Gratitude is more than just saying “thank you”; it’s a powerful emotion that can significantly enhance our well-being and relationships. Cultivating gratitude can help us focus on the positive aspects of our lives, no matter how small, fostering a greater sense of contentment and happiness. And which one of us isn’t in need of that?
It’s a practice that’s been linked to numerous benefits, from improved mental health, stronger relationships, and even physical health improvements like better sleep and reduced stress.
One man who knows more than most about this practice is Dr. Greg Hammer, a recently retired professor at Stanford University School of Medicine, pediatric intensive care physician, and mindfulness expert. His best selling book “GAIN Without Pain” introduced readers to a four-step method to promote happiness and mental strength.
He sat down with us recently for a fascinating chat, talking us through his GAIN system, techniques to combat the Winter blues, how all our brains are hard wired for negativity and much more.
The MALESTROM: Maybe we could open with your definition of gratitude?
Dr Greg Hammer: Gratitude is the acknowledgement of the positive elements and gifts in our lives. It’s well known in psychology science that we have a negativity bias. So, we tend to remember and embrace the negative and forget the positive. I think we have to remind ourselves consciously, we have to have a plan to remember all of the positive things in our lives for which we have to be thankful.
The MALESTROM: You’ve mentioned before that we’re all primarily wired for negativity. That’s our jumping off point essentially?
Dr Greg Hammer: That’s our default. And really, I think our brains are wired that way for survival. So we’ve really evolved to be prepared for danger, to be wary, to anticipate and deal with threats in our environment.
150, 000 years ago, that was adaptive, because there could in fact be a saber-tooth tiger lurking outside the mouth of our cave. So, we evolved that way, this sort of genetic or epigenetic property of being wary, negative, catastrophising, allowed us to live longer, have more offspring.
So these genes and epigenes sort of propagated in the population and here we are stuck with those attributes if you will. In fact, we don’t have physical threat in our environment very often. most of us don’t anyway, but these acute stress responses that evolved to deal with danger are actually triggered by our thoughts primarily, which is maladaptive.
The MALESTROM: And your particular method you developed, the GAIN system, maybe just introduce that for people who don’t know about it?
Dr Greg Hammer: Again, the premise is that we’re wired for survival, not happiness. And that includes a negativity bias. It includes very distracted brains. In other words if we close our eyes and try to just take in what’s happening physically and otherwise. In the present moment, our minds will quickly wander to the future and the list of things we have to do later, or something we said or did yesterday.
We have a hard time being present. Negativity bias distracts from the present moment, which is really where happiness lives in the present moment. The good news is our brains have this quality called neuroplasticity. So if we have a plan, we can actually begin to rewire our brains. And that’s what the GAIN practice is meant to do, it’s a mindfulness meditation practice.
We start with the breath, just activating slow, deep, deliberate breathing. For example, in through our nose for a count of three. Pausing to a count of three, exhaling slowly to a count of four. That kind of breathing pattern, we’re actually breathing like six times a minute if each of those counts is one.
Second, it activates our vagus nerve, our parasympathetic nervous system, and that counteracts the sympathetic side of our autonomic nervous system or the acute stress response. Just that slow, deep, deliberate breathing brings us a sense of calm and our heart rate and blood pressure are coming down. Ten we just do a self guided tour of the GAIN elements starting with gratitude.
Gratitude
The first one, again, we often forget of all the bounties we have. We focus on the negative. I use one example often in conversation that we wake up in the morning and maybe we tweaked a little something the day before in the garden or playing golf or tennis or what have you. Our knee is sore, right?
So we wake up, we have a little bit of soreness in our knee and we focus on that. It’s this sort of negative feeling and we focus on it. And as we’re getting out of bed, this thought process begets this thought process of negativity. We focus on the soreness that we’re having. We think why me?
In fact, we can rewire our brain to be grateful for all of the things that are working so beautifully with our body. Here we were asleep all night. Our kidneys were filtering the toxins out of our blood, sending them down to our bladder. Our bladder, for the most part, is kind enough to store them so we don’t have to wake up and pee every five minutes.
