RHR: Finding Joy and Peace in the Midst of Challenging Circumstances, with Dr. Greg Hammer

In this episode, we discuss:

• Our current environment of heightened stress and polarization
• How to understand and cultivate resilience
• Choosing between resistance or acceptance
• How to navigate pain and suffering
• The importance of intention and present moment awareness
• How to practice non-judgment and discernment

Show notes:

• Dr. Hammer’s website
• GAIN Without Pain: The Happiness Handbook for Health Care Professionals by Dr. Greg Hammer
• Learn more about the Adapt Naturals Core Plus bundle or take our quiz to see which individual products best suit your needs
• If you’d like to ask a question for Chris to answer in a future episode, submit it here
• Follow Chris on Twitter/X, Instagram, or Facebook

Hey everyone, Chris Kresser here. Welcome to another episode of Revolution Health Radio. I think it’s fair to say we’re living in pretty stressful times, between the recent pandemic, the political discord, the growing polarization and divisiveness, multiple wars happening around the world, and our increasing exposure to all of it through social media and the 24/7 digital culture that we live in. We see rates of anxiety and depression skyrocketing and people just feeling like they’re overwhelmed.

So, I’m really excited to welcome Dr. Greg Hammer as my guest. Dr. Hammer is a recently retired professor at Stanford University School of Medicine, a pediatric intensive care physician, [and a] pediatric anesthesiologist. [And] more relevant to the conversation that we’re going to be having today, [he’s] a wellness and mindfulness lecturer and the author of Gain Without Pain, The Happiness Handbook For Healthcare Professionals. Now, this conversation we’re having is not unique to healthcare professionals; that’s just the context [which] Dr. Hammer has mostly applied his wellness and mindfulness work in. But we are going to talk about tools and approaches that everybody can use to find joy and peace in the midst of a really challenging set of circumstances. We’ll talk about how to overcome divisive thinking and polarization, how to build resilience, how to deal with uncertainty, the importance of cultivating non-judgmental awareness, the importance of acceptance and the difference between acceptance and approval and submission, the role that gratitude plays, and many other important topics that are really crucial now than ever.

I enjoyed this conversation [and] I think you’re going to get a lot out of it. So, without further delay, let’s dive in.

Chris Kresser:  Dr. Greg Hammer, welcome to the show.

Greg Hammer:  Great to be with you.

Chris Kresser:  So, times are challenging right now. It feels like [we’re] living in a pressure cooker, with the election coming up and the increasing polarization and level of hostility, and media and social media, and even in families and friends being torn apart by all the recent events. I know several people in my family and my friend network are expressing that they feel like they’re kind of in a vice, and the vice is tightening more and more all the time. So this conversation is timely, and this is something I know you write and think a lot about. Let’s start with how we can work with this increasing divisiveness and polarization that has really come to characterize the media and digital media environment that we live in.

The Current Environment of Stress and Polarization

Greg Hammer:  Great question. First of all, I believe that the past five years or so have been perhaps more stressful than any other five-year period, within my lifetime at least. The causes are well known to all of us. [One is] the COVID pandemic, which is still going on, actually, but the repercussions [of it]. I’m finishing a book on mindfulness for teenagers, and our teens are still suffering from the effects of COVID. Not just physically, although they do have a percentage of those who are infected with the virus [that] do have long COVID, just like adults, but [more so] emotionally [and] psychologically, because of the important developmental period in their lives that was changed so dramatically by the pandemic, where they were trying to learn remotely and were deprived of all the important social interactions that trigger their healthy social development, etc. But I think we’re all still functioning in the shadow of COVID. And in fact, there’s still a lot of virus around. It keeps mutating. I know that I had COVID about two months ago for the first time [and] was pretty sick for a couple [of] weeks, and I’m still not back to normal. So that’s a stress for everyone. I think many people lost loved ones under horrible circumstances during the peak of the COVID pandemic– people who were beloved, who were in their hospital rooms, isolated by themselves, etc. So that’s one source of ongoing stress. Then, of course, [there are] the wars going on around the world, which seem to always be going on, but I think more recently the wars in Israel and Gaza, north of Israel, and also in Ukraine have certainly not only been sources of great stress but [also] polarization. Particularly, the Israel-Palestinian conflict is a huge source of polarization [between] people in the United States.

