The Pursuit Of Health & Happiness With Dr. Greg Hammer

 

The pursuit of health and happiness is a timeless endeavor. In this episode, Adam Markel sits down with Dr. Greg Hammer, a recently retired professor, pediatric intensive care physician, pediatric anesthesiologist, wellness and mindfulness lecturer, and author of GAIN Without Pain: The Happiness Handbook for Health Care Professionals, to discuss the secrets to a happy and healthy life. Dr. Hammer emphasizes a holistic approach to well-being that includes physical, mental, and spiritual health. He discusses the importance of gratitude, acceptance, intention, and non-judgment—key elements in cultivating happiness and improving quality of life. Tune in to discover practical strategies for living a fulfilling life, inspired by the wisdom of centenarians in blue zones.

Show Notes:

• 04:05 – Longevity And Health
• 14:16 – GAIN
• 24:44 – Managing Thoughts And Expectations
• 34:01 – Survival Of The Fittest And Resilience
• 57:24 – Non-Judgment In Practice
• 1:07:28 – Motivation Behind The Book
• 1:10:07 – Creating A Healthy Life

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The Pursuit Of Health & Happiness With Dr. Greg Hammer

Welcome back to another episode of the show. I’m so happy that you are joining me. I’ve got an incredible guest. His name is Greg Hammer. He’s a doctor, retired professor at Stanford University School of Medicine, pediatric intensive care physician, pediatric anesthesiologist, wellness and mindfulness lecturer, and the author of GAIN Without Pain: The Happiness Handbook for Health Care Professionals. He has published widely on topics related to pharmacology and perioperative care for children undergoing cardiac and thoracic procedures as well as organ transplantation.

Dr. Hammer is a health enthusiast and meditator, utilizing non-duality and mindfulness-based approaches, including the GAIN method. You’re going to love this conversation. There are so many insights that Dr. Hammer is going to share with us. At the outset, sit back and enjoy this incredible guest and our wonderful conversation.

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You have a very impressive work history and CV. Not everybody’s intro reads like yours, but I’m going to ask you the same question that I would love to ask at the start of these things. What’s one thing that isn’t a part of your bio that you would love for people to know about you?

My love for ice hockey as a participant and it’s the one sport I can watch a little bit. I usually save it for the Stanley Cup, but ice hockey is about as much fun as a human being can have, as far as I’m concerned.

First of all, if anybody was seeing this on YouTube, you saw my face make a little shocked look. I wasn’t expecting that, which is perfect. That’s the perfect answer. The thought that came immediately was that you’re a Californian who loves ice hockey, but I know you have some roots in the East as well. I have to ask you. Where did the love of hockey come from? Where did that all start?

It came from my youth. I grew up outside of Chicago. I went to school in Boston. I did some training in Philadelphia as well. From a very early age, in the winters, the local elementary school that I attended had a guy named Harold who was a crossing guard. Harold would spray one of the fields with water in the wintertime, so we’d get this terrific surface full of bubbles and ruts. It created quite a surface for skating and playing hockey. That was part of the game.

My brother and I used to take our skates up there, our hockey sticks, and a few pucks. A bunch of others would congregate. It was such a great experience. We loved watching the Chicago Blackhawks back in the day when there were six teams in the NHL. It came naturally. We come from a very sporting family, so we’re always into sports and athletics. My brother and I are very close. That was our favorite.

You went to Andover, right?

I did.

Did you play hockey when you were there?

Longevity And Health

I played as a freshman, and then I played club hockey when I was there. I went to Northwestern and I played on the hockey team there, starting as a freshman.

I also live in California. You and I are a couple of hundred miles apart, you up in the north and me in the south. There are some folks nearby, friends of ours that are from the Chicago area, and they can’t give up their Blackhawks hockey for anything. They live for it. It builds resilience in the most obvious way on a physical level, but it’s more than that because to deal with the discomfort of, first of all, being on the skates to learn on a field that was sprayed and there are ruts and things, it’s not like skating on Zambonied arena ice. It’s a completely different thing, right?

Yeah. Being a Black Hawk fan builds resilience as well.

I get that. I want to jump in and follow the breadcrumbs where they lead us. I was reading about how many people are out there speaking, podcasting, and even in some ways, hawking their solutions when it comes to longevity, health and well-being, etc. I follow a lot of that stuff. I use a lot of those products as well. I find myself leaning into that. A lot of people are, clearly.

I’d like to get your perspective on longevity. We can track this and see where we want to begin with. Is it the resiliency habits that we create perhaps even early in life? Is it something that you can pivot like on the rink, change, and create those things later in life, in your experience? What does it look like outside of all the products and all the hype? What does it look like to do things that are going to help you live longer and stronger mentally from brain health and the rest of us as well? That’s a very packed intro. You can start anywhere you want, but we want answers.

We’re all interested in health span. We don’t want to live to be 120 if we’re unhealthy or unhappy. That would be punishment. We all want to have a good quality of life. We call that health span the combination of good health and longevity. There are basics in terms of our physical well-being that are well-documented with good science that we can follow. There are areas of uncertainty.

I practiced medicine for a very long time. Not everything we do in medicine is evidence-based. We can’t wait for randomized controlled trials for everything. A lot of the supplements and other lifestyle habits, if you will, that are touted, some of them may not be fully proven. We have to do a risk-benefit analysis. If something is not too inconvenient and there’s some good science that indicates it’s probably going to contribute to our health span and the risk is low, then we embrace it. We all want a health span from a physical standpoint or physical well-being, sleep, exercise, nutrition, supplements, a couple of drugs, which show promise that is readily available, at least one of them is, and then our mental and spiritual well-being.

My first book is called GAIN Without Pain. It’s about a mindfulness meditation practice based on Gratitude, Acceptance, Intention, and Non-judgment. GAIN is an acronym for those four elements. These are relatively straightforward and easy things to do because we know with regard to the quality of our life and our longevity that there are a handful of factors that age us and they undermine our wellness both physically and mentally. Those are stress and inflammation. Those two probably play the largest roles. The physical and spiritual well-being elements interact very closely with stress and inflammation.

We could go into any one of those areas. We could talk about physical well-being. We could talk about spiritual well-being. They’re very closely related. You can’t separate them. We could talk about the components of physical wellness, the importance of sleep, exercise, what kind of exercise, nutrition, supplements, and drugs. There are a lot of different conversations we can have, and I’m happy to go wherever you’d like.

