Book Now!The body keeps score.
As Bessel van der Kolk wrote in his groundbreaking book by the same name, our experiences live in our tissues, not just our minds.
Not in dramatic bursts, but in quiet, cumulative ways: a breath held too long after a difficult email. A jaw clenched during small talk with your boss. Shoulders slowly rising throughout the day until they nearly touch your ears.
Workplace stress doesn’t always arrive loudly. It lingers in the background—a hum just quiet enough to ignore but persistent enough to wear you down. Over time, that hum builds into something heavier: fatigue, irritability, anxiety, and burnout.
But there’s a quiet, powerful way to intervene. And it starts with your breath.
Breathwork is one of the most accessible tools for managing stress at work. No equipment. No appointments. Just your body, your awareness, and a few moments of attention. With every intentional breath, you send a message to your nervous system: it’s safe to soften.
Maria didn’t know this when she first started practicing. Midway through a meeting that had already gone twenty minutes over, she noticed her chest tightening. She wasn’t in danger—but her body thought otherwise. Her breath was shallow. Her shoulders tense. Her thoughts scattered.
Quietly, she inhaled through her nose for four counts. Held it. Then exhaled even slower.
No one noticed—not her boss, not the colleague nervously tapping their pen. But something shifted. Maria didn’t leave her job or overhaul her schedule. She just changed her breath. And in that moment, reclaimed a little piece of herself.
It’s easy to think of workplace stress as mental—an overflowing inbox, a tense conversation, a missed deadline. But the body experiences stress in chemical terms. It activates an ancient biological system designed for survival, not spreadsheets.
When your brain perceives a threat, it triggers the fight-or-flight response. Your heart rate spikes. Your muscles tighten. Your breathing becomes short and rapid. This was helpful when the threat was a predator. But in a modern workplace, the threat is often psychological—and constant. There's no chase, no release. Just tension without resolution.
Over time, this chronic activation of the stress response takes a toll. The body stays stuck in a heightened state, leading to a phenomenon researchers call allostatic load—the cumulative burden of stress on the nervous system.
Nearly 83% of U.S. workers report experiencing work-related stress, and chronic stress is believed to account for up to 80% of primary care visits. It doesn’t just make your day harder. It makes your health more vulnerable.
This is why nervous system regulation is so important. And breathwork is one of the most effective tools we have.
Breathwork works because it speaks the body’s native language. While you can’t directly control your heart rate or digestion, you can control your breath—and your breath, in turn, influences everything else.
Slow, deliberate breathing signals safety to your brain. It activates the parasympathetic nervous system—often called “rest and digest” mode—which counteracts the stress response and returns the body to balance.
Studies show that controlled breathing can reduce cortisol—the body’s main stress hormone—by up to 50% in just five minutes. Other research has found that deliberate breathwork improves attention span and emotional regulation by calming the brain’s arousal center, the amygdala.
In other words, when you change your breath, you change your brain.
This shift ripples outward:
And unlike other stress-reduction techniques, breathwork doesn’t require a break from work. It meets you exactly where you are—mid-meeting, mid-crisis, mid-email.
You don’t need a quiet room or a meditation cushion. Some of the most effective breathwork techniques for stress relief can be done right at your desk, without anyone noticing.
Box Breathing:
This technique is used by Navy SEALs to maintain calm under pressure. Inhale for four counts. Hold for four. Exhale for four. Hold for four. Repeat for 1–3 minutes. Research shows this type of rhythmic breathing can enhance cognitive performance, even during high-stress situations.
Extended Exhale Breathing:
When anxiety spikes, try inhaling for four counts and exhaling for six to eight. A longer exhale helps trigger the parasympathetic nervous system and can start lowering blood pressure in just two minutes.
Three-Part Breath:
This is great for grounding when you feel scattered. Inhale into your belly, then your ribs, then your chest. Exhale in reverse. This brings awareness back into your body and out of mental overdrive.
Each of these techniques can be done without fanfare. No one needs to know you’re regulating your nervous system between Zoom calls.
The real magic of breathwork isn’t in emergency use—it’s in daily rhythm. It’s in those small, consistent resets that prevent stress from spiraling in the first place.
Start with:
Behavioral research shows that when new habits are anchored to existing routines, they’re two to three times more likely to stick. So rather than adding breathwork to your to-do list, let it become part of your transitions.
One minute. Three times a day. That’s enough to start shifting your baseline.
It’s normal to feel skeptical. In fast-paced, high-pressure environments, breathwork can seem too soft—like a wellness luxury that doesn’t belong in the middle of a spreadsheet.
But this practice isn’t fluff. It’s function.
Deliberate breathing improves memory, sharpens focus, and supports emotional resilience. One study found that employees who practiced self-regulation tools like breathwork took 40% fewer sick days. Another showed that 61% of workers who used emotional regulation techniques performed better under pressure.
Breathwork doesn’t slow you down—it sustains your ability to keep going.
And if you’re worried about how it looks, start small. You don’t have to close your eyes or announce what you’re doing. A single, slow breath taken quietly at your desk can shift your internal state more than most people realize.
In a work culture that rewards urgency, choosing to breathe is a quiet act of self-leadership. You’re not retreating from your day. You’re regulating so you can meet it more effectively.
Stress management is often framed as something external—find a better job, get a better manager, take a long vacation. But real resilience doesn’t begin out there. It begins inside your own body.
Your breath is a built-in feedback loop, a way to interrupt the stress cycle before it hijacks your nervous system. Breathwork isn’t about withdrawing from your work. It’s about returning to yourself inside of it.
Maria’s meeting wasn’t unusual. It was ordinary. The kind of low-level stress moment we all experience a dozen times a day. But in that ordinary moment, she chose something different. She breathed.
You will face pressure. You will feel overwhelmed. But you don’t have to wait until the edge of burnout to intervene.
The average person takes over 20,000 breaths per day. That’s 20,000 chances to come home to yourself.
All it takes is one.
Sammy's story is one of grit, heart, and healing. After leaving home at 12 and overcoming addiction, she found her way back to herself through movement, mindfulness, and a deep commitment to growth.
Now a wellness facilitator, speaker, and lifelong student of the mind-body connection, Sammy works with Fortune 500 companies, nonprofits, and individuals alike — blending lived experience and science to help people regulate, reconnect, and lead with compassion. Her work is grounded in one mission: to connect people back to themselves, and teams to each other.
