Feb. 12, 2026
Ep 205 Teen Drama Meets Zen: We Breathe, Nobody Panics
Stress stacks fast for today’s teens—relentless social feeds, tighter college odds, safety fears, and the quiet weight of eco-anxiety. We sit down with Dr. Greg Hammer, physician, author, and mindfulness teacher, to map out a practical way forward: GAIN—Gratitude, Acceptance, Intention, and Non-Judgment. In clear, everyday language, we show how a simple three-minute morning routine can lower stress chemistry, sharpen presence, and help families navigate pressure with steadier hearts and clearer heads.
We walk through the full GAIN practice step by step, from slow, deliberate breathing to a guided tour of the four anchors. Gratitude grounds teens in what is already working. Acceptance teaches how to sit with pain without spiraling. Intention trains attention like a muscle, five seconds at a time. Non-judgment replaces verdicts with discernment, turning “that friend is bad” into “how do you feel after time with them?” You’ll hear how this shift reduces defensiveness, improves teen decision-making, and creates more honest conversations at home and in the car.
We also tackle the real landscape teens face: algorithm-driven comparison, online shaming, polarized family talk, sleep debt, and the spike in competition around academics and activities. Dr. Hammer’s reminder not to take ourselves too seriously is more than a joke; it’s strategy. When the day is already hard, injecting play, humor, and joy restores energy and makes good habits stick. Treat time like an expensive resource, model the mindset you want to see, and watch those “light-bulb” moments grow as your teen learns to return to calm on demand.
If you’re a parent, coach, teacher, or counselor looking for tools that actually fit busy lives, this conversation offers a blueprint you can start tomorrow morning. Listen, share with someone who needs a little peace, and if it helps, leave a quick review so more families can find us. Subscribe for more mindful parenting tools and stories that build calm, confidence, and connection.
The other episodes we recorded with Dr. Hammer are:
GAIN Your Way To A More Mindful Life
Three Minutes to Calm: The Morning Practice that Changes Everything
You can find Dr. Hammer's book, A Mindful Teen anywhere books are sold and you can learn more at his website.
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.
To sign up for Lindsay's "Calm & Collected" Newsletter click here.
To review the podcast click here.
00:20 - Welcome And Guest Introduction
02:12 - GAIN Method Overview
05:19 - Morning Practice And Brain Rewiring
08:11 - Modeling Mindfulness For Teens
12:43 - Judgment Versus Discernment
18:52 - Time As A Precious Resource
22:32 - Today’s Teen Stressors
28:24 - College, Competition, And Parental Pressure
33:12 - Destigmatizing Struggle With Mindfulness
38:24 - Don’t Take Yourself Too Seriously
39:36 - Resources And Closing Callouts
WEBVTT
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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.
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I'm your host, Lindsay Miller, Kids Mindfulness Coach and Cheerleader for Busy Families Everywhere.
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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.
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I'm so glad you're here.
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My guest today is Dr.
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Greg Hammer.
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He's a medical doctor who is a former professor at Stanford University School of Medicine, a retired pediatric intensive care physician, pediatric anesthesiologist, wellness and mindfulness lecturer, and author of Gain Without Pain, the Happiness Handbook for Healthcare Professionals, and co-author of the recently released book, A Mindful Teen, helping today's teenagers thrive through gratitude, acceptance, intention, and non-judgment from Bloomsbury Publishing.
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Dr.
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Hammer was the chair of Physician Wellness Task Force for the California Society of Anesthesiologists, as well as a former member of the Stanford Well MD Initiative.
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He has been a visiting professor and lecturer on wellness and institutions worldwide and has taught the gain method to medical students, residents, and fellows at Stanford.
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Dr.
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Hammer is a health enthusiast and meditator utilizing a non-duality and mindfulness-based approach, including the gain method, one of our favorite guests here on the podcast.
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Dr.
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Hammer, thanks again for joining us today.
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Wonderful to be with you, Lindsay.