I want to first ask you. You used the term health span. It’s a different way to look at it than lifespan. I’m thinking, in terms of lifespan, of a podcast that I heard a few years ago called Lifespan based on a book written in part or in collaboration with David Sinclair who’s a researcher at MIT and Harvard. I, first of all, wanted to think of it that there’s a distinction between life span and health span.

Maybe not everybody, but I know I’d love to live to be 120, and so would my wife. We set the intention long ago that we were going to have this amazing 75th wedding anniversary. We created a vision board for it and some invitations for people to come and join us on the beach in Cape Cod for a clambake. She’d be shy of 100. I’d be 100 or a little over that. To get to 120 and have all the pieces and parts working, especially the brain piece of it or the brain health part of it and the body, is different than making it there at any and all costs. It is qualitative versus quantitative. Do you agree that that’s an important distinction for people to have?

Absolutely. There has been a lot of interest in these so-called Blue Zones around the world where there are a lot of centenarians. It is the prevalence of people living over the age of 100. The thing about these centenarians is that, in general, they tend to be pretty healthy until shortly before they die. They have a short period of declining health prior to their demise as opposed to what we see more commonly in the West in particular. We get to a certain age that could be 50, 60, or 70, and then we have a relatively long, slow decline. We’re sick for a long period of time. We use a lot of resources in our health system. More importantly, we feel that we’re a burden to others, our family members. We are unwell for a relatively long period of time.

It’s costly as well. The whole concept of how you could somehow live in a memory care facility or in other ways be getting compassionate care, the cost of that is enormous. People might spend all their life savings or have some other outcome as a result as well. I am sorry to interrupt you, but the cost is insane in this country for that, isn’t it?

Absolutely. The cost of medical care is a huge issue. For the percentage of our gross national product devoted to healthcare, I don’t know if it’s over 20%, but it’s getting toward 20%. It’s not sustainable. We need to, from a public health standpoint, figure out ways and implement as much of those scientific understanding in a public health domain so that we become more like the centenarians living in the Blue Zones and less like the preponderant number of others in the US and elsewhere.

People can look that up and probably have already. There are a number of shows on any number of streaming platforms. If you haven’t, for the folks reading this, there are some interesting things to pick up from the documentaries on Blue Zones. You were going to say something at that point when I interrupted you about this idea of folks living almost right up until their expiry date but living healthily up until that point. Was there more that you wanted to say about the Blue Zones?

No. In keeping with what I said about our physical well-being and our spiritual well-being, part of the latter has to do with community. There are three things that we need to focus on, especially as we age. They are continuing to grow and learn about brain health among other things. Being in a community with others is a big issue with the centenarians living in these Blue Zones. They’re well-integrated with their families. They have a lot of wisdom. They’re highly regarded by their family members, typically. The third besides learning, growing, and being in the community is service. This is something that has been de-emphasized in our culture.

For me, when I thought about my retirement from Stanford at least 10 years before I pulled the trigger, I identified those 3 as my directives, to figure out a way to grow and learn every day, to be in a close community with others, and to serve. Those were all part of my job for 35 or so years. Once we retire, we have to have a plan in place. We have to have the I in GAIN, which is Intention. You had this vision board for your 75th anniversary. I love that. We do have to have purposefulness. We have to plan. We have to invoke our plan with intention. This idea behind growing, learning, being in a community, and serving is simple, basic, and essential.

GAIN

I would love it if you’d let people know about the acronym GAIN. This was a book you had written. The subtitle is The Happiness Handbook for Health Care Professionals. Is that correct?

Yes.

I want to talk about that audience of people because our organization serves that community quite frequently as workplace consultants and as a keynote speaker and author myself. What does GAIN stand for? Let’s then talk about the community that the book was directed toward.

GAIN stands for what I think are the four essential domains of happiness. They are Gratitude, Acceptance, Intention, and Non-judgment. We love acronyms in medicine. I rely on acronyms to help you remember things. I thought, “Five elements might be more than even I can remember. Three, I’m probably going to be leaving something important out. Can I do it in four? Can I embrace what I think are all of the domains of happiness in 4 letters and 4 domains?” That’s partly how I came up with GAIN.

GAIN stands for the four essential domains of happiness: gratitude, acceptance, intention, and non-judgment. Share on X

With gratitude, people might go, “I’ve heard this before.” There was a study I read some years ago. It was a UC Davis study looking at people who had gratitude practices. I want to say something, and then if there’s more, let’s explore it because this is a deep well. For anybody that thinks, “I’ve heard something about gratitude. I get that,” you may get it and maybe don’t get it as well as possible, I suppose. I keep getting it daily how important it is to live in that state of appreciation.

This UC Davis study was really amazing because people who had gratitude practices, in which we could discuss what those are and we have them in our house, are healthier and happier. They have fewer complaints of all kinds, including health complaints. They move their bodies about an hour and a half per week more than people who do not have gratitude practices. That one surprised me as well. There are a whole host of benefits that they were attributing to simply these practices that people have regarding what they’re grateful for.

Going back to what is the science behind these findings, for example, there’s association. People who are grateful and have gratitude practices tend to be healthier, live longer, happier, etc. It’s not necessarily cause and effect that you have the gratitude practice and then that creates this euphoria or what have you. It’s an association. There’s a lot of selection bias involved because the people who have gratitude practice tend to be more pragmatic and more optimistic. This is common sense. I’m not quoting any scientific data here.

Gratitude, we can all agree, is intrinsic to happiness. We can imagine somebody or may know somebody who’s poor and happy or somebody who’s not in the greatest of health, has physical challenges, and is happy despite that. You can’t even imagine somebody who’s ungrateful and happy. That’s the test. It’s not difficult.

We can go into this in more detail if you like, but I’m fascinated by the neurologic circuitry in our brains and how our brains are wired. Over the course of hundreds of thousands of years, our brains have evolved in ways that suit survival. We’re wired for survival, and that includes having a negativity bias. We’re very wary. We are obsessed with the future.

 

What’s the worst thing that can happen with our negativity bias? We catastrophize. That may have been adaptive many years ago when our forebears were sitting around a fire in a cave, imagining there might be a saber tooth tiger lurking outside the mouth of the cave. There was an advantage to thinking of what the worst thing that could happen was, being very wary, and being focused on the future and even on the past but not necessarily the present. If they were wary and concerned about what was the worst thing that might happen, they may have lived longer and procreated more. The genes that code for these neural circuits propagated in the population.

