By Chloe
In my professional world of AI and technology, everything is about optimization—speed, scale, accuracy, cost, and reaching the next milestone. We build systems that learn, rank, predict, and automate. We watch dashboards the way pilots watch instruments. And without noticing, we start living the same way: always monitoring, always adjusting, always looking forward.
In AI work, “what’s next” is baked into the workflow. There’s always another experiment to launch, another model to evaluate, another regression to investigate, another stakeholder to align, another set of metrics to defend. The future is not an occasional thought—it’s the default operating system.
Lately, I’ve been sitting with a book called A Life Worth Breathing by Max Strom, and it quietly disrupted that operating system. It forced me to ask a difficult question—one no roadmap, model, or meeting can answer on my behalf: Am I actually living, or am I just busy?
Strom suggests that many of us “hold our breath” through our lives. We wait for the week to end, for the meeting to finish, for the launch to stabilize, for the numbers to confirm we’re safe—before we allow ourselves to be fully present. And when I read that, I recognized a pattern I’ve been practicing for years: postponing my own life until everything is “handled.”
Shallow Breath, Shallow Life
The core insight that hit me is deceptively simple: how we breathe is how we live. When my mind races toward my 2026 goals, my breath becomes shallow—short inhales, tight chest, a body bracing for impact. It’s as if my nervous system is constantly preparing to explain, prove, or defend.
This showed up even in the Zendo. I thought I was “just sitting,” but I realized I wasn’t only fighting thoughts—I was feeling the physical tension of ambition. The same intensity that helps me drive outcomes at work was also tightening my ribs in stillness.
In AI and tech, tension can look like competence. We call it “high ownership,” “high standards,” “bias for action.” But the body doesn’t care what we label it. If the breath stays shallow, the present moment becomes something we manage rather than something we experience.
Strom argues that shallow breath leads to shallow connection. I started to see how often I was “performing” my life—moving from sync to sync, from decision to decision, from metric to metric—without actually inhabiting my day. That realization didn’t make me less ambitious. It made me want ambition without self-abandonment.
The Practice: The Three-Breath Reset
So how do we change this in a world that won’t slow down? The most practical shift for me was viewing the breath as a bridge. Breath is one of the only functions that is both automatic and within our control—available before a high-stakes exec review, during a tense Slack thread, or right after an A/B test surprises the room.
This week, I started a discipline I now rely on: The Three-Breath Reset. Before every high-stakes meeting or difficult decision, I stop and take three conscious deep breaths. It’s a tiny interruption—small enough to be invisible to others, strong enough to change what happens next inside me.
Here’s what it looks like in practice:
- Pause for a single beat before you speak or decide.
- Inhale slowly through the nose; let the ribs and belly expand.
- Exhale fully; if you can, make the exhale slightly longer than the inhale.
- Repeat three times, then proceed.
It doesn’t change the technical complexity of the work—model architecture is still model architecture, latency is still latency, stakeholders are still stakeholders. But it changes me. It shifts my energy from “reacting” to “responding.” It gives me just enough space to choose curiosity over defensiveness and clarity over urgency.
And that shift matters more in AI than we like to admit. When the team is debating fairness constraints, personalization tradeoffs, brand safety, or unintended consequences of automation, the quality of our attention becomes part of the product. Calm isn’t “soft.” Calm is how we avoid shipping our stress into systems that touch millions of people.
Gratitude as a State
Max Strom writes: “Gratitude is not a result of things going our way; it is a result of our breath being deep.” That line reframed my timeline. I realized I’ve been treating wholeness as something I earn after milestones—after the launch, after the numbers, after the “proof.”
But I don’t need to wait for my 2026 goals to be met to feel whole. I can find that wholeness in a single breath, right here—before the meeting starts, before the calendar fills again, before the next notification steals my attention.
This isn’t a call to step away from ambition. It’s a call to stop confusing ambition with self-erasure. We can build powerful technology—and still live a life that feels breathable, embodied, and present.
Thank you for being a community that reminds me to stop holding my breath and start living—right in the middle of the work.
Hakone Zendo 