Then we have all of the continuous bad news about global warming and extremes of heat, which has caused suffering for so many people around the world. Here in Northern California, where I live, we’ve been relatively spared, but we had temperatures over 100 degrees for many days in a row recently, which is very unusual. So I think the pandemic, political [and] military strife around the world, [and] eco-anxiety, among other things, have created a tremendous amount of stress, and that’s our baseline. I think those stressors have [put] us in a [situation] where many of us are kind of close to the edge of the cliff even before we start incorporating the political divide. I think that’s the point of departure.

Chris Kresser:  Right, and inflation, rising food prices, rising gas prices, [and] people just generally feeling like they have the same jobs, perhaps, but the money’s not going as far as it used to. They’re not able to make ends meet, and that triggers a very primal reaction for most of us because those are just basic survival needs– the ability to feed ourselves and our family and to make a living.

Greg Hammer:  Absolutely, I couldn’t agree more. And that dovetails with the political divide because the reasons for current inflation, how grocery prices have become so significantly increased, [and] other issues related to our pocketbooks are the source of great polarization amongst us. I think one political party or the other gets blamed for things that are really outside of their control, and so one side is defending and the other one is attacking. So, yeah, I think that we’re all stressed out. I think what you mentioned is a significant contributor. Then you get into the political divide. And I think we could talk about some of the reasons why the added stress of the political divide is magnified in our current 24/7/365 media news cycle. I think that, unfortunately, bad news sells more than good news. So we’re bombarded constantly with all of the bad news about issues related to the pandemic, issues related to wars elsewhere, though those are truly horrific, finances, global warming, and other aspects of politics. [They] are kind of pitched to us in very polarized and negative ways. You sort of pick your cable news station and you get a point of view that comports with what you want to hear. And that’s a very dangerous situation, where artificial intelligence [is] driving a lot of what gets pushed to individuals in the media [and] is reinforcing our own set of beliefs. You have more and more polarization, where each side is having its own point of view supported by the media to which they choose to be exposed. So, yes, I think these are all really important factors, and I’m glad we’re having this conversation because it’s really important to identify the drivers of our current situation of stress. I think we’ve named a handful of very significant drivers, but until we really identify those, we can’t embrace a strategy to ameliorate or improve the situation.

Understanding and Cultivating Resilience

Chris Kresser:  Absolutely. We’ve talked on this show quite a bit about the role of digital technologies and algorithms on Meta and other platforms and how they have optimized for engagement in a way that has exacerbated the political divide and pushed people further and further to the polarities. I think it is important to identify all these sources of stress, and of course, many people who are listening are probably nodding their heads and saying, “Yeah, I’m aware of why I’m stressed out. How do I deal with this?” So, I want to start by talking about resilience. First, [by] defining it [and] how you think about resilience, and then we can talk a little bit about how to cultivate resilience. Because the reality for most of us [is that while] we have some control over some of these stressors, as an individual [I have] a limited impact on climate change, I have a limited impact on the wars in the Middle East, [and] I have a limited impact on gas prices and food prices. The reality is that those things are not in my control to change. What I do have some influence over is how I respond, and this is where resilience comes in.

Greg Hammer:  Beautifully put. There’s a formula in my first book, GAIN Without Pain, that is suffering equals pain times resistance. So, the pain is there. The pain is knowing about these innocent people being killed, people starving, people in poverty, people who are sick with COVID [and] long COVID, etc. Those are examples of the pain. The suffering is a matter of the magnitude of our suffering from that pain, or from those painful stimuli, if you will. [It] depends on how we manage our own physiology and mental and physical well-being. And that is the resistance. Do we resist, or do we accept? So, just kind of taking a step back, my approach to dealing with stress is to have a mindfulness practice, and [the one] which I embrace and practice and teach is called the GAIN practice. GAIN is in capital letters, an acronym for what I think are the four essential domains of stress reduction and happiness– gratitude, acceptance, intention, and non-judgment. So, with your permission, I can sort of walk through how those apply to the topic in question, which might be the political divide, in the context of all these other stressors.

The G in GAIN is gratitude. The next time we find that we’re getting wound up because we’re observing somebody expressing political points of view with which we disagree, or we’re talking to a friend or Uncle Joe at the dinner table and we’re hearing views that we object to, and we’re starting to get a stress response– that is, we can sense that the adrenaline in our body is increasing. We can’t sense some of the other changes associated with acute stress, like the increase in cortisol, for example. But the net of those changes, generally, unless it’s adaptive because we’re running away from a predator or deciding to fight, those physiologic changes associated with stress are maladaptive because they evolved to help us flee from a predator or stay and fight, the so-called fight-or-flight response. But nowadays, stress is triggered mainly by our thoughts. We’re not faced with an actual threat. We think about something that the other political party is espousing, and that elicits the stress response. So when we’re having that stress response elicited in the context of a political discussion or being exposed to some media related to politics, the first thing that I would recommend is [to] go to your breathing. Make sure you’re taking slow, deep, deliberate breaths because that activates our parasympathetic nervous system and counteracts some of this fight-or-flight response.