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Okay, so the gain method, our listeners should be familiar with it at this point.
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But for anybody who's new around here, can you just give us a brief reminder of the gain method?
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And I'm going to link our other two podcast episodes to this one so they can do a deeper dive.
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But let's get into that.
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Just the baseline, and then we'll apply it to teens.
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Sure.
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Gain is an acronym for what I think are the four essential domains of happiness.
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And let's face it, the almost 8 billion of us on the planet only want that.
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And those four domains are expressed by the acronym GAIN, and they are gratitude, acceptance, intention, and non-judgment.
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And it's really a lifestyle, but the gain practice begins in the morning, ideally.
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So we get up, we open the blinds, get any light that might be out there into our eyeballs, do our morning hygiene thing, and then find a comfortable place to sit, preferably in a quiet part of the house.
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And we close our eyes, we focus on slow, deep, deliberate breathing first, which activates the vagus nerve and the parasympathetic nervous system, lowers our heart rate and blood pressure, and even our blood sugar in a healthy way, of course.
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And then we do a self-guided tour through these four domains.
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So we contemplate that for which we're grateful.
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And it can just be simply having a roof over our head, access to food and running water, preferably including hot water and cold water, and friends, family, loved ones, pets in our lives.
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You can see my little dog Yogi behind me, always grateful for my dogs.
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Yes.
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And then while we continue to do this slow, deep, deliberate breathing, we transition to acceptance.
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And we all have pain and suffering in our lives.
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It's intrinsic as much as joy and happiness are.
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And so here, I think it's important to acknowledge uncomfortable and even painful experiences and not always to try not to think about them and resist them.
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And so we might, for example, as we're doing this slow, deep, deliberate breathing with our eyes closed, imagine bringing some painful experience, could be loss of a loved one, for example, closer and closer, imagine opening our chest, bringing this experience into our heart, opening our heart, literally opening our heart, bringing the experience in and just breathing into it, relaxing our body into it, sitting with it in a patient and open-hearted way.
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And at some point, we can ask ourselves the question: can I live with this pain forever?
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And the answer will be yes.
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And then continuing our breathing focus, we transition to the eye and gain, which is intention.
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As much as we need intention and a plan to keep our physical body tuned up and in good shape, we need to do the same with our mental health.
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And so we sort of acknowledge to ourselves that we have a plan.
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And one of the elements of our plan is to be present more, to focus on the present moment.
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That's really what mindfulness is.
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And so we may practice during this phase of the gain meditation, simply paying attention to our current bodily sensations, the pressure of the chair against our body, the sound of a passing automobile or aircraft.
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And after five seconds, our minds will start to wander.
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And we just sort of observe that and bring it back to focusing on the present moment.
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And we could do it today for five or 10 seconds, and maybe next week or next month for 15 or 20 seconds.
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And we're practicing the art of really focusing on the present moment without any judgment.
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And then we transition to the N-game, which is in fact non-judgment.
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And I think here we're really acknowledging that we excessively judge others, the world, and notably ourselves.
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And more often than not, in a negative way, we have this negativity bias.
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And so we might, as we do our slow, deep, deliberate breathing, picture an image of the earth apparently suspended in space, one of these beautiful NASA images.
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And it's clear the earth is a lovely planet, but it really doesn't possess the qualities of goodness or badness.
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Things don't have to be good or bad.
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And so the earth is a lovely planet, but it's neither good nor bad.
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And being of the earth, I acknowledge here that I am just a person.
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I'm neither good nor bad.
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I'm just the person that I am, just like the earth itself.
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And we sort of repeat this over and over to ourselves.
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I'm just the person that I am.
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I'm neither good nor bad.
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I simply am.
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And maybe we transition to just I am, the I amness of being.
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And then we return our focus fully to the slow, deep, deliberate breath in through our nose to a count of three, pausing to a count of three with our bellies and chests full of air, and then slowly letting the breath go to a count of four.