It’s just one little aspect of our physiology that was working beautifully, but we don’t think of that. So the fact is when we wake up in the morning and we start to feel like why me and complain about something relatively minor, we can reroute our thought process towards something positive.
That starts with gratitude and gratitude is really intrinsic to happiness. I think our empiric experience shows us this. We can imagine somebody who’s poor and happy or physically challenged and happy, but we can’t really even imagine somebody who’s ungrateful and happy. So in this mindfulness practice, we do our breathing and we come back to our breathing during the practice, but we focus on that for which we’re grateful.
We might think of three things that we’re grateful for and link this to our breathing. We transitioned to the A in GAIN, which is acceptance.
Acceptance
These four gain elements are all very interwoven, but we get to acceptance and we actually think of something unpleasant or even painful. And we visualise as we’re taking these slow, deep breaths, bringing this pain into our person, like opening our chest, opening our heart, actually bringing it into our heart and sitting with it as we breathe deeply and relax into this uncomfortable thought or experience until we can ask ourself the question, can I live with this pain forever?
And the answer is yes. So we accept it. We link it to the breath. We focus again on the breath as we transition to the I in GAIN, which is intention.
Intention
Again, we have this default mode of thinking if we want to be happier and rewire our brains to be more positive and present, we need to have a plan, we need to have intention.
We first may start to train our brains to be more present. And as we’re breathing slowly and deeply, just focus on our current experience, like the pressure of the chair against our body. Maybe the sound of an airplane or a car going by, the temperature of the air, the sensation of air going through our nose as we take a breath.
At first we might be able to have these thoughts for five seconds before our brain starts going to the future or past. Tomorrow or next week, maybe 10 seconds. It’s eventually longer. So, we just sit in the present moment as we breathe, and then we return our focus to the breath and then to the N in GAIN, which is non judgment.
Non Judgement
I think there are tools that many people find useful. We might picture an image of the earth apparently suspended in space. And remind ourselves as we focus also on our breath that the earth is a lovely planet, but it really doesn’t possess the qualities of goodness or badness.
It’s neither good nor bad. It’s just a planet that it is. It simply is. And it’s only logical then for me to think that I too am just a human being. I’m not good. I’m not bad. I simply am the person that I am. And we sit with this I am ness as we take these slow, deep, deliberate breaths. And then we just return our focus to the breath and then slowly open our eyes and we’re ready to go out in the world.
I think the magic of this rewiring practice is that when we start to be ungrateful, we start to whine and focus on that ache or pain or whatever. A light bulb will go off. We’ll recall that we did this practice this morning and remember to be grateful and just go back to maybe three good things for which we’re grateful.
Or if we’re being resisting of discomfort, where something’s bothering us, we’re trying not to think about it. It’s another person that’s bothering us. We depersonalise them. These are ways of resisting and a light bulb goes off and we’re just reminded to go to that deep, slow breath and just accept this.
It just is what it is. If it’s something we can’t change that we don’t like, learn to accept it. And the same thing with the intention and non judgment.
The MALESTROM: So, essentially, like going to the gym and training your muscles, this is something we can train ourselves?
Dr Greg Hammer: Yeah. Exactly.
The MALESTROM: Is this something that’s meant to be a daily practice would you say?
Dr Greg Hammer: Yes. I mean, it’s designed to be a daily practice. You may not do it every day, but ideally you get up in the morning, you open the blinds, you do your morning hygiene and find a comfortable place to sit and make a commitment to do this for three minutes. Set your intention the night before by setting your alarm three minutes earlier than you would have otherwise. I mean, who can’t do that?
Go to bed three minutes earlier and really commit to this because what happens, as you can imagine, you’re linking these new ways of thinking also to slow, deep, deliberate breaths. And when you’re feeling stressed, say you’re driving, somebody cuts you off, or you’re getting in a heated discussion with somebody, you can learn to recognise that you’re developing this acute stress response. And you can neutralise it by just going to your breath.