Think about that for which we’re grateful. We have a highly functioning political system. We tend to, according to our negativity bias, get overly wrapped up in all the negative aspects of our politics. But compared to other countries in the world, we’re fortunate, and can be appreciative that we have a functioning democracy. People’s vote counts, and we have elected officials. We have the opportunity to express our views freely, as long as we’re not being violent about it. Let’s be grateful for all of the attributes of our political system and the idea that we can even engage in this political discourse. So, starting with the breath, and then maybe going to our gratitude. Let’s not forget about all of the positive things for which we have to be grateful. And we can go through the other elements in GAIN if you’d like.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, I think that’d be helpful. I mean, I definitely want to talk a little bit more about gratitude in general as we go through the podcast and some of the other elements of the acronym, but I think it’d be an instructive way of seeing how to apply it to a particular situation to just continue for now.

Greg Hammer:  Yeah, well, the A in GAIN pertains to what you said a minute ago, which is that there’s little that you can do about many of these things. It pains you to be made excruciatingly aware of deaths in Gaza, for example, and in northern Israel, let’s say, but there’s not much you can do about it. So here’s where the A in GAIN, or acceptance, is so critical to minimizing our suffering in response to that pain. Acceptance is really, like gratitude, I think, embedded in all religious and philosophic traditions.​​ The Serenity Prayer, for example, which is, of course, one of the core values of Christianity, teaches us that we will hopefully be able to discern between things we can change and things that we cannot change and have the wisdom and ability to learn to accept those things that cause us pain that we cannot change. So we have to decide, “Okay, do I want to engage in a protest related to what’s happening in the Middle East? Or donate money to the cause in Ukraine, or what have you? Or is this really something that is beyond my scope and my energy and resources are better spent elsewhere?” Once we make the decision through our discerning that [it] is something that we can’t change, or the net is better if we attend elsewhere, then we can work on acceptance. And we do that through, I think, a practice. We have to be intentional about accepting because our natural response to pain is to resist. We exacerbate our own suffering as our sort of default mode of thinking and being, just as our default mode of thinking and being is to be rather negative. There’s a lot of psychology and social science that tells us that we have a negativity bias. We tend to embrace the negative and push away or forget the positive. This is our default mode. So if we’re going to think and be in ways other than this negative, resisting default mode, we have to have a plan. We have to have a purposeful approach.

First, we identify the issues, as we’ve been discussing. Identify the drivers, and then purposefully take aim at these and learn to rewire our brains in the way of favorable responses. So, with regard to these painful issues we can’t do anything about, acceptance is a practice. I can tell you that in the GAIN meditation, which can be done in three or four minutes, preferably in the morning after we get up, open the blinds, and do our morning hygiene, we find a comfortable place to sit. We first focus on our breath, slowly inhaling through our nose, maybe to a count of three, pausing to a count of three, and then slowly exhaling to a count of four, breathing into our belly, expanding our body, pausing, and then slowly exhaling. And that, again, will begin to calm us down, lower our heart rate and blood pressure and blood sugar, and activate our parasympathetic nervous system. Then, we go through a self-guided tour of the GAIN elements, beginning with that for which we’re grateful. We identify things for which we are grateful, such as our democracy. That can be a component of our morning GAIN meditation today or tomorrow.

And then acceptance. So, with regard to acceptance, a tool that I like to use and teach is, again with our eyes closed, focus on the slow, deliberate breathing, [and] imagine something painful. The loss of a loved one. I lost my son eight years ago, at the age of 29. That pain is not going away. But through this practice, with my eyes closed, sitting comfortably, slowly, deeply, deliberately breathing, I imagine bringing that pain closer and closer, opening my chest, opening my heart, actually bringing the pain into my heart and residing with it, abiding there, and actually nurturing it and fully accepting it, until I ask myself the question, “Can I live with this pain forever?” At some point, the answer will be yes. So we’ve linked this to our slow, deep breathing, and this is part of our GAIN practice. Notably, the exercise in learning acceptance, [and] learning to be more adept at [and] more automatic at accepting painful thoughts and experiences that we cannot change.