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And we do that a few more times slowly, and then slowly open our eyes and we're ready to go out in the world.
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And the amazing thing about this practice is that the more we do it, we're really rewiring our brains, right?
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So we're acknowledging that our brains are wired to be negative and to be distracted.
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We have a hard time being present, and yet happiness lives in the present moment.
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And so we're rewiring our brain every time we do this practice because our thoughts, positive thoughts, beget positive thoughts, right?
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And negative thoughts beget negative thoughts.
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And then we do the practice and we go out in the world, and when we find that we're being ungrateful or overly judgmental, a little light bulb goes off and reminds us that, hey, I just, you know, I did my game practice, I had a cup of coffee, got in my car and drove to work.
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Somebody cut me off.
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I started making all these negative judgments about them.
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And I had that light bulb moment where I just said, Oh, why am I judging this person?
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It's not necessary.
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And I have a little laugh to myself and maybe a little dopamine hit instead of an adrenaline hit.
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And so the more we do this practice, the more we have those light bulb moments.
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And again, we're rewiring ourselves to be happier beings.
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Yes, I love the way you went through that.
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And I think too, the power of doing it in the morning, like you talked about, is that we can return to it.
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It's like we're starting our day that way.
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The way I explain it to the kids that I coach is the first time you went to your school and you tried to find the gym.
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Because there's a lot of fun stuff that happens in the gym, right?
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Like maybe you eat lunch in there, there's games, there's dances.
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Like you want to know where the gym is, right?
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But the first time you go to find it might be a little tricky because you have to orient yourself.
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You know, you haven't been in there before, you're not sure where it is, which turns to take to get there.
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But after somebody shows you the way, after you've done it a couple of times, it's a little easier for you to find the gym the next time, right?
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And and before you know it, you're like in the gym all the time and you're just having a great time with the assemblies or the pep rallies, whatever's going on in there, you can get there quick.
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And I like to explain mindfulness in that way where if we can find it in the morning, right?
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Like whatever twists and turns we have to take after we get out of bed to get to mindfulness first thing for the whole rest of the day, we're gonna have that pathway cleared and ready to go.
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And it's gonna be easier for us to access than if we're stumbling around, oh yeah, what does it feel like to be calm right now?
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And so when we can access early, easier to find later, especially important for teens, right?
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Absolutely.
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And the thing is that the practice was designed to be a three-minute practice.
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Yeah.
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So when I do it myself, I enjoy it for longer than that.
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But I taught my trainees when we discussed this practice, set your alarm three minutes earlier in the morning than you normally would.
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So if you're gonna get up at 5:30 in the morning and, you know, let's face it, anesthesia residents and pediatric residents who are in the ICU, they do get up early.
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What's three minutes?
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So if you go to bed three minutes earlier and get up three minutes earlier so you can do this practice before you head out, it is nice to do it in the morning.
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It sort of establishes you on the path for the day.
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Yeah, and I like your analogy of getting to and being in the gym.
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You know, we need to have a plan, that's part of our intention.
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So if we're going to take care of our physical bodies and we want to train our physical bodies, it does take a little discipline.
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It takes formulating a plan and then sticking to it.
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Yeah.
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And, you know, let's make that for our teens an easy plan to embrace.
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Now, the book, A Mindful Teen, is really not designed for teens to read because I don't think that's terribly realistic.
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It's really for those who are caring for teens.
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So people like us, but parents, grandparents, coaches, school counselors, social workers, teachers, and really our kids are watching us at a young age, and certainly in their teenage years, we can't just tell them what to do.
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We really kind of have to embody that which we're representing in our teaching to them and in our instruction and conversations.
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So let's be mindful ourselves, and then our teens will watch us expressing gratitude, you know, maybe at the dinner table for those perhaps uncommon times when you can actually have dinner with your family as a family.
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But, you know, when you're driving your teen to practice or to school or picking them up and bringing them home, you've got that one-on-one time.
