“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.”
- Rick Hanson, Ph.D., Neurodharma
Although Dr. Hanson is talking about inner resources in general, this is a perfect analogy for why improving HRV via slow deep breathing is so helpful: it’s like deepening the keel of your physiological sailboat.
You will still be hit by life’s storms, but you’ll remain steadier and recover quicker.
We could say that deep breathing = deep keel.