Chris Kresser:  Wonderful. I’d like to linger here for a little bit on this topic because I’ve found that it’s ripe for confusion sometimes. Even just the word acceptance itself is pretty loaded and subject to different interpretations, so I like to differentiate between acceptance and submission. Sometimes, when I have this conversation with people about acceptance, the response is, “I can’t possibly accept what’s happening in Gaza,” for example. “In the Middle East, I can’t accept that people are dying In these wars. Why should I accept that’s happening?” And, of course, acceptance is just the recognition that it is happening in this moment. It’s not a stamp of approval. It’s not agreeing to never try to do anything about it, to make any changes, [or] to be active in making that change. But I think it can be tricky. I’m curious how you think about that and talk about that with folks. In my experience, that can be an obstacle– that gap in understanding can be an obstacle for people when we talk about acceptance.

Resistance or Acceptance

Greg Hammer:  I think you nailed it, actually. You have to go through that thought process and take a logical approach to it. Let’s just go downstream with this notion of, “I cannot accept this.” What does that actually mean? I cannot accept what’s happening in the Middle East, notably in Israel and the Palestinian lands. Okay, I can’t accept that. So what are my alternatives? My alternatives are either, just simplifying and taking a logical approach, [that] I can try to do something about it, or since I can’t really do anything about it, if that is my conclusion, I’m just going to resist this whole process. The opposite of acceptance in this context is resistance. If we want to be mathematical, acceptance equals one over resistance, or is proportional to one over resistance, so suffering equals pain times resistance becomes suffering equals pain divided by acceptance. If the acceptance is big in the denominator, then suffering is reduced.

So what are my options? My options are to actually get up and do something about it– maybe I can march, maybe I can try to donate money to whichever cause I think appropriate. But absent the ability to do something about it, my only other option is to resist, to agonize over it, to get into arguments about it, [and] to magnify my suffering because I just don’t accept it. So there you go. What I’m doing as an alternative to acting toward a solution is simply magnifying my own suffering. That’s really the end point of this process of, “I cannot accept it.” I can’t do anything about it, and I can’t accept it, so what I’m actually doing is just magnifying my own suffering. I think you really have to look at it in that way. It’s a very simple but logical approach. And I think one has to be circumspect about how we engage with others in presenting that point of view. But I think that’s basically the bottom line here.

Chris Kresser:  Right. And it’s worth pointing out [that], in that situation, resisting and not accepting didn’t do anything to change the situation itself. All it did was add more suffering. Namely, your own suffering, and possibly [the] suffering of others, if you’re externalizing [and] projecting that resistance outward in the form of unpleasant or hostile attacks against other people who don’t share your views. Which, of course, we do see happening all the time, every day, all day long, on all of the social media platforms and other forums as well.

Greg Hammer:  Oh, you’re absolutely right. I think basically what we’re talking about, in part, is our negativity bias. We often choose to be negative. Given the choice of being negative or being pragmatic, we often choose the negative option that leads to an increase in our suffering. The reason that I can’t accept what’s happening in the Middle East is because I love people, and it’s a hugely painful experience that people are suffering [and] people are being killed, etc. It’s because I love my brothers and sisters on the planet that this is so painful to me. So am I going to get into arguments with myself and manifest resistance and get into arguments with other people, some of whom I love especially, and alienate them because I’m so vehement in my opinions? All I’m doing is magnifying the suffering, as you said, and creating a negative situation and actually decreasing my ability to express my love for my friends and family and decreasing their ability to express it to me because I’m not receiving it, because I’m resisting their points of view if they’re different than mine.

So you get into this whole realm of negativity, and that’s a choice. We’re not going to only focus on gratitude and pretend that everything is a bowl of cherries, because it’s not. That’s why the second letter in the acronym is acceptance. We have to acknowledge that there’s pain in the world, that there’s loss, that there’s uncertainty, that there’s insecurity, that there’s all the other things that contribute to our pain, and we’re going to actually take that on. We’re going to have a plan to be able to cope with the pain in life. It’s intrinsic to life itself.

