John Graham
Appearances
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
Kids are really, really good at memory. Why? Because they use their imagination. I'm 38 years old, and my imagination is as good as any seven-year-old.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
I got my own voice in my head saying, what are you doing? Your score sucks. You're already behind. You already can't focus. So I had all that going on and still trying to bring my attention back onto what I was doing and let the training kick in, let the habits kick in. And I would train that way. That is my secret for how I won training.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
Yeah, I was working a boring cubicle job in Denver for a bankruptcy office. I mean, how much more boring can you get, right? And I read an article about this book called Moonwalking with Einstein. And the subtitle is what grabbed me. It's called The Art and Science of Remembering Everything. So it was a book. It was a moment that grabbed my soul. Like it was a divine moment.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
my three championships, how I performed in front of 400 million people in China, like you saw, that training is what I did. But here's the thing, that helped me get to the point where I realized what's the real root of this pressure. I realized, and everyone does this, every moment of your life that you've ever pushed away that you couldn't handle, something that was embarrassing, a breakup.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
Every moment of your life that you could not handle in that moment, it's still inside of you. It's suppressed. And so when we get poked by life, you know, like you're in the board meeting or, you know, you're under pressure, those moments get poked inside of you and they come up, they arise. anxiety, some people depression, overwhelm is a good one. Overwhelm, what is overwhelm?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
It's you're being poked by all kinds of things. You can't handle this. You can't handle this. You can't handle this. You don't like this. You don't like this. Overwhelmed. The voltage is too much for you to handle. So all this stuff comes up in that moment. So what do most of us do? We do the exact opposite of what we should do. And this is what I teach people now.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
Because this is how I overcame my anxiety is instead of meditating to calm yourself down, Instead of going for a walk to clear your head, instead of listening to podcasts or anything to feel better, eating, drinking, smoking, and no judgment, right? Because we all do it because the voltage is so intense. We sit with that energy because that energy...
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
The suppressed emotions is your suppressed potential. When you open up to it, relax into it, feel it, and allow it to surge through you, it processes out like it should have 30 years ago or 10 years ago or 20 years ago when it happened. So you process it out and you start increasing your capacity to handle more voltage.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
So how can I go in front of 400 million people and memorize 700 different things without collapsing to the ground? It's because... I've increased my capacity to handle life's voltage. And those moments don't bother me anymore.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
I went to Barnes & Noble. I bought the book. I read the book. So I was 27 years old at the time. I wasn't born with a gifted memory, photographic memory, anything like that. It was all learned. I took this book, I learned some techniques that involve visualization, imagination, connections, linking, making stories. And I just went all out and I started learning like this was real.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
The crazy thing is, so I had to memorize 100 different items that were placed in 100 different lockers, and each locker had a four-digit code that they locked to them. So pretty easy. The hard part for me was three days before the event, they told me, hey, you're going to have to memorize two things at a time. We're going to give you two things like a Rubik's cube and a picture.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
At the same time, we're going to put them in the lockers. At the same time, we're going to put the numbers on the screen at the same time instead of one at a time. So on top of it being like with the language, with all the people, I had to do two at a time and multitask. And that was like, oh, shit. That was intense for me because I was like, I've never done that before. I don't know.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
But to answer your question, yeah, I'm on the stage and I'll be 100% honest with you. I've done all this internal work. But when I was on the stage, I felt the lights. It felt like 90 degrees in my suit. I felt the adrenaline surge through me because I realized I'm in front of 400 million people. I heard all the noises of the crowd. I saw the cameraman in front of me.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
I saw the models walking in front of me, holding stuff. I heard the translator through my earpiece that was, I actually draped it over my shoulder because I didn't want to hear them in my ear. I felt and I heard the voice in my head, right? All this stuff, all this stuff that every normal human being experiences. But with the work that I've done, I was able to handle all of that. Here's the thing.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
Most people resist it. They don't even realize they're resisting it. That's where anxiety comes from. That's where pressure and all these things is because we're like, oh my gosh, I don't want to feel this. Put it away. Stop talking, stop voice, like you try to halt it. If you halt the voice in your head or you push it away, you're resisting it. And that actually strengthens it.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
So I've learned how to allow it, which sounds super simple, but it's not. You have to allow all of this stuff, all of this voltage, all of this voice to happen, to do whatever it wants to do. You can't do that in that moment. Like you have to cultivate that. And so all of this stuff's happening.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
