The Stronghold Method: How to Cultivate Inner Calm and Take Control of Anxiety and Panic Attacks

This video was made possible by Brilliant, a math and science problem-solving website that makes learning fun and rewarding. Anxiety and panic controlled a large part of my life for the last decade, and over the last few years, they strengthened their hold over me. They manipulated me into acting the same way they do many of their victims, mistaking panic attacks for heart attacks, visiting emergency rooms when it was unnecessary, increasingly avoiding activities and locations, and depending on objects and rituals to feel safe. But I recently made some breakthroughs that have allowed me to reverse the polarity of this power dynamic, to bring anxiety and panic under my control. I'd like to share these breakthroughs with you. By combining a series of practices together into a singular method, which I call the Stronghold Method, I'm cultivating an inner calm and reducing my anxiety and panic. You might be wondering, why would I take advice from a neurotic on achieving calm? And that reminds me of something Niccolò Machiavelli wrote in The Prince. Just as artists who draw landscapes get down in the valley to study the mountains, and up to the mountains to look down on the valley, so one has to be a prince to get to know the character of a people, and a man of the people to know the character of a prince." I lived much of my life in the valley of anxiety, and it allowed me to see the mountain of calm in a way that someone who has always lived there can't see it. Or to paraphrase Machiavelli, one must be calm to know the character of a neurotic, and a neurotic to know the character of the calm. So without further ado, let's explore the method. The Stronghold Method consists of four steps. Step 1. Master Breathing. Breathing sounds simple and boring, but according to James Nestor's book, Breath, quote, 90% of us, very likely me, you, and almost everyone you know, is breathing incorrectly, and that this failure is either causing or aggravating a laundry list of chronic diseases, end quote. Not only does proper breathing contribute to good health, but it will also serve as a fundamental tool in our kit for cultivating calm and diminishing the control of anxiety and panic. Saying that learning to breathe correctly has changed my life would be an understatement. Until very recently, I had breathed in a way that escalated panic without knowing it. Most of us have heard that deep breathing is the best way to become calm, but it turns out that if you don't know how to breathe correctly, you can actually increase anxiety and panic. A proper breath is deep, slow, and into the belly, not the chest. Find out if you're a chest or belly breather by placing both of your hands flat on your body, one on your chest and one on your belly. Now take a deep breath. If the hand on your chest rises more than the hand on your belly, you've got some work to do. You're a chest breather. Practice breathing until you can get the hand on your belly to rise more than the one on your chest. Once we've mastered breathing into our bellies, it's time to learn how to take a proper breath. I have found that a proper breath is deep, slow, and has exhales that are longer than the inhales. For me, the perfect ratio is to inhale for 4 seconds, hold for 2 seconds, exhale for 8 seconds, and then hold for another 2. Breathing in this way quickly reduces my panic and anxiety. But experiment and figure out for yourself the perfect ratio of inhales and exhales that work for you. I don't know how accurate this is, but according to Nestor's book, the perfect breath is this. Breathe in for about 5.5 seconds, then exhale for 5.5 seconds. That's 5.5 breaths a minute for a total of about 5.5 liters of air. I'm going to link to a video on breathing by Dr. David Carbonell in the description below. It's really helped me, so maybe it'll help you too. Once we've mastered breathing, we now have a tool that we can carry around and use anywhere and anytime we feel panicky or anxious. The next step is to expand our comfort zones by facing discomfort. Like all things in life, our comfort zones constantly move. They expand and contract. The more we avoid new and uncomfortable situations, the more our comfort zones shrink. I have found that a consistent exposure to reasonable discomfort, even if it's a little bit each day, such as driving to a place I've never been before, eating at a new restaurant, or talking to someone I've never met, helped me expand my comfort zone. And the more uncomfortable the situation I overcame, the more my comfort zone expanded. Trying a new sport, like kickboxing, or taking up a job in a different city were both things that helped me grow immensely. Pushing my body to new limits through running, swimming, cold plunge, and heat therapy also helped me establish new baselines of comfort. As my comfort zone expanded, I found that the number of situations in which I could naturally remain calm increased. Right now, I'm actually doing a 30-day challenge, where I try to go somewhere or do something new each day. After I've done it, I place a pin on my apple maps and save it into a custom map. The custom map shows me the actual expansion of my comfort zone in real time. The third step to cultivate calm is to do what's meaningful. I find that focusing too heavily on the future triggers my anxiety. The future is uncertain, inevitable, and incalculable. We want it to take a good shape, but the shape it takes depends on how we act today. A thousand potential actions wait for us in each moment, so a problem arises. What is the thing that we should do now to shape our futures in the best possible way? I don't think this question can be answered intellectually. We don't have enough information to compute the best possible action. Rather, I think our bodies intuitively compute the best possible action in the form of meaning. The action that manifests itself as the most meaningful one to us, the one that most loudly calls out to us from the thousand other potential actions, is the best possible one we can take. I don't see how anything else could be better than focusing on the present and doing the most meaningful thing. At some point, a point that no one can predict, death catches us. But if we've done what we perceive to be the most meaningful action in every single moment, what do we have to regret? We've made the most meaning we could out of our lives. There's nothing more we could have done. The final step for reducing anxiety is to love our fates. As a result of doing what's meaningful in the present, our futures will naturally take shape. That shape can be thought of as our fate. If we've done what's most meaningful to us, why run, refuse, or reject the future that that creates? By accepting and loving our fate. By accepting and loving the consequences of a meaningful life. We accept and love our purpose. We find peace in the fact that what is is what was meant to be. So by mastering breathing, we learn how to reduce our panic in the moment. By doing something a little bit uncomfortable each day, we expand our comfort zone. By doing what's most meaningful, we make the most out of the present moment. And by loving our fate, we accept the consequences of a meaningful life and fulfill our purpose. So by using the stronghold method, we can cultivate a fortress of inner calm and protect ourselves from anxiety and panic. But as with any method, this one isn't definitive. It won't work for everyone, and I don't claim that it will. It's simply what has and continues to work for me. Of course, if you struggle with similar problems, it's up to you to seek help and talk to a professional, especially before making any serious changes to your routine. With that said, I wish you the best of luck. And if you're looking to cultivate your skills in science and math, I recommend checking out this week's sponsor, Brilliant.org. Through their course on scientific thinking, Brilliant taught me how to think more like a scientist. They helped me to make better predictions about the world, such as when I'm working with my YouTube analytics. And this, in turn, helped me achieve more success in my YouTube career so far. In their course on scientific thinking, you'll learn to think like a scientist and make better predictions. And you'll get to do it through Brilliant's signature fun and interactive style. Scientific literacy and the ability to think and communicate like a scientist is more important now than ever before. We're entering a world that divides us all into two groups, those who can think for themselves and those who can't. And if you want to be one of those who can, I recommend checking out Brilliant's course on scientific thinking. But if scientific thinking isn't your thing, Brilliant has thousands of other lessons, with new, exclusive content added each month, for different areas of study, such as math, logic, or computer science. To get your 30-day free trial, visit brilliant.org or click on the link in the description below. The first 200 of you will get 20% off Brilliant's annual premium subscription. As always, thanks for watching, and I'll see you next time.