Navigating Pain and Suffering

Chris Kresser:  Let’s talk about that a little more, because something else you said earlier when you were talking about acceptance is related to that, which is [that] when we accept, we open to the pain. I think it’s often the case that when we resist, it’s because we don’t want to feel the feelings that will inevitably come when we accept whatever it is that we’re faced with. And I think that fear is a basic human response, because we’re afraid of being so overwhelmed by the enormity of the pain, especially like with the death of a loved one [or] somebody very close to us or something that’s deeply meaningful to us. We fear that if we accept and open to that pain, then we’ll never come out of it. So there’s that wall and the resistance that goes up.

So before we move on to intention, maybe we can talk a little bit about practicing with pain and how to navigate that, when it feels like the pain can be potentially overwhelming or shattering.

Greg Hammer:  Sure, I think that’s really such a key and important point. I’ll tell you a little bit about my own story as it pertains to that. When I was a university student, I was very interested in astronomy, but I also got very interested in nutritional science and human biology. [I] decided to go to medical school, and as a medical student we do these rotations through all the different specialties. I found that when I was on my pediatrics rotation, I felt more kinship to the other people practicing medicine, nursing, respiratory therapy, etc, in the pediatric domain. They sort of didn’t take themselves too seriously. They didn’t have [as] much ego as I found in some of the adult medicine areas [and] in surgery. So I decided to go into pediatrics, which I did. When I was a pediatric resident, I did my first rotation in the intensive care unit and I loved it. And I realized that I was not going to be having an office practice, seeing 20, 30 patients a day. I wanted to really take care of the sickest of the sick. At that time, anesthesiology and critical care and pediatrics were a good combination. And still are, but less commonly now. So I decided to do a residency in anesthesiology and then fellowships in pediatric anesthesiology and intensive care. And again, this is something I was passionate about. I loved the specialties, and I knew I would be taking care of a lot of very critically ill infants and children, many of whom would die in my care.  I knew I would be dealing with a lot of death and dying. And somebody told me, “Don’t get too close to your patients, because when they have a bad outcome, when they die, your heart will be broken.” And that just did not resonate with me. I want to be close to my patients and their families. That, to me, is part of the joy of being a provider in this area. So I realized [that] if I’m going to be able to cope with death and dying in my patients and the repercussions in their family, I better really think about this and open my heart to it, and dwell in that domain of death and dying, come to an understanding about our mortality, including my own in the process, and learn to really be accepting. And it was a process. There is no destination. I don’t fully accept or reside happily in the knowledge of my own death or the death of others that I care about. But I’ve certainly made a lot of progress, and that’s through an intentional practice of bringing the pain in, [and] really learning how to open my heart to the pain. I found that, progressively, during my career, I’m able to sit with these families. Sometimes they have all the medical science information they need, and the thing that I can do for them the most is just to be fully present with them. Fully mindful, if you will. Being fully aware of the present moment as part of mindfulness, and [listening] to them without having a response formulated, without having an agenda of what I want to tell them, but just at some point, at some stage in this process of taking care of a family with a child who’s in the process of dying or very, very critically ill, listening, residing, [and] abiding. And that involves opening my heart to the pain [and] being fully exposed.

I’ve found that this is one of the most rewarding components of my practice over the last 35 years, and I’m so grateful for the fact that I had the opportunity to serve in this way, and that I had the wherewithal to really embark on this journey. So that’s an example of what you just importantly pointed out– that it’s not something that’s our default mode, to be able to sit in that room and be mindful and listen and be able to stay in the room. It’s uncomfortable. It’s a potentially very uncomfortable situation where I have really nothing more to offer other than my own presence and listening. That can be a very uncomfortable situation, but if we take an approach of acceptance, it can also be a very rewarding circumstance.

Chris Kresser:  Absolutely. Yeah, thank you for sharing that.

Feeling overwhelmed by today’s challenges? Tune in to Chris and Dr. Greg Hammer as they discuss the GAIN practice for finding peace and joy in turbulent times. Learn practical tools for resilience and mindfulness in this episode of Revolution Health Radio. #Wellness #Mindfulness #Chriskresser

Chris Kresser:  So let’s talk about intention, the next letter in the acronym. And you’re welcome to relate that to the political climate we’ve been talking about, or just how it shows up overall in this process of building resilience, dealing with uncertainty, and finding some joy and peace in the midst of incredible suffering and difficulty.

