The Stress Nanny with Lindsay Miller
Mindfulness and stress management for families raising kids with big goals, big feelings, and everything in between.
Hosted by mindfulness coach Lindsay Miller, The Stress Nanny is full of practical strategies for calming anxious kids, supporting high-achievers, and teaching emotional regulation in everyday moments. Each episode offers easy-to-use mindfulness practices, stress management tips, and confidence-building tools that empower kids (and parents!) to navigate challenges with ease. Whether you’re raising a child who struggles with big feelings, a high-performing student-athlete, or simply want a calmer home, The Stress Nanny will give you the resources and encouragement you need.
The Stress Nanny with Lindsay Miller
Ep 184 Three Minutes to Calm: The Morning Practice That Changes Everything
Ever wondered why stress seems hardwired into our daily experience? Stanford professor and pediatric intensive care physician Dr. Greg Hammer returns to The Stress Nanny podcast to unpack this question and share his revolutionary GAIN method for stress reduction.
Dr. Hammer explains that our brains evolved with a negativity bias that once served our ancestors well but now interferes with our happiness. This tendency to remember negative experiences and overthink both past and future creates physiological stress responses—elevated adrenaline and cortisol, increased heart rate and blood pressure—that cascade into sleep disturbances, fatigue, poor dietary choices, and a self-perpetuating cycle of stress.
For today's children, especially teenagers, the burden is particularly severe. They're navigating unprecedented challenges—social media pressures, climate anxiety, school shooting concerns—while still developing the resilience skills needed to cope. As Dr. Hammer poignantly observes, they're "drinking from a fire hose" of stressors without the years of coping mechanisms adults have developed.
The GAIN method offers a practical framework accessible to both adults and children. This acronym—standing for Gratitude, Acceptance, Intention, and Non-judgment—can be practiced in just three minutes each morning through a combination of mindful breathing and sequential focus on each element. The practice activates the parasympathetic nervous system while rewiring neural pathways through neuroplasticity, creating what Dr. Hammer calls "light bulb moments" throughout the day when we notice ourselves being ungrateful, resistant, or judgmental.
Perhaps most powerfully, Dr. Hammer emphasizes that teaching mindfulness to children works best through modeling rather than instruction. When parents practice mindfulness themselves—taking those deep breaths during stressful moments or expressing gratitude regularly—children absorb these behaviors naturally. As he reminds us, "They are watching closely; they don't miss a thing."
Ready to transform your family's stress response with just three minutes each morning? Listen now to discover how the GAIN method can help you and your children build resilience, happiness, and emotional regulation skills that last a lifetime. Learn more about Dr. Hammer's work visit www. greghammermd.com
Lindsay Miller is a distinguished kids mindfulness coach, mindfulness educator and host of The Stress Nanny Podcast. She is known for her suitcase tricks and playful laugh. When she's not cheering on her daughter or rollerblading on local trails with her husband, you can find her using her 20+ years of child development study and mindfulness certification to dream up new ways to get kids excited about deep breathing. Having been featured on numerous podcasts, platforms and publications, Lindsay’s words of wisdom are high impact and leave a lasting impression wherever she goes.
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Welcome to the Stress Nanny, the podcast where we take the overwhelm out of parenting and help kids and parents build calm, confidence and connection. I'm your host, Lindsay Miller, kids mindfulness coach and cheerleader for busy families everywhere. Each week, we'll explore simple tools, uplifting stories and practical strategies to help your child learn emotional regulation, resilience and self-confidence, while giving you a little more peace of mind too. I'm so glad you're here. My guest today is Dr Greg Hammer. He's a professor at Stanford University School of Medicine, pediatric intensive care physician, pediatric anesthesiologist, mindfulness expert and author of the Gain Without Pain Happiness Handbook for Healthcare Professionals. And author of the Gain Without Pain Happiness Handbook for Healthcare Professionals.