Here we are, 150,000 years later, and this is the way our brains are wired. It’s no longer adaptive to be on the edge of this negativity and stress and be ready to fight or flee at the drop of a hat. It doesn’t suit us anymore. The good news is we can rewire our brains. We have this amazing quality called neuroplasticity. Gratitude is one of the elements along with the other three in GAIN that can help us do that. It’s never too late. Having a gratitude practice is extremely simple.

Tell me if I’m droning on a bit too long. As for our negativity bias, I often think about the fact that we have negative thoughts right off the bat before we even get out of bed. I am lying in bed. Maybe I played golf or did something and my knee is a little bit sore. I start focusing even before I get up, “I’ve got this pain in my knee. Why me?” As I swing my legs and get out of bed, I’m more aware of it. I’m thinking about it as I go to the commode.

Why not instead as soon as we start to have those negative thoughts think about the miracle of our physiology and think about the fact that while we were sleeping, our kidneys were working, filtering our blood, removing these toxins from the blood, and putting them in a solution that gets sent down to our bladder? Our bladder, for the most part, is kind to us and helps store that so that we don’t have to get up and go to the bathroom every five minutes. Maybe we get up once or twice. We go over to the commode in the morning and we have this pleasurable release of this stuff.

What a miracle that this is working 24/7 for most of us. As we begin to move around in the morning and start to get out of bed, let’s be grateful for the physiology. It blows me away. The more I study it, the more amazed I am. This is an example of our negativity bias, but how we can really begin to rewire the brain by being grateful for what we have.

That neuroplasticity means we have the ability to change or grow at any point in time when that system is still operative. That in and of itself is something to be grateful for. You asked how long I could listen to you on and on about that. I didn’t look to see if you’ve ever done a TED Talk or anything like that, but I said yes to one some years ago. It was an amazing experience but also a very tortuous one. The through line of that talk was all about what you said. How do you begin the day? What flows out of that choice that we make to start the day?

It’s interesting, I was a lawyer for twenty years. Even though I’ve been retired from that for twelve or so years, I still think in terms of some of those pragmatic things. I didn’t have a contract when I went to sleep that I would even wake up. I’ve never yet met anybody in my personal life or my professional life who has ever told me that they did or that they had an agreement that was in writing, for example. I’ll ask you. Did you have a contract when you went to sleep that you were going to wake up?

No such contract.

No such contract exists. Sometimes, if I wake up and have a little of that dicey feeling at the beginning of the day, I can tell when I put my feet on the floor, which used to be something that I lived with. I lived with that for a period of about a decade through my practice of law when I was ignoring everything except being vigilant. I was allowing worry to drive what I did for most of the day.

When I wake up and that little twinge of angst or even anxiety hits me right out of the gate, I go, “In this moment, what is happening all around this globe? I’m taking a breath and someone’s taking their last breath in that exact same moment.” While that might sound like hyperbole, first of all, it’s true. It’s an absolute fact. It immediately brings me into the present moment to decide whether I’m grateful for that breath that I’m taking as other people are leaving. It’s a state change. Everything changes at that moment. It makes that moment quite sacred for me.

Managing Thoughts And Expectations

Not going off on a tangent on the spiritual side of things, but it’s hard for me not to feel appreciation for my life as imperfect as it is. We share that. In that moment, it creates an opportunity or an opening that is pretty beautiful. It starts at the very first moment of the day. Do you still have to manage your thoughts from waking up?

Yeah. In fact, I, in the haze of semi-consciousness as I’m beginning to emerge from sleep in the morning, often have feelings of anxiety. I’m going through a year of transition because I retired at the end of ‘23. I knew it would be a year of adjustment because every day, I went to work and it was like, “The professor is here,” etc. You can’t help but have that image become part of your identity.

From a spiritual standpoint, and I have a strong spiritual practice, I don’t believe there’s a hierarchy, etc. You can’t help but be supported by the community of others holding you in high esteem. I felt that that was my condition. I knew that when I stopped doing that, it would be an adjustment, even though I thought about it a lot and I was well-prepared for it.

I have feelings as I’m in that semi-conscious state in the morning often of, “What am I doing? Am I serving a purpose?” etc. It’s generally when I’m not fully awake yet. When I get up, get all the visual cues, open the blinds, and let in some light, I appreciate my kidneys, etc. Things change. Many of us feel that way. It’s important for anybody who’s reading to know that we’re not alone. Our brains are wired this way. We’re not going to completely change them. All we can do is improve the circuitry so that it’s more adaptive because, in many ways, it’s maladaptive the way we think.

It wasn’t before, but it is now. This is a bridge that we have to create because it is wired into our genetics to lean that way.

I try not to resist those thoughts. I make a point of being the observer of those thoughts. That’s an essential ingredient to mindfulness. We become the observer. The A in GAIN is acceptance. The opposite of that is resistance. Resistance is directly proportional to suffering. There’s a formula in the book. Suffering equals pain times resistance. The pain is there.

 

I lost my son a couple of years ago at the age of 29. That pain is not going away, but if I resist it in so many ways that we can resist uncomfortable or painful thoughts and feelings, my suffering increases. When I have those thoughts in the morning, I don’t try to push them away. I breathe into them. My strategy is that I will take long, slow, deep breaths, activate my parasympathetic nervous system, and breathe in acceptance. I accept these thoughts. I accept that I retired and that I’m going through this transitional period.

At times, I’m uncertain of my purpose. At times, I feel like I’m not part of the community anymore. These are natural thoughts. I observe them and maybe even lean into them and embrace them. It’s important not to think that gratitude is simply going to solve all of your problems or the negative ways of thinking and being that we have, but it sure is an important ingredient.

It’s things that we hang on to. Mostly, we hang on to things or resist things being different than the way we think they ought to be. The root of that is our expectations around them. Would you agree with that?

Absolutely.

None of this stuff is easy. I don’t know that this needs to put bumpers around the conversation because people realize that nothing in life is necessarily easy. If you don’t realize that, then that’s a great awareness to begin with already. It’s not promised that it’d be easy, but it could be meaningful and worthwhile.

That’s different. Those are different expectations, like, “It should go my way. It should happen when I want it to happen. It should be fair.” I was a lawyer for a long time. You are working through these things after a long and illustrious career and knowing that you still want to remain of service, and maybe even a greater service now than previously. You’ve had to let go of lots in the process of transitioning into the present.

I knew that my career was not my identity. It’s not who I am. Nevertheless, this does get ingrained into the way we think and experience. It does take Intention, the I in GAIN, in order to let go of those. Expectations and that construct, this is not who we are. I don’t want to get into the spirituality of it too much unless you’d like to go there, but I believe in the consciousness-only model. We’re all made of consciousness. We’re not some construct that is built on the career that we had, our relationships with other people, or what have you. It takes a plan in order to let go of those feelings and those experiences. It’s not easy.