Intention and Present Moment Awareness

Greg Hammer:  Our default way of being, as I think we’ve discussed a little bit, is to be rather negative and also to be very distracted. It’s very hard for us to dwell in the present moment. I love Dr. Jon Kabat Zinn’s definition of mindfulness, which could be, I think, [the] definition of happiness. Which is all that about 8 billion of us want, is to be happy. And that definition was being aware of the present moment on purpose, non-judgmentally. So there are the GAIN elements of purpose, or intention, and the N in GAIN being non-judgment, which we can get to. But the reason that he said being aware of the present moment is because that’s where happiness lives. Yes, we can have happy memories thinking of the past, and yes, it’s adaptive also sometimes to think about the future [and] to plan happy times. But I think for most of us, if not all of us, the most profound times of happiness are when we are fully present. I’m walking through the forest, I’m appreciating the footfall on the soft forest floor covered with pine needles, I’m smelling that pine, I’m enjoying the oxygen-enriched environment produced by all of the plant life and I’m seeing the sunlight filtering through the canopy 100 feet above, and I’m just totally present, and I’m happy and I’m at peace. And I often feel under those circumstances, “If I die right now, I’m okay with it. Just bury me out here, or cast my ashes out here, because I’m present and I’m happy.”

I think we get that same thing from listening to a beautiful piece of music. We’re sort of fully present. Or making love with a partner. There’s moments of really being purely present and feeling blissful. Happiness is in the present, yet our brain’s default mode is to be very distracted. If we close our eyes and just try to pay attention to what’s going on right now, whether it’s the pressure of the chair against our body, or the tingling on the soles of our feet, or hearing a car or an airplane go by in the distance, our minds will very quickly start focusing on what we have to do when we’re done doing this, or perhaps tomorrow, or the list of things that we have to get home to do, or our brains will go to something we said or didn’t say yesterday that we’re embarrassed about. It’s very hard for us to stay present, but that’s where happiness lives for the most part.

If we want to be present and if we want to be more positive and pragmatic, it’s not our default mode. That means we have to do something other than just sink into our default mode, and that means we have to have a plan. As you and I have discussed, we have to identify what the drivers are of our current state of unhappiness, and then we have to have a plan as to what to do about it. And here’s where the I in intention really comes into focus. I think that the first thing we can do is rewire our brains. Fortunately, our brains, though we’re wired to be negative and distracted, also are wired to have this wonderful quality called neuroplasticity. We can actually change the way we think. So how do we do that? We’re here in our GAIN meditation, we’re breathing slowly and deeply, we’ve slowed our heart rate and lowered our blood pressure, we’ve gone through a tour of that for which we’re grateful, something painful that we’re learning to accept. We get to the I, while we’re breathing slowly and deeply and deliberately, [and] focus on our present experience. At first, maybe we can only be there for five seconds. The pressure of the chair against our body, the tingling of the soles of our feet, the sound of a bird or a dog barking next door or a car going by in the distance. Let’s just breathe in and abide in that present experience. Maybe it’s five seconds today, maybe it’s 10 seconds next week, maybe it’s 30 seconds a month from now. That’s part of our intention, to learn to be more present. When we identify with that lightbulb moment, [where] we’re agonizing over something that hasn’t happened yet, we’re thinking about tomorrow, and with our negativity bias we’re thinking about something negative tomorrow, we’re catastrophizing, we’re generating a lot of fear and anxiety, a lightbulb goes off and we use these tools to bring ourselves back into our present experience and drop the anxiety about what hasn’t even happened yet.

We’re exercising our brains. We’re rewiring our brains to be more present, and that is through this intentional practice. Then we may transition to thoughts of, “What are my other intentions?” To be more generous, more loving, more kind, more patient, more grateful, more accepting, more non-judgmental. Again, we’re linking this to the slow, deep breathing during this phase of what can be a very brief practice.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, so important, and increasingly difficult in the modern world that we live in, where [many of us are] connected to screens throughout much of the day. These companies who manufacture these technologies are incentivized to reap as much of our attention as they can, because that’s the medium that they sell advertising against. We’re the product, as Tristan Harris pointed out in The Social Dilemma. If you just go with the flow these days, then your attention will, by definition, be scattered. Let’s say you have 40, 50 apps on your phone and they all have notifications and you haven’t turned any of those notifications off. Just the notifications of those apps all day long, beeping and flashing, are going to be enough to distract you completely from whatever is happening in the present moment. So I love the I in intention, because the only way now to have moments of solitude and moments of present moment awareness is intention. If you don’t have that intention, you will not just stumble upon that, unless there’s an [electromagnetic pulse] (EMP) or, like, the cell networks are down and all of a sudden, none of those devices work. I think intention is powerful there.