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Let's express our gratitude.
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Let's check in with them.
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And to the extent that they're maybe complaining about their circumstances, let's reroute them a little bit into a more positive domain.
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So we need to embody those principles ourselves, the principles of gratitude, acceptance, intention, and non-judgment.
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Yeah, it's such a good point because if anybody has like a BS filter, it's teens, right?
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Like little kids do too.
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But if you're trying to teach this to a teen and you're not practicing it, it's not going to go great.
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Absolutely.
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You know, your teens watching you, maybe your mother or father, and they're watching you and your partner, their parents, and the parents are complaining and whining and not being very grateful, or resisting reality in some way, overly judging, judging other people unnecessarily as being good or particularly bad.
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I guess if we're going to judge, it's better to judge on the positive side than the negative side.
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But it reminds me I went to a Qigong retreat for a week with a Qigong master.
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And one thing we did was we're all sitting on the floor in front of him, the 40 of us or so, and he had us pair off, so we had a partner, and then he did this exercise with us, and he said, I want you to face your partner, so you're in pairs, and arbitrarily the person with the longer hair go first and look at your partner and say, You are good, and repeat that five times, and then switch places.
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And then he would have us say, You are bad to the other person, and then do it in the reverse.
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And then afterwards he asks us, Well, how did it feel saying to someone you are good or being told you are good, and the same with you are bad.
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And I thought, you know, the obvious response to that would be it feels positive to be told you're good or to tell someone that you're good, and the reverse for you're bad.
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But you know, he's making a point here, it can't be that simple.
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And I thought it might be that just either way, you're judging.
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And so, in fact, he said just that both are judgments, and the person who's judging you as good in this minute, in the next minute, might change their mind about something else and judge you as being bad.
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So, for those of us who tend to be overly judgmental, you're really looking through a sort of a tinted lens, if you will.
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You're not seeing things exactly as they are in reality, if there is such a thing, because maybe all of reality is relative.
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But you know, when you're judging, you're skewed, you're really incorporating your own biases.
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And so let's just drop that.
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It's often not necessary to render things as being good or bad.
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Yeah.
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Discern, but don't necessarily judge.
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So I give the example you've got 45 minutes for a cup of coffee with a friend, and you can choose between friend A and friend B.
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And friend A is sort of a downer, you know, they kind of complain, they're not very grateful.
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They seem to have everything they need, but yet they're sort of unhappy.
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But, you know, I grew up with this person, they're like my brother or sister, and I love them, and I do want to kind of keep up with them.
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Or I can have that 45-minute coffee break with friend B who's like me, pragmatic, forward-looking, positive, optimistic, funny.
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So I need to discern which one would I rather have the cup of coffee with.
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I might choose friend B, but it doesn't mean that friend A is bad and friend B is good.
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There's no need to judge them in that way.
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Yeah, there's so much to that.
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I appreciate that explanation.
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Because I think especially in the nuances of teenage friendships, sometimes it can be tricky because what I've seen in certain situations is with parents talking to their teens about friendship choices.
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When we can remove the judgment, they're less defensive.
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So with the clients that I work with who are maybe making choices around friendships that aren't getting them where they want to go, if we accept the friendship and we're not judging the friendship, but instead we're practicing discernment, like you said, and saying, okay, is the time you spent with this friend what did you feel like afterwards?
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What were the outcomes?
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Did it help you become the person you're looking to become?
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Is it helping you move toward your goals?
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You know, and when uh faced with those questions, a lot of times they're a little bit less defensive because we're not saying anybody's bad here.
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We're just saying, is this someone who is supporting you in becoming the best athlete you can be, the best student you can be?
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Is this person helping you get to where you want to go?
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And when they're free to see it that way, a lot of times they have a different view on it than if we go in saying that person is bad for you.
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Absolutely.
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And let's face it, we can remind our teens we know how busy you are, you don't have unlimited time.
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I have a domestic partner who has an 18-year-old daughter, and the two of them are so beautiful together.
