you can’t take a new breath until you’ve released the old one.
Being the change, one breath at a time
The familiar line be the change you wish to see in the world is often attributed to Gandhi, though it’s a paraphrase. His original idea was closer to this: as we change ourselves, the tendencies of the world around us change too.
That is a systemic insight. We don’t change the system by standing outside it and pushing. We change it by changing how we show up inside it.
So here is a small practice for leaders — a three-breath pause. Use it before you open the next document, before you walk into the next review, or before you hit send on a reply that AI drafted for you.
Breath one: Head
Notice what your mind is telling you must happen right now. Thank it. Let it soften.
Breath two: Heart
Ask: what actually matters here, and to whom? Let the answer arrive rather than chasing it.
Breath three: Hara
Breathe low into your belly and make the exhale long and slow. What does your gut already know?
Three breaths. Perhaps twenty seconds. Enough to move from reacting to responding — and to become one of those small islands of coherence that can shift a whole system.
Room to breathe
The leader who told me he didn’t have time to breathe wasn’t asking for less responsibility. He was asking for room. The machine will keep offering to go faster. The question is whether we use the space it creates to rush — or to breathe.
Breath is the first thing we’re given and the last thing we let go. In between, it’s always available, always free, always waiting for us to come back.
Take the breath. Let go of the old one. Lead from there.
References
Balban, M. Y., Neri, E., Kogon, M. M., Weed, L., Nouriani, B., Jo, B., Holl, G., Zeitzer, J. M., Spiegel, D., & Huberman, A. D. (2023). Brief structured respiration practices enhance mood and reduce physiological arousal. Cell Reports Medicine, 4(1), Article 100895. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.xcrm.2022.100895
Heifetz, R. A., & Linsky, M. (2002). Leadership on the line: Staying alive through the dangers of leading. Harvard Business School Press.
Ranganathan, A., & Ye, X. M. (2026, February 9). AI doesn’t reduce work—it intensifies it. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2026/02/ai-doesnt-reduce-work-it-intensifies-it
Stone, L. (2008, February 8). Just breathe: Building the case for email apnea. HuffPost. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/just-breathe-building-the_b_85651
Zaccaro, A., Piarulli, A., Laurino, M., Garbella, E., Menicucci, D., Neri, B., & Gemignani, A. (2018). How breath-control can change your life: A systematic review on psycho-physiological correlates of slow breathing. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 12, Article 353. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2018.00353