Speaker 1:A member of the Stanford WellMD Initiative, dr Hammer is the former chair of the Physician Wellness Task Force for the California Society of Anesthesiologists. He has been a visiting professor and lecturer on wellness at institutions worldwide and teaches gain to medical students, residents and fellows at Stanford. Dr Hammer's clinical focus is in pediatric cardiac anesthesia and pediatric critical care medicine. His research is in developmental pharmacology and immunology and he has an active laboratory with multiple ongoing studies in these areas. He's published widely on topics related to pharmacology and perioperative care of children undergoing cardiac and thoracic procedures, as well as organ transplantation. Dr Hammer isa, health enthusiast and meditator, utilizing a non-duality and mindfulness-based approach, including his GAIN method. Dr Hammer, thanks so much for coming onto the podcast again.
Speaker 2:Oh, it's really my pleasure, so great to be with you.
Speaker 1:So you may remember Dr Hammer from when he spoke with us about his GAIN method and I love the conversation so much and felt like his expertise is so needed in our world today that I asked him to come back explore GAIN with us a little bit more and give us a little bit more insight on why stress levels are so high these days, especially among children, but plenty high among adults as well. Dr Hammer, can you give us just kind of a glimpse into your perspective on stress levels? What has been going on that's been causing stress levels to just be constantly elevated, and then how is that manifesting in people's lives?
Speaker 2:Great question, lindsay. First, I would emphasize that life itself is stressful, right, we all are fearful of things that may happen, perhaps hyper aware of things that have happened that are not to our liking. We're worried about our mortality. What's going to happen to us? We're worried about our mortality. What's going to happen to us? That is a baseline level of stress that we all share. It's just part of life.
Speaker 2:In fact, tens of thousands of years ago it may have been adaptive, to be stressed. For example, I can imagine early Homo sapiens in their cave trying to keep the fire going to keep their family warm, and there could be a saber-toothed tiger lurking outside the mouth of their cave. And that wariness, that stressed experience, that increased in adrenaline circulating in their body may have been an evolutionary advantage. It may have helped them live longer, procreate more and hence, perhaps the genes for these traits were propagated widely in the population over thousands of years. So fast forward. Here we are. Now there is no saber-toothed tiger lurking outside the mouth of our cave, but we have had certain traits hardwired into our brains and they may apparently interfere with our ability to be happy, which, let's face it, happiness is the only thing that apparently almost 8 billion of us really want? I'm told that we're almost up to 8 billion on the planet and we all just want one thing, and that is happiness. What is it about our brains that interferes with that happiness and underscores our stress levels? One is that we tend to have a negativity bias. We tend to remember the negative and forget about the positive. And we all can, if we think about it, remember many examples in our lives of this. And the other quality that we all have is that we overthink the past and the future. So of course it's adaptive to think of the past, to savor our good memories, perhaps remember even our mistakes, to the extent that we don't keep making them. But beyond that, we overthink the past, we overthink our mistakes, and that generates a lot of self-judgment, shame, regret, low self-esteem. And likewise with the future. It's certainly adaptive to plan to put bread on the table and plan for wonderful times, but we overthink the future. And back to that early Homo sapiens overthinking the future what's the worst thing that could happen? While that may have been adaptive under those circumstances 50,000 years ago, it's probably not adaptive now, because we imagine the worst thing that will happen, even though it will almost certainly never happen, and that increases our stress levels.
Speaker 2:One might ask what is stress? Stress is that experience that causes an increase in our adrenaline levels, an increase in a hormone called cortisol. Stress interferes with our normal balance of hormones. It interferes with our sleep. Therefore we get fatigued.
Speaker 2:When we're fatigued, we tend to not exercise as much as we'd like to. Our diet even tends to deteriorate. I can certainly say that when we nurses, physicians, respiratory therapists and other healthcare professionals are fatigued, we're much more likely to stop at the nursing station where we see this nice box of See's candies that a grateful patient left there and pick one or two up. So we tend to eat sugary, fatty, so-called comfort foods when we're stressed and fatigued and this is kind of a self-propagating cycle, right, we have stress, we have too much adrenaline, our heart rate's elevated, our blood pressure's elevated, our cortisol is elevated, our blood sugar goes up, we're prone to diabetes, our diet deteriorates, obesity and these things kind of propel themselves.
