I take 4 deep, relaxing breaths at least once each hour.

Four breaths take roughly twenty seconds. The hour is arbitrary, since no nervous system runs on a schedule. What the hour does is interrupt.

Most tension arrives without an event. You sit down at nine, and by noon your shoulders are somewhere near your ears and your jaw has been clenched so long you've stopped registering it. Nothing happened. It accumulated.

An hourly breath is less a relaxation technique than a checkpoint, a moment to find out what your body has been doing while you weren't watching. Some hours you'll notice nothing at all. On the one where you find both hands tight around the wheel of a parked car, it pays for all the others.