When you go to that in to a count of three, pausing to a count of three, out to a count of four breathing, then these elements of gratitude, acceptance, intention, non judgment, which are linked to this breathing, they come back to you. So it’s okay to have the acute stress response, as long as you can neutralise the physiological changes when they are not adaptive.
If you have an acute stress response because your toddler fell into the swimming pool, go ahead and let that adaptive response help you jump in the pool and rescue your child. But when you recognise your heart rate’s going up, you’re getting flooded with adrenaline and emotion and it’s just because you’re having a disagreement with somebody, or because you’re being aggravated when you’re driving, have that light bulb moment and realise that this is not adaptive and therefore go to your breath, go to these elements, bring your adrenaline back down to baseline, bring your cortisol back down to baseline, bring your blood sugar back down to baseline.
The MALESTROM: Is this something that becomes more automatic over time? It’s a big paradigm shift for many. But I suppose what you’re talking about is just being very aware of the situations you’re in, realising what’s going on and maybe that they’re not the big stressful situations they may feel like at the time …
Yeah, exactly. I think once we realise that we can have a little laugh at ourselves for getting so worked up about something so minor in the scheme of things. And when we laugh at ourselves, we get a little dopamine hit instead of an adrenaline hit. So yes, it’s exactly right.
The MALESTROM: Obviously the holidays are upon us. They can be stressful times. Do you have any tips around looking after ourselves in the upcoming weeks?
Dr Greg Hammer: I think the first thing to realise is that we are all wired this way. We all have this negativity bias. This is not our dirty little secret. I think that fact alone helps us drop the self judgment, which is really the most difficult form of judgment to let go of. We’re very harshly judgmental of ourselves. So as we enter the holidays, first of all, realise all of us have this negativity bias.
All of us tend to have this acute stress response, so just go easy on yourself. I think especially through the holidays, many people have the expectation of all this good stuff happening, and it often doesn’t work out that way. Or we get in a disagreement with somebody over politics at the Christmas dinner table. Just be prepared for that.
Be prepared and focus on your awareness each moment and be prepared to let go of the stress response, neutralise the stress response through this deep breathing and the GAIN practice. I think it’s a great time, especially with, New Year’s and so on, it’s a great time to really double down on on your commitment to this kind of wellness.
The MALESTROM: I wanted to touch on winter itself, because obviously with it often comes the winter blues. Is it the same sort of thing that you would recommend for this time of year, trying to make us rethink situations?
Dr Greg Hammer: Absolutely. And I think the winter blues is a multifactorial one. Some of it is actually just directly physiologic. For example, the importance of light. When I moved to California from Chicago area, I realised the light here is so much brighter. The sky, even on a clear day in Chicago is a little bit gray. In California it’s really brilliant.
Light has a big effect on our physiology. We know that blue light for example, the shorter wavelength end of the visible light spectrum is activating. That’s why it’s a bad idea to expose yourself to blue light before you go to sleep. And I don’t think these blue light blocking glasses are that helpful, but that’s one reason that screens tend to arouse us and keep us from falling asleep quickly.
So that’s blue light. There’s a lot of information about the opposite end of the visible light spectrum. The red light, longer wavelength spectrum has healing properties. It actually helps our skin heal. It has positive effects on our eyes and maybe even our deeper tissues that activate our mitochondria.
So light is really important and natural light has the whole spectrum. Yet in the winter, we tend to get a lot less light exposure for obvious reasons. My recommendation for the winter blues is in part, get exposed to as much light as you can. You can get artificial lighting, but get outside as much as you can.
The second issue beside light is just being outside, which I think is so vital. It’s sort of a Buddhist, non-dual thought, that suffering comes from the sense of being a separate self. Being this isolated little egoic creature that appears to be born, exists and then dies. And this is a source of suffering.