Speaker 2:So we're fatigued, we don't exercise, we don't eat well, our sleep deteriorates further, we're more fatigued, etc. So that's just the nature of our life is to have some degree of stress. But I think we can all agree that we've had circumstances in the world that have made it probably the most stressful time that I've experienced in my lifetime, with, obviously, the COVID pandemic, war in Ukraine, bizarre weather that makes us fearful, that you know. Imagine being a teenager now and wondering if there's going to be a planet for your children in 30 years or so, or 20 years. So there's just so much anxiety and so much stress based on circumstances around us that it's pretty hard not to experience that. So the key and we can talk about this in as much detail as we have time for, if you'd like how do we reduce the stress in our lives?
Speaker 1:Yeah, thank you for that, and I think you bring up so many good points and one of the things that is striking to me you mentioned teenagers and concern and worry.
Speaker 1:And obviously you and I you as a pediatric physician and then me as the mindfulness coach for kids we both have a vested interest in the well-being of children, right, and I think that there's so much insight and perspective we can get when we realize like these teenagers and these little kids eight years old, 10 years old a big portion of their lives have been lived during this time when we're experiencing epic amounts of stress, right.
Speaker 1:And so if as adults, we're struggling to kind of navigate the burden of it and we're struggling to care for ourselves amidst all the day-to-day concerns or disrupted schedules and routines, like there's just been so much for adults to adapt to and we have years and years of resilience and coping skills that we've been working on that we can pull out in these moments and employ to navigate and mitigate stress. But for kids, they're just learning the skills, right. It's like drinking out of a fire hose right now, trying to figure out how to build enough resilience to the stresses that they're facing in order for them to kind of stay afloat amidst this craziness and, I think, this conversation we're going to have today around how to reduce it. It's crucial for adults right, because we're creating these environments for kids and caring for them, but it's so important to model for kids so that they can add yet another skill to their stress resilience toolbox.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. I'm actually writing a book now about mindfulness for teenagers, really targeting parents, teachers, counselors, school administrators. And the factors that cause stress amongst our precious teenagers are legion from social media. You know these apps that are designed with artificial intelligence to keep teens glued to their phones, swiping one way or another or what have you. The number of hours they end up spending on their screens is just crazy, and even at the expense of their sleep they get in bed with their cell phones.
Speaker 2:And then we talked about the climate anxiety. Is there gonna be a planet for my children? Am I gonna have children More immediately? Should I wear a bulletproof vest to school today? It's just unfathomable. I mean, every morning when I get my 10 minutes of news on CNN, there's another shooting. It's just absolutely insane. And then, of course, you have these surging hormones and underdeveloped frontal lobe and executive function and decision makings, with all the impulsivity that teenagers tend to embody, and you could go on and on and on. I just think that life for teenagers now is uber stressful and how can we help them? And my book is really embracing the GAIN ideals. And GAIN is an acronym for gratitude, acceptance, intention and non-judgment. So we can talk about that, but it's through really the embracing and embodying of these principles with our children, young children, teenagers, adult children who are just kind of making their way. This is how I think we can help our children.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, that's so beautifully put. I think the depth of suffering that they're kind of seeing and the depth of awareness that they're experiencing on a day-to-day basis simply because they have access to the information, like you're saying, the awareness that they carry for all of these things is massive. And so these tools that we're going to explore, the GAIN method I love it so much because I think it's such a concise way to give kids and adults small steps to take to build that resilience so that they can operate and function with happiness, with a sense of resilience and with the awareness that they need, but also the ability to filter it right, Like to filter the awareness and only take in the stuff that is useful to them, that is serving them and that is going to propel them forward in a meaningful and skillful way, as opposed to kind of pull them back.
Speaker 2:Yes, beautifully put.
Speaker 1:So let's dive in. I know we talked about it a little bit on the last episode, but I wanted to give us a little bit more space to explore, especially as it pertains to families. The first one gratitude. Do you want to maybe just go through the pillars and then we can dive back in and talk about specific practices that might be applicable for each?
Speaker 2:Absolutely Well, I think we could first start with the practice actually.
Speaker 1:What is the gain?
