No Breathing, Please -- We're Working

Robert Goldman
Wed, 18 Mar 2026 23:00:00 -0700
Lifestyle

It doesn't matter if they're managing you from across the office or from across the country, having a boss telling you what to do and when to do it is bad. What's worse is having a boss who's sitting on your wrist.

I refer to your Apple Watch, or whichever digital device you strap to your wrist or press to your finger. Whether it comes from Costco or Gucci, devices like the Apple watch can tell you when to start exercising and when to stop. They tell you when to stand up and when to sit down. They wake you from your sleep and remind you when it's time for night-night.

They can also provide a good deal of health information, like tracking your heart rate and monitoring your blood pressure. With the proper apps, a digital device can count your steps, record your menstrual cycles, evaluate the quality of your sleep and notify emergency services when you get in a tizzy and fall off your office chair.
Updated: Thu Mar 19, 2026

It doesn't matter if they're managing you from across the office or from across the country, having a boss telling you what to do and when to do it is bad. What's worse is having a boss who's sitting on your wrist.

I refer to your Apple Watch, or whichever digital device you strap to your wrist or press to your finger. Whether it comes from Costco or Gucci, devices like the Apple watch can tell you when to start exercising and when to stop. They tell you when to stand up and when to sit down. They wake you from your sleep and remind you when it's time for night-night.

They can also provide a good deal of health information, like tracking your heart rate and monitoring your blood pressure. With the proper apps, a digital device can count your steps, record your menstrual cycles, evaluate the quality of your sleep and notify emergency services when you get in a tizzy and fall off your office chair.

And — oh yes! — they also tell you the time.

Which used to be the main reason people wore a watch. Not anymore. Now the reason you want an Apple Watch or an Oura ring or a Fitbit or a Whoop wristband is to measure your Heart Rate Variability. (H.R.V. to its friends.)

I can't give you an in-depth medical definition of H.R.V. because I am not a doctor, though I never miss an episode of "The Pitt." (I think Dr. Robby is being very unfair to Dr. Langdon, don't you?)

Suffice it to say, if you think a steady heart rate is ideal, think again. The heart rate you want is uneven, "a heart that beats not every second on the dot but after, say, 1.1 seconds, then 1.05 seconds, then 0.95, then 1."

Why? Because an uneven heart rate "tends to reflect physiological resilience." And maximum resilience, physical and emotional, is an attribute you need in a crazy-making workplace like your own.

Or so I learned from "When Your Apple Watch Becomes an Office Taskmaster," a recent Noam Scheiber article in The New York Times.

Measuring your H.R.V. is just one of the many edgy obsessions of biohackers, people who, in their quest for perfect bodies and eternal life, have moved past the tiresome truths of traditional medicine to practice intermittent fasting, ice immersion, sauna sessions, brain enhancers, like Nootropics — just say noo to Nootropics — not to mention of passel of supplements, stimulants, patches and pouches, plus blue-light blocking, nutrigenomics, ketogenics, biofeedback, neurostimulation, blood panels and urinalysis.

All before breakfast.

Of all the wacky and wonderful aspects of biohacking, it's H.R.V. that has moved most forcibly into the workplace. Noam Schneider writes, "more and more gadget geeks have focused such biohacking efforts on their performance not just at the gym but at the office, as well. The once eccentric quest for immortality is becoming a feature of the 9-to-5 hustle."

Not only are individual employees tracking their own heart rates, but corporate management has also taken an interest. To track the trackers, they're turning to consultants for company-wide efforts to improve their employees' H.R.V. scores, like centralized digital dashboards to measure individuals and teams.

Scary!

And how can you control your heart rate to produce the kind of results management demands? Better sleep is one way to improve H.R.V. Unfortunately, companies are not responding by establishing official nap times. The corporate response is a touch more intrusive. They're spending megabucks to teach you how to breathe.

"To help clients raise their H.R.V. some consultants train them to breathe at a slow, steady rate," Scheiber reports. It "generally means inhaling and exhaling three and a half to seven times a minute."

If you're too busy working to breathe seven times a minute, take a deep breath. Your career trajectory is at risk here. The last thing you want is a quarterly review that states your work has been excellent, but your breathing has been below expectations, so pack your Apple watch and leave.

For some people, the availability of round-the-clock monitoring can become a compulsion. Add it to remembering and recording all your other bio-hacks and you may not have any time left to work or, for that matter, to live. And considering all the time and effort it takes to hack and track every bodily function, from breathing to burping, I'm not sure why you'd really want to.

If this worries you, just stop breathing altogether. Frankly, with your job, you don't have time.

Bob Goldman was an advertising executive at a Fortune 500 company. He offers a virtual shoulder to cry on at info@creators.com. To find out more about Bob Goldman and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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