Our negativity bias comes into play when we feel as though we’re uncomfortable or suffering. We assume that it is easier for everybody else and that this is our dirty little secret, that we have this negativity bias, that we feel insecure, that we have depression, or that we experience anxiety. This is not our dirty little secret. We are all this way.

Wouldn’t it be great if everybody really believed that? Also, not just believed it but lived with the understanding that we are all behind the facade, the meat suit, and the rest of it that we’re all feeling those same ways about ourselves and about our relationship to the rest of the world around us.

That is a hugely important understanding. If I’m asked at the end of a show like yours and lots of others if there’s one thing I’d like for people to know coming from my heart or what have you, it’s that our negativity and our feelings of depression, sadness, isolation, anxiety, and fear are not ours alone. We’re all wired this way. It’s not our dirty little secret.

Our feelings of depression, sadness, isolation, anxiety, and fear are not ours alone. We’re all wired this way. Share on X

I don’t know if you’re familiar with the writings of Arthur Brooks. One of the ideas that he writes about is that through discussing and sharing our thoughts of weakness and negativity, we become stronger. That’s the paradox, apparently. I believe in that so strongly. I, for a very long time, had no problem falling on my sword when I was wrong. I am overly self-judgmental and think I’m wrong even when maybe there is no such thing. I have no problem apologizing. I have no problems discussing my sadness, fears, and anxiety. We’re all wired this way.

When we let go of this construct that tends to suppress or resist those thoughts and feelings, we become liberated. We become happier. We become stronger. If I were to have the opportunity to transmit one message, it would be that. This is not your dirty little secret. This is how we’re wired. We’re all like this. Understanding itself is so helpful to people. It’s transformational.

Survival Of The Fittest And Resilience

You said earlier that our negativity bias is no longer adaptive. I want to lean into that for a second as we move through the GAIN. A lot of people think or know that Darwin is famous for certain things. One that people will attribute to Darwin is the statement that the survival of the fittest is what we see and that’s what evolution has looked like.

That’s not what he said. He said the opposite. It’s not the fittest that survived. It’s not the most intelligent of the species that survived. It’s the most adaptive to their changing environment that survives. I’m a resilience researcher. I write about that topic. We work inside organizations to help to create more resilient teams, etc. We’re fascinated by it. That concept of how you adapt to change as a marker of resilience is really important.

When you said that our negativity bias is no longer adaptive and yet so many of us, when we think about why we resist, are unwilling to admit when we’re wrong, or protect at all costs our precious self-esteem or whatever it is, it’s this fear that being vulnerable will lead to annihilation. That’s that negativity bias. How are we as a species going to become more adaptive and therefore create longevity and also solve a lot more problems and have a better quality of life across the globe even if we still have this negativity bias leading the charge in so many of us?

I don’t know about something on as grand a scale as that, but at least you and I can have a conversation about what we might embrace and what anybody who’s reading this might embrace. First, we have to identify what are the issues of greatest importance. We talk about health span. What are those modifiable variables that adversely affect our health span? It all is very much intertwined with this sense of negativity.

I‘ll tell you my definition of resilience based on my work and what’s most critical to me. This all relates to what I was going to say. What are the modifiable variables that are maladaptive that do relate to this negativity bias? One of them is stress. We talk about evolution. The acute stress response is a fascinating array of hormonal and other changes that occur very quickly. We’re primed for them to begin to be generative. They include the secretion of epinephrine, which is also called adrenaline, and another hormone called cortisol. Most people are at least somewhat familiar with that.

There are lots of other hormonal changes and other physiologic changes associated with the acute stress response. This evolved activation of the sympathetic nervous system, fight or flee. We can go back to that 150,000 years BCE. It was an adaptive response that helped us flee from a predator or stay and fight a foe or perhaps a predator. It’s no longer adaptive.

The reason that we have the acute stress response is because, from an evolutionary standpoint, it’s ingrained into our physiology, but in general, it’s no longer adaptive. It’s typically triggered by thoughts rather than actual threats. I’m walking down the hall and my boss wants to meet with me. I’m feeling like my heart rate is going up a little bit. Maybe I’m a little sweaty. Maybe I’m a little bit jittery. It’s triggered by thoughts. It’s not adaptive. These are not responses that are necessarily beneficial.

We get flooded with emotion and adrenaline. It’s the acute stress response when we’re in a disagreement with our spouse, a friend, an acquaintance, a colleague, or what have you. It’s not adaptive for us to be flooded with adrenaline and cortisol at those moments. The fact is it’s okay to have this acute stress response. Here’s where resilience comes into play. Resilience is the ability to neutralize the acute stress response when we recognize that it is not adaptive. That’s my definition of resilience, which has many different manifestations.

 

Will you repeat that? I love for people to sit with this and read this. We’ll lean into this a little more afterward too.

Sure. Resilience is the ability to neutralize the acute stress response when it is understood to be maladaptive or not adaptive. We have this flooding of adrenaline, cortisol, and many other changes. We’re like, “I don’t need this right now. I’m not running away from a predator. Let me take a few deep breaths and do what I need to do. Let me embody resilience and have these adverse changes neutralized and come back down to baseline so that they don’t become chronic.” If we don’t have the resilience to neutralize the acute stress response, that manifestation of stress becomes chronic.

Chronic stress is at the core of aging, stress, and inflammation. This is my understanding and my thesis. If we’re not resilient, we’re going to suffer from chronic stress. That promotes cardiovascular disease, neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s, metabolic syndrome, obesity, Type 2 diabetes, and even cancer because our immune system is suppressed when we have chronic stress. This is one of those modifiable variables that we mention. This is something we can do something about if we have the I in GAIN or Intention. I’d love to hear about what you call resilience. Resilience has many different manifestations in different environments. I’m speaking about physiologic resilience.

We’re simpatico. I am speaking on behalf of a larger population of folks that we’ve researched. They say that resilience is bouncing back how you endure stress, or how you endure hardship, and any number of other things. That endurance and grit, and no offense to the folks that have written and talked about grit whether on a TED stage, in Angela Duckworth’s case, or in her book, Grit, is valuable and an aspect. The problem is people think that the answer to the stress in their lives or other challenges is to be more gritty or to grind somehow so that they can work their way through it that way.