Speaker 2:method, for example. And again, these four domains of gratitude, acceptance, intention and non-judgment are really universal. They are embodied by all wonderful spiritual and philosophic traditions. So there's nothing new here, just a matter of framing these ways of thinking and being in a way that we can remember and incorporate into a daily practice. And so the game practice in the morning can be done in as little as three minutes. So we wake up, we open the blinds Hopefully there's some wonderful light out there we may want to do our morning hygiene thing, and then we just find a comfortable place to sit. You know, meditation does not have to take 30 minutes. It does not have to be done in complete stillness, refraining from scratching an itch or banishing all thoughts from our heads. So this can be a relatively brief practice and sit in a comfortable chair, in a comfortable position, and instead of trying to banish all thoughts, I'm actually going to suggest thoughts on which we can focus. That's much easier than trying not to have any thoughts.
Speaker 1:So true.
Speaker 2:So we sit, let's start with the breath. I think the breath is such an underappreciation. One thing is let's take an intentional breath through our nose and exhale through our nose so we slow the breath down. Let's take a slow in-breath to a count of three, pause to a count of three and then gently relax and let the breath go without effort to a count of four. So if those are each one second, that's seven seconds and we will unconsciously slow our respiratory rate to about eight. And when we slow our breathing rate we actually stimulate what's called the parasympathetic nervous system and that results in a reduction of epinephrine, or commonly known as adrenaline, in our body. It lowers our heart rate, it lowers our blood pressure in a healthy way. It lowers our cortisol, and so we relax into this beautiful rhythm of slow, intentional breathing through our nose into a count of three, pausing to a count of three. Our nose into a count of three, pausing to a count of three, relaxing and exhaling to a slow count of four. And then we enter the domain of the gain element.
Speaker 2:So first we think about gratitude, we focus our thoughts on that for which we are grateful, and this can be loved ones in our lives. In my case, it also involves such gratitude for the privilege of practicing medicine and treating these beautiful children and their families. Gratitude for my health, even though my health is not perfect it certainly could be worse Gratitude for living in a safe place I'm grateful that I don't live in a war-torn place where I can hear bombs exploding in the background continuously. So we all have much for which to be grateful. So we link our breath to this gratitude that we feel and then we transition to acceptance. And it's very important, lindsay, as you know, to acknowledge the pain in our lives. Pain is as much a part of our experience as joy. So take the pain of losing a loved one. I lost my beautiful 29-year-old boy five years ago. So that pain is there. And there's a formula in the book suffering equals pain times resistance. You know we love formulas in medicine, right? Blood pressure equals cardiac output times resistance. Or in any kind of physics environment, whether it's gas, fluid, electricity, let's say pressure equals flow times resistance. So suffering equals pain times resistance. The pain is there. And again, according to the serenity prayer, there are things that are painful that we can change and those that we cannot change. So let's distinguish between them and take something painful that we cannot change and actually focus on it, as we also focus on our breath and bring that painful thought or experience closer and closer. Imagine opening our chest, opening our heart, bringing that pain into our heart, enveloping it with our heart, nurturing it with our heart until when we ask ourselves the question. Enveloping it with our heart, nurturing it with our heart, until when we ask ourselves the question can I live with this pain forever? The answer is yes, and we've dropped our resistance and diminished our suffering and we transition to intention.
Speaker 2:And I love Dr Jon Kabat-Zinn's definition of mindfulness, which I think could be a definition of happiness. Definition of mindfulness, which I think could be a definition of happiness Awareness of the present moment on purpose, non-judgmentally. And the on purpose or intention is key because we have default modes of thinking and being that appear to be hardwired into the way we think, into our brains. And the good news is we have this amazing quality called neuroplasticity. That means that we can change the way our brains, these neuronal connections and synapses and patterns in our brain can be modified, they can be changed, but we have to have a plan, we have to have purpose or intention.
Speaker 2:So let's first, focus our intention on being present, being aware of the present moment. Just think about the sensation in our body, against the chair. Focus on that little tingling sensation at the bottom of our feet. Focus on something we're listening, we can hear in the background. I live sort of halfway in between San Francisco International Airport and San Jose Airport, so as I'm focused on my breath with my eyes closed, and I'm on the eye and gain or intention, my plan and my intention is to be present. So I'm focusing on my present physical experiences and I can often hear an airplane going by in the distance, that lovely little Doppler effect of the increase in pitch as it becomes closer and then the decrease in pitch as it becomes more distant and focus on the air entering our body through our nose. These are the present moment experiences that we're having.
