1st Session

1. Introduce yourself.

2. How was your weekend?

3. What are you going to do after this session?

4. A skilled colleague with a bad temper vs. a unskilled colleague with a good temper

Breathe: How Workers Use Breathing to Fight Stress

Each staff meeting at Texas company Myosin Marketing begins in the same way. When everyone is gathered on a video call, CEO Sean Clayton leads his team through a deep-breathing exercise.

The practice sets the tone for the meeting, and helps his employees, most of whom work remotely, to feel safe, grounded and willing to take creative risks, he said.

Deep breathing can be an effective way to reduce stress at work, studies show. But while working, many people don't think about how they're inhaling and exhaling.

There are plenty of good reasons to remember to pause to take deep breaths.

Research suggests deep-breathing exercises can lower a person's blood pressure and reduce anxiety.

Spending just a minute or two breathing deeply can help calm our thoughts, experts say.

"When we slow down our breath, we send a signal to our brain that everything's OK, even when it's not," said Suze Yalof Schwartz, who is the founder of Unplug Meditation, a California company with a meditation studio, an app and programs for corporate clients.

"It is the best thing that you can do at work before you have a meeting ... before you have a difficult conversation, because it just calms you down, gets rid of your negative energy," Yalof Schwartz said.

It's not always easy for workers to find space for deep breathing exercises. But Yalof Schwartz says you can do breathing exercises even while you're working or right before you walk through a door.

What do you usually do to relieve your stress?

2. What kinds of things make you feel stressful?

3. When you are stressed, do you prefer to be alone or with friends?

4. How do you help others when they are feeling stressed out?

2nd session

1. Introduce yourself.

2. What are your plans for this winter?

3. How often do you go to the library, and what do you do there?

4. How many meals do you eat in a day?

Why humans feel the need to feast together (BBC)

It's a peculiarly human universal: we like to sit down together for a good tuck-in. Meals out with friends, dinner parties, holiday get-togethers where we regularly overindulge ? eating shared meals is so common that it's rarely remarked upon, except when the idea that it's not happening enough enjoys a societal vogue.

The act of giving food to those closest to you is not the same as having a meal together, points out sociologist Nicklas Neuman of Uppsala University in Sweden. "You can distribute food as an x-object without sitting down and actually eating with others," he says. Humans seem to have added a number of complex social layers to this act.

When someone has gone to the trouble of hunting or gathering food, putting together a fire, and then cooking over it, it implies that they may have a social group to help them with the many stages of this process.

And once you are all seated around a fire, a warm, bright beacon in the darkness, you may find yourself staying awake later, speculates Robin Dunbar, a biological anthropologist at the University of Oxford in the UK. Those extra hours in the day may have been golden opportunities for social bonding over food.

Eating the same thing at the same time as someone else makes them seem more trustworthy. People who had eaten the same snacks were also quicker to reach a satisfactory end to a negotiation than people who hadn't. A researcher suggests that this is a kind of relic of an earlier time, when perhaps having similar tastes in food might have been a clearer signifier of shared values than it is today.

But eating together isn't a simple, consistently positive act. Feasts, meals at which an outsized amount of food is shared, can be highly choreographed ways of showing submission and control. Think of a harvest tradition in which a landowner provides a large meal for their workers, or an office party where an employer's largess, or lack thereof, is scrutinised by the attendees. And regular family meals, as lauded as they are, aren't necessarily free of friction.

1. Have you ever had an uncomfortable meal with someone?

2. Do you mind eating alone? Or do you usually try to eat with another person?

3. What do you do while eating? Watch videos, check social media, or chat?

4. Do you prefer home-cooked meals or eating out? Why?