In many professions, including nursing and anything to do with healthcare, what we saw through the pandemic is that it’s clearly not the case. We saw it across every industry that we’ve ever been involved in. That methodology, which might have worked in the past and I don’t even know that it worked in the past, frankly, is upside down. You cannot grit your way through those things. You cannot run a marathon that has no end.

For us, resilience is about recovery. What you described was beautiful that when something is non-adaptive, it isn’t going to help you in the moment or in the future. In that instance, if that response isn’t adaptive and isn’t going to help you, then it has to be neutralized. The way you neutralize it is through recovery practice, through that breath, through that twenty-minute walk, putting your legs up the wall in the middle of the afternoon instead of grabbing another cup of coffee, or focusing on getting a truly beneficial night’s rest or hydration from the start.

You say you start the day by saying, “I’m thankful for my kidneys. I’m also dehydrated because I sweat all night.” You bring up inflammation. Inflammation often is the result of dehydration as well as other things. I’m asking a doctor. Is that BS that I said that we can often feel that there’s inflammation in our bodies because we are dehydrated?

Sure. It is certainly a stress to our body to be dehydrated. Is there an inflammatory response to dehydration? There may be, but it is a stressor to our body. It’s not a healthful condition but it’s one that, hopefully, we can remedy quickly. I think of resilience in a very physiologic sense, but what you said is true. You’re not going to be resilient by toughing it out.

We talked about physical well-being, sleep exercise, and nutrition. Sleep has been hugely underrated. Believe me. I’ve had a lot of nights of disrupted or absent sleep. The idea that you can make up for it on the weekends or the greediest approach that we’ll sleep when we die or we’ll sleep when we’re dead is completely untrue. If you want to have a healthy, long life, you have to have a plan with regard to your sleep and your sleep hygiene. That’s one example of exactly what you said. You’re not going to tough it out by depriving yourself of sleep night after night and expecting to be healthy.

If you want to have a healthy long life, you’ve got to have a plan with regard to your sleep. Share on X

The I in GAIN is Intention. It becomes even a question in conversation of, “What is your true intention? Do you have the intention of sleeping well tonight? If so, what would you do to prepare for that?” As you and I are recording this, the Olympics in Paris are going to be starting. Sometimes, I’ll ask people, “If you were to have an Olympic event tomorrow, what would you be doing? Would you be drinking tonight? Would you be drinking a couple of cocktails this evening? How would you be thinking and preparing for sleep? Mentally, emotionally, physically, and spiritually speaking, what would you be doing?

For many people, getting up in the morning to take care of the kids or take care of their work is not an Olympic event. It may not be a direct fit. It becomes that question of intention. It is like, “Do you intend to sleep well? Frankly, what would you do to prepare for sleep?” We don’t know. You studied long ago to be a doctor and probably started that journey to become a physician in high school or maybe earlier than that.

Even with someone who is so on point in terms of what you wanted to do, I assume in your career, were you being taught at that point or even at various other points in your professional training the value of sleep or how to monitor sleep? Many doctors that I know, even the younger ones that are friends of our kids, don’t sleep very much. People in healthcare don’t sleep much. It’s an interesting dichotomy there, isn’t it?

The components of physical well-being were not stressed. It’s almost quite the contrary. With sleep, exercise, and nutrition, I had the intention of studying at least one of those, which was nutrition because nutritional science is my undergraduate major. I agree with you. These are things that we’ve largely ignored.

It’s a great example of what you were highlighting, which was, “We’ll deal with this with grit.” That’s certainly what we thought in medicine. It was like, “This is a tough field. You’re going to have sleepless nights. You got to be tough. You have to have grit. You got to have resilience.” The definition of resilience was to power through it. Nothing could be further from the truth. That’s not resilience. That’s craziness. I couldn’t agree with you more.

Do you monitor your sleep?

I have. I don’t do it. I tried some of the apps and devices. I decided in the end that they don’t do that much for me. I do monitor my glucose continuously from time to time to see if I have one of these Libre. There is no conflict of interest. I’m not receiving any funds or even free sensors, but continuous glucose monitoring and seeing how our sleep affects that, what is our sugar first thing in the morning and so on, there’s a lot of benefits to that.

I tried these apps and so on. I didn’t think they were completely reliable or informative in that they were going to change anything I was doing. I can usually tell when I’ve slept well or not. I always have the intention of sleeping well. I try to practice good sleep hygiene with good nutrition. There are going to be times when you have transgressions and you don’t necessarily do everything according to the principles of good sleep hygiene, but I certainly have that intention well-integrated into my lifestyle. I think about sleep hygiene on a daily basis.

I do as well. I’ll rattle off a couple of things. Press back if you object or think that this is BS. Working on your circadian and ultradian clocks at the start of the day. If I can get out and see the sun early in the morning and take 5 or 10 minutes looking at the direct sunlight as well as at the end of the day to be out at dusk and see the sunset preferably if possible, these are good things to set the rhythms of the body to get your body attuned to when we should be going back to bed, right?

Absolutely.

That’s the first one. Back to hydration, for example, I was reading this and I thought it was interesting. I have a partner in bed who runs hot at night. One of the things that I was reading was that when we hydrate our bodies, back to what hydration can do, we are cooler at night. If we’re dehydrated, then we might be hotter at night. It might even exacerbate the heat at night. Is that true or false, do you think?

That’s true because when our blood volume is a little bit low, the blood vessels in non-essential organs, including our skin, tend to constrict to divert blood flow to our brain, our heart itself, and vital organs. When your skin blood vessels constrict, you’re not able to lose heat through your skin readily. You can see your skin may look a little pale and a little vasoconstricted. Since high blood flow to the skin is a great way to dissipate heat from the body, when you’re dehydrated and you’re a little vasoconstricted, you’re much less able to get rid of that heat, so your body temperature can go up.

In this section of our show, we’ll put brackets around it for better sleep or something. If there’s anything that I wish for people, I wish a bunch of things, but better sleep is one of those things. We’re different people when we’re sleeping well, when we eat well, when we move our bodies, and when we have people to talk to.

There are a few things that help us to be able to deal with the world as complicated as it is. One of those things for me is legs up to the wall practice, which is a gentle inversion for those who like yoga and whatnot. I will do that in the middle of the afternoon as a way to recapture energy as opposed to coffee in twenty minutes with that lying on the ground with my legs, up the wall with my tush to the baseboard kind of thing. My wife and I will do it in bed before sleep for ten or so minutes, listening maybe to one of those Non-Sleep Deep Rests or NSDR scripts, meditation, or music. That works.