Speaker 2:And even if we can do this comfortably only for five or ten seconds before other thoughts creep in, fine, allow those other thoughts and re-guide them back to intention or purpose. Remind ourselves that we have the power of rewiring our brains. So our intention is to be more present and more positive, more grateful, more accepting, more nonjudgmental. So these elements are all interrelated and we transition to the end and gain, which is nonjudgment. So we might picture one of these beautiful NASA images of the Earth, the Earth apparently suspended in space. And it's clear that the Earth is neither good nor bad. The Earth is simply a planet. We can look at it with what Francis Lucille might call benevolent indifference. Yes, it's lovely and it is what it is. So, in that sense, I'm indifferent to it. I'm not trying to change it, I'm accepting it. It is what it is. So, in that sense, I'm indifferent to it. I'm not trying to change it, I'm accepting it. It is what it is. It's a lovely planet. It's clearly neither good nor bad, and so it's only rational for me to think I too am simply the person that I am. I am neither good nor bad. With all of my traits, with all of my ways of thinking and being. I am neither good nor bad. I am simply the person that I am. I am that I am. I am. And we return to our focus on the breath, slowing it down, so peaceful, and then we slowly open our eyes and we're ready to go out in the day.
Speaker 2:So the lovely thing about this process of rewiring our brains is that something beautiful and rather automatic happens when we're being ungrateful, when we're sort of whining and complaining about what my daughter would call a first world problem. Okay, like, oh my gosh, here in the Bay Area we've had torrential rains and wind and many of us lost power for a period of time. So, oh, the power's out. Oh, bummer, I can't be at my computer, I can't turn on the lights and read a book. And then a little light bulb goes off. Oh, I'm being ungrateful, I'm whining. Here I am in this beautiful home, in this beautiful place, with my beautiful neighbors, and I'm having a very first world problem, a temporary, probably reasonably brief power outage, and I'm complaining. Let me refocus my thoughts in this light bulb moment to being grateful for the 99 point, something percent of time that the power is on, compared to others who have no power in their home, who may not even have a home, who may live in a part of the world where the power is out. It's the middle of winter, it's freezing outside and I don't have enough food and I don't have power. I mean, honestly, am I really going to complain and be ungrateful about the power having gone out? So that light bulb moment will be something that happens when we're being ungrateful, resisting, unintentional and judgmental, and that's the beauty of this daily practice.
Speaker 2:We are, little by little, reprogramming our brains in ways that are conducive to our happiness, and when we do this with our kids. So maybe we have a gratitude, acceptance, intention or non-judgment minute. When we sit down to have dinner or while they're having their cereal and I'm making their lunch in the morning, let's focus on the food that we're eating and be grateful for the person that planted those seeds and nurtured those grains and harvested them and sent them off and they got packaged and now they're so conveniently located in the local grocery store. You know this is rather miraculous. Let's be grateful to those individuals who got the ball rolling, and so on. So have a grateful minute, have an accepting minute, have a minute of purposefulness and a minute of non-judgment. Maybe one of those once a day with our children and then have that creep into the way we interact with them in general. And it's not complicated, it simply takes purpose. It takes having a plan.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, thank you for walking us through that practice. I enjoyed it as I was sitting here experiencing it myself, and I agree that just creating the plan and creating some spaces, even if they're tiny spaces, whether you know, I like to do it like you're describing just when I roll out of bed in the morning, that's the time when I do my meditation and connect, because I think it's easier for me throughout the day to return to it instead of trying to find it. If I can find that piece right off and that perspective, and if I can connect with some gratitude, acceptance, intention and non-judgment, then throughout the day, like you're saying, it's already a part of me and so the departure is noticeable, right. But if I just kind of get up and go on my merry way and then try to find those things in the middle of a swirl, it can be trickier. It's not, you know, it's still possible, but trickier.
Speaker 1:So I also love the idea of having that moment with our kids in the morning and just choosing, like you said, one to start with. I know when I'm working with kids we'll try to tether it to something they do in the morning. So it'll be like when you grab your backpack. What are you going to do? Or when are you going to take your deep breath in the morning? Are you going to do it when you're waiting for the bus, when I think it's fun to kind of experiment and let kids decide, or see what times work for them?
