I’m alone.

Who I am doesn’t matter.

What I do doesn’t matter.

These three thoughts destroy a human being, yet this is how so many of us feel day to day. So, we have tried to medicate our painful emotions and stuff our lives inside our smartphones, and have begun to accept this way of existing as the new normal. We try to cope but don’t know how to heal.

The irony is that we seem to be waiting for science to solve these problems when it is partly science that has caused them. Science is performing extraordinary new miracles to heal our body, but still has yet to heal a single broken heart.

How can we heal the painful unrest within us, our quiet state of crisis, without pharmaceutical intervention? We’ve been led to believe that anxiety is something we’ll have forever, and that we’re condemned to simply cope and medicate. Most of us don't even know that healing is an option, but I can assure you, in most cases, it is.

Anxiety Is Not Your Natural State — You Can Heal

The age of numbing symptoms while ignoring the cause is over. Anxiety is not our natural state and is not a life sentence. In fact, you can alleviate anxiety. When you practice breathing exercises, you’ll know what it's like to breathe freely, without fear or anxiety in your chest. You will learn how to free yourself from your stuck emotions and help your loved ones to free themselves as well.

You will also learn how to deeply connect with people in this crazy, disconnected world in which we live. Teaching breathwork for 30 years has given me a unique skill set and perspective on human beings, especially the intimate relationship between our breath and our buried emotions. I can say with learned confidence that breathwork is the first and quintessential tool to begin the healing of anxiety, panic attacks, and grief. This is why the breathing techniques that I teach are now being used by therapists and psychologists in their sessions. It does not replace talk therapy; it supercharges it.

While the mental health industry is finally acknowledging breathwork as a significant tool for therapy, there is a massively important component that we have been missing altogether. We increasingly suffer from loneliness and alienation because as a society, we are simply not taught how to look after each other, how to ask for help, or how to allow others to look after us during a crisis. Instead, we’re taught to push down one unprocessed crisis after the other until our chest is one big icebox full of grief. Then we soldier on until we’re ultimately faced with the consequences of all that suppression: anxiety, panic attacks, and sleep issues. Because our painful memories and bottled up emotions remain beneath the surface, surrounded by armor, we lose the ability to receive the love for which we yearn, even when it is freely offered.

We Celebrate Joy — But Hide Our Grief

We can barely communicate with each other about our most powerful emotions and memories that live within us. We gather for weddings but not divorces. We gather for baby showers but not miscarriages. Yet it is during times of despair and grief that we need each other the most. This is why we are so deeply lonely. I believe that we are not suffering from mental health, but rather emotional health and social health.

For most of us, anxiety, grief, and loneliness are not caused by a malfunctioning mind or a chemical imbalance, but by an almost complete absence of knowledge of how to connect with each other, particularly during tragedy. But when we learn to truly connect with each other during the most painful times, we know we are not alone. We know we belong to a community that values us, and our lives are completely transformed. 

Why Science Can’t Heal a Broken Heart

The mental health care industry has been scouring the brain looking for answers, but both the problem and the answers can be found in the human heart. What science is missing is the simple understanding that while some things can be fixed like a machine, a broken heart cannot be fixed. But a broken heart can heal, and that is entirely different.

This is where breathwork comes in. Breathwork is the way in beneath the armor. It unbolts the door to our emotions and suppressed memory. Some feel reluctant when they think about releasing their buried emotions. But if we want to heal our anxiety, live without panic attacks, and sleep peacefully, then the only way out is to go in. 

Excerpted from a forthcoming book by Max Strom. Copyright © 2025 by Max Strom.