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It's one of the things I love about my partner, she's such a wonderful mother.
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But you know, her daughter is just very, very busy, and so she's a freshman in college now.
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But in the last couple of years in high school, she was on the cheer team, she was captain of the cheer team.
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She did cheer after school until eight o'clock in the evening.
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They practice for two or three hours after school, and she would come home and have something to eat and do her homework, and pretty soon it's like one o'clock in the morning.
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And time is a precious commodity for all of us.
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I mean, we can help our teens reinforce that notion.
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So every decision we make to spend our time doing this is a decision not to spend it doing that.
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And I want to remind people I'm not a psychologist or psychiatrist, I'm just a regular guy who happen to have a connection with teenagers like many of us do.
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But I think that kids, as they're growing up, they have their besties and they tend to stick with those people if they can, you know, if they're still going to the same school and so on, and maybe even if they're not.
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And sometimes those are not the most productive relationships after some point, right?
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Kids grow up, they change, they get involved in different activities.
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And so, as you suggested, let's discern this might not be the friend that is making you happy and positive and grateful and so on.
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And where's that energy?
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Is that really something that helps you grow and be happy?
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And maybe not.
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You know, let's discern, let's take a look at that.
00:17:45.759 --> 00:17:48.160
We don't have to call anybody good or bad.
00:17:48.480 --> 00:17:52.799
But I think that's such an essential lesson for kids is that their time is precious.
00:17:52.960 --> 00:18:00.799
And again, deciding to do one thing or spend time with one person means not doing another thing or spending time with another person or group.
00:18:01.200 --> 00:18:06.799
Yeah, it reminds me of the recent Taylor Swift quote about like pretend your time is expensive, right?
00:18:06.960 --> 00:18:09.440
It's something expensive, and some people can't afford it.
00:18:09.680 --> 00:18:20.319
And how in those moments you're thinking to yourself, okay, if this is a situation where all things being equal, I'm investing myself in this moment, who do I want to be with and how do I want it to go?
00:18:20.480 --> 00:18:20.720
Yeah.
00:18:20.960 --> 00:18:23.599
Yeah, I like that quote because money is a resource.
00:18:23.759 --> 00:18:25.519
Obviously, that's very palpable.
00:18:25.680 --> 00:18:26.160
Yeah.
00:18:26.400 --> 00:18:27.200
We all know that.
00:18:27.359 --> 00:18:28.559
Teens appreciate that.
00:18:28.720 --> 00:18:31.359
And our time, similarly, you know, let's not waste it.
00:18:31.440 --> 00:18:33.359
Let's make the most of the time that we have.
00:18:33.519 --> 00:18:35.440
Yeah, you never know what's gonna happen next.
00:18:35.519 --> 00:18:40.559
You know, things may turn upside down, and teens often experience that, in fact.
00:18:40.880 --> 00:18:41.279
Yeah.
00:18:41.440 --> 00:18:42.960
And let's get into some of those things.
00:18:43.039 --> 00:18:45.039
As I know I went out down a rabbit hole there.
00:18:45.119 --> 00:18:47.039
Thanks for entertaining that conversation.
00:18:47.200 --> 00:18:51.920
But we were gonna go a little bit more global and talk about the pressures that teens face today.
00:18:52.000 --> 00:18:59.200
Because one of the reasons you wrote this book is because of the epic amounts of stress that teenagers are under in our modern world.
00:18:59.440 --> 00:19:03.680
I know a lot of our listeners are very familiar with those from a day-to-day standpoint.
00:19:04.000 --> 00:19:08.400
Can you give us the academic view on what those stressors are like?
00:19:08.559 --> 00:19:13.200
And what were some of the ways that teens deal with things now that previous generations didn't have to worry about?
00:19:13.680 --> 00:19:15.200
Well, that's a great point.
00:19:15.599 --> 00:19:23.839
I certainly never had to deal with the top five or six or seven stressors that are in the lives of teens these days.
