Breathwork for Tech Overwhelm: 5 Ways to Stay Calm When It All Goes Wrong

One afternoon my car went into limp mode on the A360. Four miles an hour, on a road where everyone else was doing sixty, with a long queue of lovely people behind me getting later by the minute. I could feel a proper meltdown on its way. (It wouldn’t have been pretty. I’d probably have made the local news.)

What got me home safely was my breath. That’s the idea behind breathwork for tech overwhelm. A frozen laptop, a form that won’t connect to anything or a platform that changed overnight can set off the same stress response as a car crawling along a main road.

In July 2025 I talked about this with Nicola Walsh on her podcast, This Mum Loves Tech, after leading a masterclass for her membership of women in business. Nicola’s show is all about making tech simpler, and she’s very aware that tech brings up emotions as well as problems. Here’s what I’d tell any business owner who’s staring at a spinning wheel right now.

Or click here to to go to the Spotify episode.

From book editor to breathwork nerd

I wasn’t always a Breathwork Practitioner. I was a book editor, working full time while building my own business and juggling more plates than I’d like to admit.

A few years ago I joined a business mastermind with Anna Parker-Naples, who is now my breathwork trainer. She taught us a breathing technique for the moments we’d need to put ourselves out there on video. First she asked us to picture standing on a stage in front of 200 people, about to tell them what we do. My face went beetroot, my heart was pounding and I couldn’t have told you my own name. Then she guided us through one breathing technique and the panic began to subside. No pill, nothing to take. All I’d changed was how I was breathing. It felt like magic.

The training went far deeper than I expected. Think A level biology and chemistry, and then some. I’ve been a breath nerd ever since.

I’d planned to use breathwork to help my authors through writer’s block. Then I noticed what it was doing for me through perimenopause, from mood swings and brain fog to migraines. In my own experience it was far bigger than writer’s block. So I widened my focus to women like me: running a business, looking after family, perhaps supporting ageing parents too, with hormones doing their own thing.

Why tech feels like a sabre-tooth tiger

Our bodies are brilliant at protecting us. When something feels threatening, we’re flooded with adrenaline and cortisol so we can fight or run. When the threat was a sabre-tooth tiger, we’d get to safety and the body would settle again.

The trouble with modern life is that everything feels like a tiger. A failed upload gets the same response, then an email, then a deadline, one thing after another, and the body never gets the chance to settle. When we’re flooded like that, reaction takes over from logical thinking. It’s why you can read the same error message five times and still not take it in.

As Nicola pointed out, a lot of tech stress is about things outside your control: systems that aren’t talking to each other, a platform that’s down. Getting more stressed won’t make it fix itself any faster. If you’d like to understand more about how this works, I’ve written about why “just relax” is the worst advice.

Here are five ways breathwork can help.

1. Notice whether you’re holding your breath

Fight, flight and freeze. Freeze is the one I know best. I used to hold my breath, because if I don’t breathe, nobody can see me. If that sounds familiar, you’re in good company. Holding your breath can signal to your body that something is wrong, which feeds the very stress you’re trying to get away from.

Perhaps next time something goes wrong on screen, you might notice: am I breathing? What are my shoulders doing? Noticing is the first step. No fixing required yet.

2. Breathwork for tech overwhelm: make your exhale longer than your inhale

This is the simplest reset I know, and the one people tell me they can do anywhere. Breathe in through your nose at a comfortable pace, then let your exhale be longer than your inhale. A slower breath with a longer out-breath signals to your nervous system that you’re safe, and your body can begin to ease out of its stress response.

Do five rounds at your desk, with your eyes open, while the page loads. Any count that feels easy is the right count. If you’d like numbers, try 3 in and 6 out. If you feel light-headed or uncomfortable, go back to your natural breathing. Breathwork isn’t a cure-all and it never replaces medical care where you need it.

3. Practise when you’re calm

Think about school fire drills. Children practise them regularly, so when the alarm goes off they don’t run about like headless chickens. They stand up and walk calmly to their meeting place, without even knowing whether it’s a test or the real thing.

Breathing works the same way. The more you practise a technique when you’re already calm, the more likely you are to find yourself doing it when you’re not. That’s what happened on the A360. I noticed my breathing slowing down before I’d consciously decided to do anything.

4. Give your busy brain one job

Alternate nostril breathing is an old technique, used by yogis in India thousands of years ago. You breathe in through one nostril and out through the other, switching sides as you go. It asks for your full attention, because you have to think about where the breath is going. That leaves very little room for the tech spiral, and a couple of minutes can be enough for the chaos in your head to quieten.

It’s best learned step by step, so if you’d like to try it, I’m happy to show you in a session. Skip it if your nose is blocked.

5. Breathe before you start, not just when it breaks

Prevention is better than cure. If opening the laptop or sorting something out on your phone sets your stomach fluttering, take a few slow breaths with a longer exhale before you begin.

Nicola does this herself. When something isn’t going right with a client’s tech, she stops and takes a breath, and her clients tell her how calm she is. In her masterclass we practised three short techniques, each under five minutes. Breathwork for tech overwhelm doesn’t need an hour or a retreat. It needs a few minutes and a bit of practice.

Where breathwork for tech overwhelm can start for you

If this has you curious, there are two ways in:

• Start with a free five days: my email course, Awaken Your Inner Magic, brings you one simple breathwork practice each morning, 10–15 minutes at most, including a longer-exhale practice on day three.
• Go deeper: Breathwork for Wellness is two months of one-to-one work with WhatsApp support between sessions. It starts with functional breathing, so your body learns to breathe the way it’s designed to. Book a free suitability call and we’ll talk it through.

No pressure, just an open door. 💜

A big thank you to Nicola for having me on the podcast and for inviting me to speak to her membership.

You can listen to the full episode on Spotify, and if tech is stressing you out, take a look at This Mum Loves Tech.

Which of these five will you try the next time a screen freezes? I’d love to hear in the comments.