BY: RICK HANSON, Ph.D.
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4 THOUGHTS
1. Beating Our Negative Biases with Slow Breathing
“We need to deal with real dangers, but much of the time we overestimate threats—an aspect of the negativity bias—and don’t feel as safe as we actually are. This makes us feel bad, and it wears down physical and mental health over time. Plus when we feel at all anxious, attention understandably skitters around, scanning the world—including relationships—and body and mind for what might go wrong. Helping yourself to feel reasonably safe calms the stress response system and helps you stay with the object of attention rather than look about for a tiger that might pounce.”
Evolution wired us to notice the negative about 9x more than the positive. Although that’s good for survival, it’s not so great for our everyday health.
Enter slow breathing exercises. By activating the calming parasympathetic nervous system, they teach our bodies to feel safe. This dampens the negativity bias, helping us engage fully in things that matter.
It reminds me of this wisdom from Russ Harris in The Confidence Gap, “Mindful Breathing is a useful practice in its own right. It allows us to take some time out from our busy daily routines, and often creates a restful state that allows us to recharge our batteries and find some inner peace.”
So here’s to using our breath to feel safe, to find some inner peace, and to beat our negativity bias.
2. On Sailboats, HRV, and Developing Your Inner Resources
“Developing inner resources is like deepening the keel of a sailboat so that you’re more able to deal with the worldly winds—gain and loss, pleasure and pain, praise and blame, fame and slander—without getting tipped over into the reactive mode—or at least you can recover more quickly. With growing confidence in these capabilities, you become more comfortable raising your sights in life and sailing even farther into the deep, dark blue.”
Although Dr. Hanson is talking about inner resources in general, this is an excellent analogy for why improving HRV via slow deep breathing is so helpful: it’s like deepening the keel of our physiological sailboats.
Of course, we’ll always be hit by life’s storms, but with higher HRV, we’ll remain steadier and recover quicker. We could say, then, that deep breathing = deep keel.
3. Delight in Practice: Finding Routines that Are Meaningful to You (it’s ok to have fun with it)
“Whatever your practices are, you’re more likely to keep doing them if you enjoy them. So look for what feels good and meaningful in what you are already doing, and perhaps find additional things that are naturally pleasurable for you. Ask yourself if you’ve been doing some things by rote, or if they’ve gotten dry for you; see if there are ways to help them be more rewarding. It’s all right to let go of some things to make room for others that would be more fruitful for you.
It’s good to bring playfulness, even delight, to your practices. See if you can be amused sometimes by your own mind, its zigging and zagging, the tricks it can play, the surprising sudden openings. I’ve gotten way too serious about my own practice in the past. Practice is less effective if it’s heavy and somber most of the time. It’s okay to have fun with it!”
What a perfect attitude to take toward our breathing practice (or any practice we do for self-care).
If you want to start applying the new things you learn, start with what you already find meaningful and add or subtract from there.
For example, suppose you love Wim Hof breathing, but then you learn about the power of slow breathing for better health. In that case, you might try adding 5 minutes of slow breathing after your Wim Hof routine.
If you like it, you keep it. If not, you don’t.
Lastly, let’s remember not to take ourselves (or our practice) too seriously (guilty here). As Dr. Hanson also tells us, “It’s good to bring playfulness, even delight, to your practices.”
Here’s to applying rigorous science in our lives in a delightful way, today.
***
Related Quote: “As long as you derive inner help and comfort from anything, keep it.” - Gandhi.
4. Perfect Advice to Follow Today (and for the rest of our lives)
“So look for those little ways in the flow of life to feel a bit more relaxed, protected, strong, and at ease…and a little more grateful, glad, and successful…and a little more cared about and caring, and a little more loved and loving. One breath at a time, one synapse at a time, you can gradually develop an increasingly unshakable core inside yourself. The more often and deeply you do this, the greater the results.” (my emphasis)
That sounds like perfect advice to follow today, tomorrow, and for the rest of our lives 🙏
1 LIFE-CHANGING IDEA
You Can’t Live There, but You’re Changed Forever
“I was once talking with the teacher Steve Armstrong, who had trained as a monk in Asia. I asked him if he could tell me about nibbana. He looked at me intently and then got a faraway look and said something I’ve thought about many times since: ‘It’s as if you live in a deep valley surrounded by mountains. Then one day you’re standing on top of the highest peak. The perspective is amazing. Still, you can’t live there. And so you come back down to the valley. But what you’ve seen changes you forever.’”
What a fantastic story with such a practical, life-changing message.
We can have spiritual, even mystical experiences, whether through a 2-hour breathing session, a weekend retreat, or just 10 minutes of slow breathing on your couch.
But remember that we can’t live up on the mountaintop they bring us to. If we chase that state forever, we’ll always be unhappy. Instead, we have to integrate the perspective they give us in our everyday lives while simultaneously doing the things that need to get done to live in our current reality.
1 STACK OF MEMORABLE QUOTES
“Train yourself in doing good that lasts and brings happiness. Cultivate generosity, the life of peace, and a mind of boundless love.” - Itivuttaka 1.22
“In a saying from the work of the psychologist Donald Hebb, neurons that fire together wire together. This means that you can use your mind to change your brain to change your mind for the better.”
“Be devoted to the breath and renounce everything else.” – Eugene Cash
“It’s helpful to extend your exhalations because the “rest-and-digest” parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) handles exhaling while also slowing your heart rate, so longer exhalations are naturally relaxing.”
“Just as a felled tree grows again if the roots are unharmed and strong, so suffering sprouts again and again until the tendency to crave is rooted out.” - Dhammapada 338
“For example, the classic Mindfulness of Breathing Sutta (Majjhima Nikaya 118) suggests that we “breathe in, tranquilizing the body; breathe out, tranquilizing the body…breathe in, tranquilizing the mind; breathe out, tranquilizing the mind…””
“One of the most remarkable facts of existence is under our noses all of the time. This is the Now of the present moment: endlessly ending, and endlessly renewed. Radically transient, yet always enduring.”
“Your experience of the present moment is based on the activity of your nervous system at that moment.”
“In truth we are always present. We only imagine ourselves to be in one place or another.” – Attributed to Howard Cohn
“Every atom in your body that is heavier than helium was made inside a star, usually as it was exploding. Carbon, oxygen, iron: all of it. Take a breath—and breathe stardust with stardust. This body is billions of years old.”
And I’ll just repeat this gem one more time to finish it off:
“So look for those little ways in the flow of life to feel a bit more relaxed, protected, strong, and at ease…and a little more grateful, glad, and successful…and a little more cared about and caring, and a little more loved and loving. One breath at a time, one synapse at a time, you can gradually develop an increasingly unshakable core inside yourself. The more often and deeply you do this, the greater the results.”