00:19:24.160 --> 00:19:27.279
Social media, obviously, is a huge stressor.
00:19:27.359 --> 00:19:30.559
It's a double-edged sword, like all of technology.
00:19:30.720 --> 00:19:33.279
I think we're kind of wondering what's going to happen with AI.
00:19:33.359 --> 00:19:41.200
But social media itself, I think during COVID, it was great for kids to stay connected to each other when they couldn't be physically together.
00:19:41.440 --> 00:19:47.599
And there are a lot of other good things about social media, but there are also some downsides.
00:19:47.839 --> 00:20:01.119
And there's bullying, there's shaming, there's sort of, you know, less obvious things that we all know about, which include exposure to these sort of perfected ideals of another human being.
00:20:01.279 --> 00:20:06.640
What's this beautiful person, and so on, and everything's fantastic, which is not very realistic.
00:20:06.799 --> 00:20:16.400
And so this may lead to kind of shame and low self-esteem among teens, especially because they're spending so much time with social media.
00:20:16.640 --> 00:20:21.119
There's also other aspects of social media that can be very dangerous.
00:20:21.359 --> 00:20:25.920
You know, beside the bullying and shaming, there can be something called sex dorsi.
00:20:26.079 --> 00:20:33.839
Kids often circulate pictures of themselves in various manifestations, and those can be used against them.
00:20:34.160 --> 00:20:36.720
So obviously, we need to have that discussion with our kids.
00:20:36.880 --> 00:20:40.480
But anyway, social media can be a big stressor in kids' lives.
00:20:40.720 --> 00:20:46.720
I think the political divide is a stressor for all of us, especially now during the holidays.
00:20:46.799 --> 00:21:03.359
Sometimes families are in part broken apart by their different political views because people are having all this information pushed to them, including teens, and that's part of social media's potential trap, is that information is pushed to people that they agree with.
00:21:03.759 --> 00:21:08.720
And things they disagree with that they don't really look into deeply, they're not exposed to so much.
00:21:08.799 --> 00:21:17.039
And so I think this is further underscoring the differences in people's attitudes and beliefs artificially to some degree.
00:21:17.279 --> 00:21:25.440
But you know, as we get together with families, there's Uncle Joe who's got these political ideas that the rest of us primarily don't agree with.
00:21:25.599 --> 00:21:35.200
And this is where we need to really kind of go into the game practice because, you know, we need to accept Uncle Joe, even if he does have some views that we don't agree with.
00:21:35.359 --> 00:21:36.880
That's what acceptance is.
00:21:37.119 --> 00:21:44.319
So let's have an intention and let's have a plan to embrace our differences and not be so negatively judgmental of others.
00:21:44.559 --> 00:21:51.839
But back to your original question, I think besides social media, the political divide represents a stressor for all of us, including our teens.
00:21:52.160 --> 00:21:57.359
Gun violence in schools, obviously, I just can't imagine going through a metal detector to get into school.
00:21:57.519 --> 00:21:59.759
Or, you know, we had nuclear fault.
00:22:00.799 --> 00:22:07.440
I'm a little bit older than you are, but we used to have these drills where we get under the desk as though that was going to protect us from nuclear fallout.
00:22:07.839 --> 00:22:09.440
It was kind of fun, actually, though.
00:22:09.519 --> 00:22:11.519
It wasn't stressful, right?
00:22:11.680 --> 00:22:17.680
I mean, we didn't really think we were going to be exposed to nuclear radiation from a nuclear weapon.
00:22:17.920 --> 00:22:20.640
It was just sort of something that was a little bit humorous.
00:22:20.799 --> 00:22:26.000
But now, gun violence is a very real thing, and so many teens have been touched by that.
00:22:27.279 --> 00:22:36.880
Ecology, you know, global warming, eco anxiety, I call it, because kids are actually wondering: is the earth going to be habitable for my children and grandchildren?
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