We do, for example, a multi-day river rafting trip with our family every summer. And one of the reasons we like to do that is because nothing works. None of the digital devices work, and you are completely off the grid with other people who are also off the grid. It’s one of the few environments I know of where you can do that and just have a week of time with nobody on a screen, nobody checking their email, nobody responding to text messages, etc. For me, it’s really important just to recognize that we are in a battle for our own attention, and there are forces that are trying actively to secure our attention. So we all have to be very intentional about our attention, and very, I would say even, guarded about where we spend our attention, because it’s our most precious resource. If we don’t have our attention, there’s no hope of us dwelling in the present moment.

Greg Hammer:  Absolutely. Our life is really just a series of present moments, and we will miss our own life if we are constantly attending to the future and the past. And, again, I consider what is adaptive and what is maladaptive. It’s adaptive to reflect on happy times, [to] think of the past in that regard, or to learn from our mistakes. Sometimes we do have to identify mistakes that we’ve made that caused us pain and caused us suffering and we have to learn how to accept those. It’s adaptive, with regard to the future, to plan to put bread on the table and plan events with friends and family. But beyond that, our default mode is to ruminate over the past, to overthink the past, and overthink the future. And when you blend that with our negativity bias, overthinking the past results in depression, shame, regret, [and] imposter syndrome. With regard to overthinking the future and our negativity bias, we generate a lot of fear and anxiety.

So you’re absolutely right with regard to all the forces that [tend] to knock us off being aware of the present moment [and] sort of knock us off that perch, if you will. But the good news is [that] we can actually do something about [it]. It’s not fundamentally that difficult to limit our screen time [and] limit our social media exposure. It’s simple. Now that [you’ve gone] on this river trip repeatedly, you’ve got it down. You just turn things off and go. It’s not that hard, really, but it’s not our default mode. Our default mode is to kind of get sucked into this. And I think our default mode is to allow ourselves to be distracted to a significant degree because then we don’t have to think about some of the pain in our lives and some of the fear, anxiety, and depression that we suffer from. The bottom line is [that] it’s not that complicated. It’s not that difficult. We just have to decide [that] it’s important, make a plan, [and] focus our intention.

Chris Kresser:  Absolutely. Intention can go a long way. And practice, as well. You mentioned neuroplasticity. Neurons that fire together, wire together, right? The downside of that is [that] if we’re accustomed to a very distracted frame of mind, [then] those circuits have been reinforced. The positive side of that, as you pointed out, is that [it’s] not permanent. There’s nothing inherently permanent about that. We can train our minds to be more focused and less distractible. And I think this is where acceptance and compassion come in as well toward ourselves. If you have been in a situation, in a place of a lot of distraction and lack of attention, it’s not going to be an overnight process to reverse that. So, just extending compassion to yourself in that process of change and transformation is probably going to help you along the way, rather than a lot of self judgment.

Which is a good segue into the N, which is non-judgment. [It’s] kind of required in some way, if you think about it, for all of the other letters. All of the letters kind of interact, it seems to me, in really important, meaningful, and myriad ways. [And] non-judgmental awareness is kind of the ground of all of it.

Greg Hammer:  I think you’re right. I’ve thought a lot about this. The GAIN elements are very closely interrelated. You can’t really talk about one without talking about the other ones. What you said about using our intention to be more accepting, more grateful, more non-judgmental, again, they’re all interrelated. And I just want to amplify that we are all wired this way. This is the way our brains are wired. This evolution of the way our brains are wired happened over hundreds of thousands of years. So, yes, we’re not going to change the way our brains are wired overnight. But the good news is [that] through relatively simple practice, if we have enough intention, we can begin to rewire our brains so that we are more at peace and happier starting today. We’re not going to totally flip things 180 [degrees], but we can begin to right the ship and begin to point ourselves in the right direction. It’s not that complicated.

So, yes, the N in GAIN is as crucial as the other three elements. Our brains are not only wired to be negative, they’re wired to be very judgmental. We’re always assessing the world around us, other people, and ourselves. Unfortunately, with our negativity bias, these assessments or judgments tend to be negative. We tend to be negative about the way we look at the world, the way we judge other people, and then most harshly, ourselves. We are certainly our own [harshest] critics, and there’s a lot of psychology science [and] social science to support that. So it’s really imperative that we embrace tools to learn how to drop the judging. And the good news is [that] we have that capability.