Speaker 1:So, as parents, when we're engaging with our kids in these conversations, you know like, do you think we should do gratitude as we're eating breakfast or when we touch the doorknob and we're leaving the house, or do you think we should do gratitude? You know, I'm a big fan of leaving the house strategies because I can put a little note that's a reminder of leaving the house strategies, because I can put a little note, that's a reminder. But I think just being willing to engage with them in conversation, right Like these, are important skills. They're going to help all of us. Let's figure out a time when we can make them happen.
Speaker 2:I think those yes, I love the idea. The other thing about the morning is and, as you said, it kind of sets up your day and prepares your mind for those light bulb moments when we're inevitably transgressing and being ungrateful, etc. The thing is that when we get out of bed we tend to start the same pattern of often negative thinking and fixating on the past and future in ways that are maladaptive. So we have a pattern of thinking and being that starts with the time we wake up in the morning. So let's take that opportunity to sit for those magic three minutes and sort of do a reset and redirect, and it's so easy and it feels so good. I mean it even feels good just focusing on the breath. You know, as you said, that deep breath moment, and I'm just finishing a book called Breath.
Speaker 2:I don't know the author's name offhand, and while I don't necessarily agree with all of his physiology explanations, I think that the important thing to recognize is that the breath is just so vital and really can be so integral to our mental and physical health, and how we can go for hours and days without really breathing properly, and what the ill effects are on our physiology. And so I think the combination of the magic of the breath and enjoying that in a focused, intentional way first thing in the morning and then just establishing these new patterns of thinking and being right away, why not? You know we all have three minutes. I tell my medical students and residents and fellows just set your alarm clock three minutes earlier. If you're waking up at 545 in the morning, set your alarm for 542. Go to bed at 957 instead of 10 o'clock. Nobody's going to notice that. Three minutes indifferent. So we've all got three minutes to spend really devoted to our own health and happiness.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. And when I first started practicing, I would kind of just describe that as opening my conduit in the morning, like if I'm connecting to the world in a certain way, how do I want to connect If I'm connecting with myself? And you know, every morning after I wake up, how do I want to connect and to be open to experiences that are going to bring more gratitude, that are going to bring more acceptance right, that are going to allow me to live with intention and non judgment. I mean, if I'm going to open myself up to anything in the morning, those are pretty awesome qualities to lean into.
Speaker 2:Yeah, beautifully put, Lindsay. I couldn't agree more.
Speaker 1:So, as we talk about this, let's just talk a minute more about teaching this to kids, because I think sometimes as parents and I'm sure you see this in your work as an educator of people who are teaching this to kids that there are, or you know, using it in their own practice as doctors there are moments when we can tell kids something and there are moments when we show them something right, and I I love the work you're doing to train all manner of people to be the change, instead of to tell kids how to change, because when we illustrate by example, we make a much bigger impact than if we're just saying we need to do our gratitude this morning, but maybe we haven't done it ourselves yet.
Speaker 1:Right, we haven't taken the three minutes ourselves, and then we're just kind of trying to mandate it to our space. But when we take the three minutes and do that ourselves, we come to that moment differently, right? Can you give me kind of a glimpse, maybe, of how the perception changes when you're doing the work yourself versus when you're telling someone else how to do the work? Does that make sense?
Speaker 2:Oh, it's absolutely sensible and it's a great point. You have kids.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I have a daughter.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I can tell you that my kids, when they were young. They are watching closely, they don't miss a thing. And one fork in the road that we come to with our kids often is especially when they're teenagers, I think, but even preteens. They may ask us well, dad, did you do this when you were of a certain age, something that we might not want them to do? Okay, and I could never lie to my kids. So if they ask me if I smoke pot, what have you? And you know our kids ask us those questions and we have to make a decision with intention. How am I going to deal with these questions that my children will inevitably ask me? And my decision came to me quickly. I'm just going to tell them the truth, and they're watching us and they are so perceptive. So if you try to tell them something that you yourself do not embody, if you try to tell them to be a certain way or think about something a certain way, and you're not being and thinking in that way, they will hone right in on that and you might as well not even bring it up so clearly.