I still like to drink. I’m not going to give up the occasional alcohol. I know that if I need and want to sleep well that night, and let’s say I’ve got something going on early the next morning that I want to be at my best for, I realize that it’s not so much being hungover. I don’t drink that much anyway. It’s the fact that my heart rate elevated from exercise, drinking, or a number of other things where your heart rate goes up.

I will not feel rested in the morning if my heart rate does not get to its low point somewhere in the middle of my sleep. That, for me, is usually in the 48, 49, or 50 range in the middle of the sleep, and then I wake up feeling rested. If what happens is it takes almost the entire night for my heart to go from 70 to 60 down to that resting number and I don’t hit the low until 5:00 AM or 6:00 AM, I wake up feeling groggy. I’m not hungover, but not ready to rock the day or whatever. From your perspective, does that make sense?

The better documented adverse effect of alcohol and sleep is that alcohol interacts with the same receptor that we target in anesthesia primarily. That’s the GABA receptor. GABA stands for Gamma-AminoButyric Acid. When that receptor is occupied by an alcohol and ethanol molecule, it helps us be unconscious but it disrupts our sleep.

If I were to look at your EEG after you’ve had 2 beers or what have you relatively proximate to the time you went to sleep, even 4 hours or so within your bedtime, I would notice that your EEG or your brainwave patterns are not consistent with physiologic sleep. We go through these four stages of sleep. Those are not passive. There’s a lot going on in the brain when we’re asleep. There’s removal of a lot of junk from our brain, like these proteins that we’ve heard about which are these amyloid and tau proteins that tend to accumulate in people with repetitive head injury like football players and are quite overly represented in patients with neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s. When we’re sleeping, our brain is getting rid of those. There are a lot of other constructive things.

When that GABA receptor is activated with alcohol, a Valium-like drug, or even diphenhydramine, which is Benadryl, which is in a lot of over-the-counter sleep drugs and is also a GABA agonist, our brainwaves and ability to have fully restorative sleep are altered. I’m not sure about the heart rate if that’s an association or if there’s anything causative about your heart rate not getting as low as it might in your sleep. It may be a co-variable that the alcohol is activating the GABA receptor. That may be interfering with your heart rate, achieving its minimum level, but it’s interfering with restorative sleep.

Caffeine is another thing. You talk about putting your legs up against the wall. Anything you do that prevents you from having that cup of coffee in the afternoon is doing you a favor. I ran a lab where we did pharmacology research. Caffeine has a long half-life of five hours. This affected my intention to have good sleep hygiene. I ended up stopping my afternoon cup of coffee from being enjoyed.

That cup of coffee you have at 1:00 may result in a peak concentration in your bloodstream at 1:45 or 2:00. That’s like having half a cup of coffee at 6:00, five hours later, and like having a quarter of a cup of coffee at 11:00 in the evening. If you’re sensitive to caffeine like I am, that would disrupt my sleep or prevent me from falling asleep and staying asleep. I stopped having coffee after my 8:00 or 9:00 cup in the morning. It used to be 6:00. It then became 8:00. These are all elements that if we’re going to have intention toward healthier, restorative sleep, which is essential and is why I put it as first in the sleep, exercise, and nutrition trifecta, we have to consider all of these elements. I applaud you for doing so.

The good news here for everybody is that our bodies are different. Our physiology is different. You’re more sensitive to caffeine. My father-in-law used to be able to sleep like a baby, and he’d have a cup of coffee at 10:00 at night.

It’s a bell-shaped curve, we say.

The news that’s fit to print here is that if we’re intentional about it and we are looking at finding those answers, then we will likely find the answers that are right for us about how to get better sleep. With Non-judgment, let’s talk about what that looks like. What would you say the most important aspect of Non-judgment is outside of what many people have heard through their spiritual practices, their religion, or what comes up for them when they hear the phrase non-judgment?

There’s a difference between discerning and judging. Judgment is placing a value on something. With our negativity bias, we tend to attach negative values, to others, to the world, and most harshly, to ourselves. When we judge somebody or something, we are not seeing things as they truly are. We’re coloring them with our own set of biases, and they tend to be rather negative. This is especially true when we judge ourselves.

 

Dropping the judgment is seeing things in a rather neutral way but in a little bit of a beneficent way as well. It is a certain kind of indifference, but we might call it beneficent indifference. We have to work at doing that. We have to have a plan to do that because our brains are wired not only to discern but to judge. Our brains are wired to do so in a negative manner. It leads to unhappiness. When we consider somebody bad, it makes us feel a little bit bad. It doesn’t give us a hit of dopamine. It probably gives us a little hit of adrenaline or something that is not necessarily adaptive. It takes practice to learn to not have this knee-jerk reaction to judge and to drop judgment.

In the GAIN meditation which we can do in as little as three minutes, when we practice deep, deliberate breathing, we activate our parasympathetic nervous system through the vagus nerve, and then we do a self-guided tour of Gratitude, Acceptance, and Intention. When we get to Non-judgment, 1 image and 1 method I like to teach and practice is to visualize an image of the Earth as apparently suspended in space, one of these beautiful NASA images.

I’m putting you on the spot here, but could we do the three-minute meditation for people who are ready but are not driving a vehicle at this moment?

Sure. If we have three minutes, I’d be happy to.

Let’s do that. Why not?

Let’s get in our chairs and sit comfortably. I’m going to close my eyes. We first want to focus on the breath. A slow, deep inhalation through the nose, maybe to a count of three. Feel the chest and abdomen expand slowly into a count of three. Pause and hold this expansion for a count of 3, and then slowly and deliberately let the breath go without effort to a count of 4. Inhale into a count of three, pause to a count of 3, and then exhale slowly and deliberately to a count of 4.

Non-Judgment In Practice

If each count is 1 second, our respiratory cycle is 3 plus 3 plus 4 is 10 seconds. Our respiratory rate or breathing rate is six breaths per minute, which is nice, slow, and healthy. It’s activating our vagus nerve, the main conduit of our parasympathetic nervous system. This is slowing our heart rate and lowering our blood pressure and our blood sugar. We’ll do this for a couple of breaths slowly and pausing very slowly out.

We contemplate that for which we’re grateful. I’m so grateful to have this opportunity to connect with you. I’m so grateful for my loving community here, my family, my friends, and my dogs. I’m so grateful for my health and my relative wealth. I have food on the table and a roof over my head unlike some others who are less fortunate in the world. I’m grateful for this day. It beats the alternative. I’m so grateful to be alive, to see the sun, and to experience the warmth. I link this to my slow, deliberate breath.