Non-Judgment and Discernment

Chris Kresser:  In this [current] environment that we’re living in, judgment is maybe amplified. Certainly more than I’ve ever seen it in my lifetime. The increasing divisiveness and polarization and dehumanizing of the other side, I would say, is something that has reached new levels in my lifetime. I remember growing up, my parents had lots of friends who differed politically from them, but they could get together and play volleyball at the beach or hang out together, and they were great friends, and they still had a good time together These days, it seems like that’s increasingly less likely. So I wonder about people who might [confuse] the difference between judgment and discernment. We talked a little bit about the trap of confusing acceptance with approval or acceptance with submission. I think sometimes when we talk about non-judgment, that can be confused with a state of just having no opinions, having no discernment, no ability to identify right or wrong, or make informed choices, or things like that. How do you think about non-judgment in this context?

Greg Hammer:  Great question. It’s important to underscore the difference between discernment and judgment. I’ll give you an example that might highlight the difference. I have two friends, John and Mary. John is very pragmatic, forward-looking, [and] optimistic. He’s kind of like me, and I really enjoy John’s company. Mary is somebody that I’ve known since I was a child. I’m close to Mary. I value her friendship, but she’s kind of a downer. She tends to complain. She tends to be a bit ungrateful and resisting and judgmental of others. So, I have an hour to have a cup of coffee with one of my friends. I’m considering either getting together with John or getting together with Mary, and I’m going to choose John. I’m going to discern that hour is going to be better spent, in my view, getting together with a guy after which I’m going to be uplifted and it’s going to be a really deep connection. It’s going to be great. With Mary, on the other hand, I’ll probably end up being a little neutral, or maybe even a little bit down from our time together.  I’m discerning that I’d rather spend the time with John, but I don’t have to judge either person. It doesn’t mean that John is good and Mary is bad. They are both human beings. They are both, like me, simply the person that they are. They are neither good nor bad.

I would introduce the concept of benevolent indifference. I feel benevolent toward both of them, but in some way indifferent as to their goodness or badness. This is, I think, a model for how to approach one’s view. When we judge, we are employing our own set of biases and we’re really looking at the world and others in ourselves as sort of tinted glasses, if you will. If we just look at the way things are, there is no judgment necessary or appropriate.

So, back to the GAIN meditation. We’ve really sunken into this slow, deep, deliberate breathing. We’ve gone through that for which we’re grateful. We’ve brought a painful thought or experience into our heart and reinforced the idea of living with it [and] accepting it. We have underscored our intention to be focused on the present moment, and also to be kinder, gentler, [and] more loving, generous human beings. All [of] this is linked to our deep breathing. We get to the N in non-judgment and there are some tools that we can use to rewire our brains, or begin to do so, [and] to let go of judgment. One might be [to] picture an image of the Earth, suspended in space. One of these gorgeous NASA images. So, as we’re breathing slowly, deeply, deliberately, we’re imagining, with our eyes closed, this image of the earth, and it’s a lovely planet, but it’s neither good nor bad. The Earth doesn’t possess qualities of goodness or badness. And this seems fairly clear to us as we take these slow, deep, deliberate breaths. We sort of sit and abide with this idea that the Earth is lovely, but neither good nor bad. And it occurs to us then that we too are just human beings, just as the Earth is the Earth. I’m a human being. I’m neither good nor bad. I don’t inherently possess qualities of goodness or badness. I’m just the person that I am. And we link this to our slow, deep breathing. I simply am the person I am. I’m neither good nor bad.

We reside in this awareness for 30 seconds while we’re breathing in this way, and then we return our focus just to our breath, and then we slowly open our eyes and we’ve completed this three to five-minute practice. Iit leaves us with this sense that, yes, I don’t have to judge things. I can discern, I can decide how I want to spend my time, but I don’t have to convey this property of goodness, badness, too big, too small, etc. I can just observe things the way they are, and eventually we can learn to view ourselves in the same way. And that, really, is so key to happiness.

Chris Kresser:  Absolutely. [I] couldn’t agree more, and that’s a good note to wrap up on. Dr. Hammer, thank you so much for coming on the show. Where can people learn more about your work and check out your book?

Greg Hammer:  My website is GregHammerMD.com. There’s a lot of media and other information [on] there, [as well as] a link to the book, Gain Without Pain. It’s been a great pleasure being with you, and I’m grateful to you and your listeners.

Chris Kresser:  Likewise. And thanks, listeners, for tuning in. Keep sending your questions to ChrisKresser.com/podcastquestion.