When we’re outside within nature we tend to lose that. When you’re taking a walk in the forest and you have the majesty of the trees and the light filtering down from the canopy above and the softness of the forest floor, we lose the sense of separation.
When I’m in the forest, in nature, I often think, if I died right now, I’d be okay. Just put my remains out here somewhere because you feel connected. I think light exposure, ideally natural light, but artificial light if need be, is so important. So take the opportunity to go outside a few times a day, even if it’s cold and overcast and it looks kind of foreboding.
I think those are two physical things about the winter blues that we can control. And then sleep, exercise and nutrition are also vital to our physical wellbeing. In the winter, we tend not to get enough exercise. So that’s part of being outside, going for a brisk walk, sort of as a cure all.
You get light, you get exposure to nature and you get some exercise. Exercise promotes sleep. Lack of exercise contributes to poor sleep. Again, sleep, exercise, nutrition, so related.
Then also in the winter, I think a lot of times our dietary habits slide. Especially the holidays, there’s lots of candy and baked goods and so called fatty and sugary comfort foods.
I think these are all things to consider, get light exposure, get outside in nature. Remember to get exercise every day, focus on good nutrition, focus on good sleep hygiene. Because I think all of these things, when they’re sort of off the rails, tend to promote furtherance of being off the rails and you can bring them back into harmony and balance.
Back to the I in GAIN. Again, it’s having the intention to focus on sleep hygiene, exercise, nutrition, get outside, get light exposure, be in nature, and then do your GAIN practice. I think that’s the remedy for the winter blues.
The MALESTROM: You mentioned blue light blockers before. These aren’t something you would recommend?
Dr Greg Hammer: They might help a little bit, but they don’t fully neutralise the effect of blue light. As you know it’s a bell shaped curve. Some people can drink a cup of coffee before they go to bed and sleep perfectly fine. But like me, you need to be mindful that caffeine has a six hour half life and that an afternoon cup of coffee is like having a half a cup of coffee at dinner and a quarter cup of coffee before you go to bed. Some people tolerate blue light, some people don’t.
The MALESTROM: At the moment, we’re suffering from a mental health epidemic worldwide. How can gratitude, in terms of changing people’s attitude and becoming happier and less depressed, help stem that problem?
Dr Greg Hammer: Again, I go back to the core issue, which is our negativity bias. We’re going to have a new president in the United States. At least half of us are not terribly happy about it. And we tend to focus on that. So when we get together with other people, we get into arguments about politics and all this stuff.
Then, when we’re just thinking about it on our own, we tend to get negative and depressed. When we’re feeling ungrateful and those are manifestations of the lack of gratitude, if you will, a light bulb goes off. Remember to be grateful. Think of the democracy that we have. Think of all of the wonderful things about our political system compared to other countries in the world.
Show me a better one. I mean, we have the president that we’re about to have because more than half the people voted for him. That’s democracy. So let’s be grateful for the ability to speak freely, to congregate with other people that we may not agree with, to register our complaints, to vote, to have a democratic system. Instead of focusing on the negative outcome, maybe of the election, if that’s your disposition, let’s just bring the focus back toward gratitude. And that goes pretty much across the board.
The MALESTROM: We always sort of like to finish off by asking for a few words of wisdom. You’ve already dropped a lot, but is there anything that comes to mind?
Dr Greg Hammer: I might go back to the idea of our negativity bias and the fact that we are all wired this way. I think just realising that takes some of the pressure and self judgment off our shoulders. We are all the same. We are all made of the same stuff. Call it consciousness, God, love, whatever. And our brains are all wired alike. We’re much more alike than different.
So when we’re feeling depressed and isolated, especially in the holidays and winter time. Just remember that we’re all in this together. We’re all wired the same way. This is not our own individual weakness, our own dirty little secret. And so let’s give ourselves a break.
Check out Dr Hammer’s website: greghammermd.com
Buy Dr Hammer’s book ‘Gain without Pain’ HERE
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