We move to the A in GAIN, which is Acceptance. I can’t help but think and feel an unpleasant or even painful thought and experience. I bring this thought and this experience closer. I imagine opening my chest and bringing this experience into my heart. I am opening my heart and bringing this experience into my heart as I breathe deeply and slowly. I’m going to nurture this feeling with my heart. I welcome it in. I abide in it and with it as I breathe deeply and slowly. I hold this uncomfortable experience until I can ask myself the question, “Can I live with this pain forever?” The answer is yes.

As I slowly and deeply breathe, I transition to the I in GAIN, which is Intention. My intention is to be present. Our brains are wired to be very distracted with the past and the future. Happiness lives in the present moment. All we want is happiness, nearly eight billion of us. As we breathe slowly and intentionally into our stomachs and our chests, feeling the expansion and the magic of the airflow, think about the intention of being present, the sensation of the chair against our bodies, the tingling of the soles of our feet, and the sound of an airplane going by in the distance. Even for 5 or 10 seconds, hold this present set of experiences or these sensations to be true as we slowly and deeply breathe. Abide in the present moment.

Happiness lives in the present moment. Share on X

I also notice my intention to be kind, generous, loving, and present. As I slowly, deeply, and deliberately breathe into my chest and my stomach, we get to the N in GAIN, which is Non-judgment. I picture an image of the Earth suspended in space, one of these lovely NASA images. I notice that the Earth is a beautiful planet, but it’s just a planet. It does not have the qualities of goodness or badness. It is neither good nor bad. It’s the planet that it is.

It’s only logical for me to understand that I, too, am a human being. I’m just the person that I am. I’m not good. I’m not bad. I don’t hold the qualities of goodness or badness. I’m a human being. I simply am the way. I am neither good nor bad. I link this understanding to my breath, slow and deep. I am simply the human that I am. I am neither good nor bad. I am simply that I am.

We breathe this I amness in, hold it, and let it go. Focus on the breath a couple of more times, and then we slowly open our eyes. That may have been 4 to 5 minutes, but it doesn’t take long. As a daily practice, what happens is that we do that in the morning. When we’re not living in accordance with these very simple principles or when we’re being ungrateful or we’re judging, a light bulb goes off. We can have a little laugh to ourselves and redirect our thoughts. What we’re doing is rewiring our brains.

Even after a few days, we notice a difference. We notice that we identify when we’re being judgmental. We do our GAIN meditation and have a cup of coffee. We’re driving to work and somebody cuts us off on the road. We start to form all these judgments. A light bulb goes off and we have a little laugh to ourselves. We get a little bit of dopamine instead of that extra adrenaline. That is a person driving. I’m driving. Neither of us is good or bad. We are the people that we are. It is very simple.

That’s beautiful. I’m speaking for everybody when I say I got so much out of that. It is to take that moment in the day, and it doesn’t have to be at the start of the day. It’s great at the start of the day. In fact, to me, it’s the optimal way to begin the day. Yet, you can do it at any point in the day. We’re doing it here. That was beautiful.

Motivation Behind The Book

I feel like there’s a theme that runs through this conversation. The subtitle of your book, GAIN Without Pain is The Happiness Handbook for Health Care Professionals, but I can’t help but say that the process and what you’ve shared about GAIN is for everybody in every walk of life and every pursuit that they’re up to. I have to ask you. You wrote this probably because you had firsthand knowledge of what a difficult job it is to be a healthcare professional and wanted to support that community of people. Is there any more to it than that in terms of directing this content you share with us to that audience of people?

No. I became very interested in burnout in medicine. I’ve had a long practice of Advaita or non-duality. I wanted to combine everything I felt and knew to be true in a way that might help others mitigate burnout. My publisher thought it’s better to be a bigger fish in a smaller pond, so make it to a specific audience, but here I am, talking to you four years later. Most of the readership is not necessarily in the healthcare field.

I wanted to let folks know that because if they want to buy the book and they think somehow this is more directed to healthcare, we do a lot of work on the crisis of burnout. That exists in the healthcare profession as well, and yet this is so universal. In many respects, the price of liberty is vigilance. How do you consciously construct your day? If you were the conscious creator of your own life experience for the day, what would it look like? What would you be thinking about? How would you set yourself up for success?

My wife and I have 4 kids, 2 big dogs, gerbils, goldfish, and lots of other things. I know what it’s like to live in a busy home with a lot on our plates and a lot to do. There’s a lot around us. There’s always a lot of energy around us in the world. You can still set yourself up for success in your life by attending to these things and by being vigilant about the thoughts that you entertained from the start or from that very first one when you’re awake in the morning and throughout the day.

Creating A Healthy Life

There is so much value in what you’ve shared. I know our folks would want it. I would like it. You don’t have to say anything, but I’d love there to be a part two because there’s so much more we can even get into. As we land this plane, I’d love to give you that opportunity if you’re going to share something other than what you’ve shared to this point for folks in terms of how they’re creating a healthier and happier life for themselves going forward. If that means to the age of 100 or it’s to some other age, what would that advice or counsel be to them?

Try to embody and embrace the principles of GAIN. Understand that our brains are wired to be negative and it’s not your dirty little secret. We’re all in this together. We’re very much alike. Try to incorporate the three domains of learning something every day, being in community with others every day, and trying to do something good for someone else in a situation where you don’t expect to be paid back service. Learn, commune, and serve. We’ll all be better off.

I’ll add to that for myself that the whole of life is a process of letting go. We’re not always focused on it, but if we give it a second thought, we realize that that’s truthful. It is for us to be able to let go of things more easily, especially the things that we get agitated about and the things that we obsess about that create that cortisol response that’s coursing through our veins continuously, it seems.

This is going back to your definition of resilience, to be more conscious about how we neutralize the acute stress response when that response is non-adaptive. This is really important. When something is not keeping you safe from getting eaten or whatever might be a threat to you, to be able to find moments where you can neutralize and recover, it’s restorative. I don’t know how else to put it.

In the world we all inhabit, the problems don’t go away and the stress doesn’t go away. I don’t know how you can get rid of the stress. Somebody has to tell me how to do that. When we understand how to recover adequately, then we’re able to have the energy to outperform the problems and find the solutions. In that more empowered state, stress does not impact us in the same way. You’re nodding your head, so I get a sense you agree with that.

I have so enjoyed this conversation. I know our folks have. The last thing to the community, if you’ve got questions, and I would imagine you may, please go to the site. Go to AdamMarkel.com/Podcast and leave your question or comment for Dr. Hammer there. It will not be a bot, I promise. There’ll be no bots responding to your questions or your comments.

