You have a gap between two meetings and no idea what to do with it. Most breathing exercises assume a quiet room, twenty minutes and a pair of earbuds. At a desk, in an open-plan office, with someone walking past, you have none of those.

So the version that works at a desk has three properties. It is silent, because you cannot play audio. It is short enough to finish, because 4 minutes is what is actually left. And it tells you what to do one line at a time, because deciding is the part you have run out of.

The mechanics are ordinary and public: breathe in through the nose, breathe out for longer than you breathed in, and let the shoulders drop. A longer breath out is the whole trick — not because it fixes anything, but because it gives your attention one job for 4 minutes.

Nobody around you will notice. You are sitting still and looking at a circle on a screen.