Speaker 2:Two things One, do it yourself, embody it. Whether you're a parent, teacher, counselor, what have you anybody who interacts with young people and even older people? The second thing is, if there is something that you choose to tell rather than simply embody, do it in a positive way. So there's a way to remind my teenager how not to be so negatively impacted by somebody treating him unkindly at school in the hallway, and there's a positive way to frame that. And there's a way to be framed as a command and do this and you can apply that broadly over so many issues that we communicate with our children. Try to be positive. Again, you know that's part of our intention is to let go of our negativity bias. So I fully agree with you. I mean, if we want to teach our children, we do it by embodying the elements that we're trying to teach.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah and I. Those are great examples, thank you, and I appreciate the way you phrased that, Like if you are going to engage in the conversation part, framing it in a positive way and in a way I think, especially for kids, that's empowering right. We want them to feel empowered with the knowledge instead of feeling like it's one more thing to do, or it's one more thing mom's asking of me, or one more thing that I need, or that I'm not doing right, or I think there's a lot of ways they could frame it in their own head. So, as we're just like hey, if you want to have this as part of your day, or hey, if it's important to you and you're feeling like today might be a lot, here's some things we could do this morning. I mean better, yet we're doing them all along right. So we're already in the habit and we're not trying to just do it as a put out the fire stress relief.
Speaker 1:But I think the other day I was I can't remember what was going on I had a long day, it was just a lot I was doing and I found myself breathing.
Speaker 1:You know it was in the afternoon and I was just breathing in like a big deep breath and then like just really lengthening my exhale, and I was breathing like that over a period of a couple of minutes and my daughter was around and she was watching me and I was like, are you okay, mom?
Speaker 1:And I was like, yeah, I just have a lot I'm trying to figure out this afternoon and she was like, oh, I know I could tell because of the way you were breathing, and so it was interesting because I hadn't done it to teach her. I was just trying to get myself into parasympathetic dominance and get out of my head. But she noticed the breathing right and she's a teenager, so she's at an age where sometimes we have some pushback around practices that I think would be really useful for us, and so I'm trying to create space for her to own it and I'm constantly reminding myself that again, like those moments when she just sees me do it and then sees me kind of settle and sees me be able to go about the rest of my day without being on edge and high alert, like that's the, that's the teaching right, like that's the moment. And so the practice in tandem is beautiful and so nourishing, I think, for families, the solo practice it translates right Because they're listening more than we think on moments like that.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. They are so intuitive and so keen in their observations, especially of their parents, I think so. Yes, I think that's a beautiful example. Your daughter saw you breathing with intention, clearly recognizing that you were trying to let go of stress and reorient yourself, and that's beautiful. And so, yeah, I'm sure she learned something from that too. Hey, why don't I try it? I'm feeling stressed. So, yeah, I think the way we teach our children and the way I think we should behave in general is to use our intention to embody those elements we find dear and positive and present, and especially, perhaps, with our kids.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so well put Well again. I have loved this time and it's gone so fast. I'm such a big fan of your work. Tell our listeners where they can find your book and find out more about what you're doing.
Speaker 2:The website is greghammermdcom g-r-e-g-h-a-m-m-e-rcom my social media people maintain that I don't look at it, but there's a lot of interesting stuff there, and that includes a lot of podcasts and links to interviews and, I would say, interactions like this one, which will hopefully be up there soon, and then there's also a link to that book, and I think that's probably the best way for people to check in with me.
Speaker 1:Great. Thank you again, Dr Hammer. I really appreciate you being with us today.
Speaker 2:Anytime, lindsay, it's always a pleasure, and stay well.
Speaker 1:You too.
Speaker 2:Okay, bye-bye.
Speaker 1:Thanks for listening to the Stress Nanny. If you found today's episode helpful, be sure to share it with a friend who could use a little extra calm in their week, and if you have a minute, I'd love for you to leave a review. It helps other parents find the show and join us on this journey. For more tools and support, head over to wwwthestressnannycom. Remember you don't have to do stress alone. Together, nannycom, remember you don't have to do stress alone. Together, we can raise kids who know how to navigate life with confidence and ease. Until next time, take a deep breath and give yourself some grace. Thank you.