If you know somebody who would benefit from reading this, share it. It’s helpful to us when you help the algorithm to put this content in front of other people. Thank you. I selfishly acknowledge that that’s to our benefit, but I also believe this show is, in many ways, an act of service. With people like Greg, it’s clear that good information is vital, life-changing, and transformative. Share it with somebody. Pass it on if you’re inclined to do so. Thank you. What a pleasure.

My pleasure.

‐‐‐

I could speak to Greg or Dr. Hammer for hours. We had to put a stop in there. When we ended our recording, he was sure to tell me that he’d love to come back and have at it again for part two. There’s so much. You could honestly feel how committed to service Dr. Hammer is not just with his time, but how generous he is in his thinking. I could feel he was thinking through the things that we were discussing and pivoting along the way with me. We enjoyed that conversation and gained from the experience. That’s how we know that it is valuable to others because we’re universally connected in that way.

GAIN, in particular, which is Gratitude, Acceptance, Intension, and Non-judgment, is a system for happiness not just for healthcare professionals, even though that’s the book that he wrote. It’s universally true that we all benefit from how we approach the day from the level of intentionality or vigilance that we have. Our liberty is tied to that vigilance in so many respects. I loved what we talked about. I know that this is a valuable conversation for others. Please, if you do know somebody who would benefit, whether it’s a colleague, a family member, or a friend, we’d love it if you’d share this episode with them.

We talked about sleep. We got into that at a pretty decent depth. We talked through Dr. Hammer’s process. This is fundamentally when we’re thinking about living longer lives, it is having a health span as opposed to a lifespan. There is so much in his definition of resilience and how it is that we learn to neutralize acute stress response when it is non-adaptive. In other words, it does not help us to evolve and grow.

Ultimately, Darwin’s theory, which I agree with, is that our species thrives as a result of adaptiveness. Our ability to adapt to a changing environment has been our superpower for thousands of years. It is not about grit exclusively. It is not about our capacity to simply suck it up or grind and ignore what our bodies or our minds would otherwise be telling us.

When we do ignore those things, as we’ve seen that happen, the effect of that and what is exacerbated are the symptoms of anxiety, depression, and other physical issues that people deal with because of that exacerbated, non-adaptive acute stress. We can do something about that. We can become more aware and therefore change our experience of living or our experience of the world so that we can live longer and be healthy at the same time. I certainly wouldn’t want to live longer if my brain health wasn’t there or if my physical health was lacking.

One of the things that I’ll reiterate that Greg shared with us was, in particular, three things he would suggest would lead to that longer, healthier life. One is to be continuously growing and learning. To also curate our relationships and the communities that we spend time in is the second one. Thirdly, to seek out fresh opportunities for service on a regular basis, if not each and every day. I know that that is what I focus on in my days at the very start of the day. I have to come back to that as often as I can and remind myself of that as frequently as possible that the opportunity for service is with us all the time and it is truly what makes life so valuable and so worth living as well.

Grow and learn. Seek to build relationships. If you’re not in a community and you don’t have the best relationships or the ones that you truly want and deserve, then that’s something that you can work on. Find those opportunities to serve in some capacity to be giving of yourself to others. There are endless ways in which to do that. Those three things are a very simple recipe, if you will, for that healthspan.

I know I got so much out of this conversation. I am so looking forward to part two with Greg Hammer. I am looking forward to your thoughts and your comments as well. You can go to AdamMarkel.com/Podcast to leave that comment or question. If you could rate this show on the platform that you are consuming it, we would appreciate that because it helps the algorithm. It helps this particular content reach more people. A five-star rating will do that, but whatever is true for you is the feedback that we’re looking for in any event.

 I also want to shout out something else that I don’t typically say. In our business, WorkWell, which is a workplace consultancy to create happier and healthier places to work, we focus on well-being in the workplace. Often, we are deploying our strategies in organizations of all kinds. Many times, they are healthcare-related organizations, but it’s every kind of industry you could think of that we are working to make healthier.

We are always looking for great talent. Dr. Hammer is a great example of the kind of talent that is on our team. Meaning, we have a number of folks who are semi-retired or have retired from their three-decade-long career as an executive within a prolific organization, etc. and they still want to serve. They have the heart for service but they understand how healthful it is to remain of value and service in your life going forward.

 We have a lot of people that after that corporate career or that career in service in government or other areas in nonprofits, because we have a great diversity of faculty on our team of contributors to WorkWell, they still want to teach and share. They may want to teach for the very first time, mentor others, create a curriculum, and be involved in the execution of that solution on behalf of a corporate client or a client of any kind.

It is a shout-out. It is an RFP that if you are interested because you are either at retirement or nearing retirement and wish to be of service by teaching, mentoring, and being involved in the execution of a learning and development project or organizational development, interested in change, or the topic of resilience is something that you lean into and would love to be involved in by helping organizations and their employees be more resilient to be healthier mentally, emotionally, physically, and even spiritually speaking, then reach out to us. You can also leave a comment there or you can email us at Team@AdamMarkel.com. Let us know that you may have an appetite for a conversation around that and we will set something up with a team member. It might even end up being myself. Please let us know.

It felt good to know that the next iteration of the evolution of his mind and the wisdom that he has gained through so many years of service is that he is doing these other things to continue to add value to the world. Dr. Hammer and I have already had a conversation about him joining our WorkWell team as well. If that is intriguing to you, please reach out and let us know. I want to say thank you so very much for being a part of our community. This community has continued to grow. It’s because of you and folks like you that that is the case. It is a beautiful thing. I feel really grateful and blessed to be a part of it myself and for the honor and the privilege to serve in this way. Ciao for now, everyone.

 

Important Links

• Greg Hammer
• GAIN Without Pain: The Happiness Handbook for Health Care Professional
• YouTube – Adam Markel
• Adam Markel Podcasts
• Adam Markel’s Email
• Grit

 

About Dr. Greg Hammer

Greg Hammer, MD is a recently retired professor at Stanford University School of Medicine, pediatric intensive care physician, pediatric anesthesiologist, wellness and mindfulness lecturer, and the author of GAIN without Pain: The Happiness Handbook for Health Care Professionals. He has published widely on topics related to pharmacology and perioperative care of children undergoing cardiac and thoracic procedures as well as organ transplantation. Dr. Hammer is a health enthusiast and meditator, utilizing a non-duality and mindfulness-based approach, including the GAIN method.