But again, I'm bringing my attention back into what do I do so that I get right back into the zone and I know exactly what to do with these numbers and with these items and how to memorize it. It's no problem. It's just if I get distracted in my mind, in my body and resist it, it's going to create problems. Yeah.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
I wasn't born with a gifted memory, photographic memory, anything like that. It was all learned. As a child, I was very, very shy, reserved, cautious. So I thought, I'm going to win Grandmaster of Memory. So I trained for like four months, signed up for my first competition. My heart is pounding out of my chest and I bombed. I completely bombed in that competition.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
Well, I can tell you it's not a puppy wagging its tail. It's highly uncomfortable when emotions show up, the real wrong ones. But you're exactly right. They will come up stronger. It's like kicking a can down the road. You kick the can down the road because you have anxiety, but you meditate it so you feel calm and you feel, okay, distracted. But really, you just kick the can down the road.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
The next day, you're going to have two cans in front of you. It's going to get louder and louder and louder. For me, it got to the point where I was having panic attacks. I was having panic attacks every single day, multiple times a day, just completely debilitating because I was resisting so much. And really, that's what anxiety is, is you're resisting the flow of life.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
Like people could literally memorize decks of cards. Within seconds, I ultimately was able to memorize a deck of cards in 21 and a half seconds, like 52 cards in order, just to show you what's possible, right? So I just took the book and ran with it. And then years later, I became three-time champ, grandmaster of memory, international performer, all from that, just learning how to do it on my own.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
At the deepest root, I had all of this suppressed emotion. There's not one moment in my life that caused all this, right? It was just an accumulation. It was a pressure cooker where I wasn't letting anything out. I was resisting it all. Just like you said, I was upstairs up here where I am now laying in bed with my daughters outside playing in the yard, wanting daddy, but I couldn't handle it.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
If you've never had a panic attack before, There's a range. There's a spectrum. They can go from a surge of adrenaline. Oh my gosh, what's wrong with me? To I'm going to die. I know I'm going to die. One of the times my arm went numb or constricted. I thought I was having a heart attack and I started getting busy. I started feeling my heart rate go up.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
One time the left side of my face went completely numb and I thought I was having a stroke. So people who think like you're in your head, it's just anxiety. No, it's like It mimics these physiological things. It's terrifying to believe you're going to die. So there was a time I was at the chiropractor office to answer your question, and I started feeling a panic attack come on.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
It felt like an adrenaline surge, a surge of voltage just go up. All of a sudden, I become extremely vigilant. What's wrong? I'm just completely scrambled in my mind trying to figure out what's happening.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
And I remembered what I had been practicing of how to relax through it, relaxing every muscle in my body that was tense because the tension is what holds it in, you know, when you talk about putting it back down. Relaxed my body in that moment. I said, okay, let it happen. I've already had panic attacks enough to know that I'm not going to die. They're awful, but I relaxed.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
I allowed it and it surged through within seconds and it was gone. And I had never transmuted that much energy in that short of time, like completely transmuted it. It was insane. And I changed my life because I realized I could do that. Maybe not every single time. But in that moment, I proved what was happening. I proved that this stuff is inside of me. It wants out.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
And if I allow it to go out, it will move through me just like it was meant to 30 years ago or 10 years ago or yesterday, whenever I suppressed it or suppressed all of these moments. And so what I realized and the reason people don't want to feel their feelings, right, especially men, It's like, what's the point, right? How much stuff is in there?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
But what I teach now is all of that energy, emotion, whatever you want to call it, inside of you is your suppressed potential. Every time you allow that voltage to move through, you process out, you accumulate information or wisdom or data that's suppressed inside of you that was stuffed away years ago. And you actually, again, expand your capacity.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
I was doing a lot of healing work, let's call it, internal work. It wasn't the greatest healing work, but I was opening up some stuff and all this energy started moving through me and I started getting really clouded in my head. I didn't know what was going on. I thought I was burnt out. I thought something physiologically was wrong with me.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
So I started experiencing all of these physical symptoms. I went to a neurologist. I went to get a CAT scan because I started having panic attacks because I'm like, something's wrong with me. I got an MRI and the MRI results got emailed to me without a doctor looking at them. In those results, it said that I had a brain aneurysm.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
And I freaked out because now I'm going through all this health stuff. What's wrong with me? What's causing this? And now they're telling me I have a brain aneurysm. And it told me the dimensions of it, how big it was. So in that moment, I freaked the F out. I thought I'm going to die. I said, oh my gosh, I got to remain calm all the time. But this is before I even talked to a doctor.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
I should have talked to someone first, right? So I started ignoring everything that was uncomfortable. I said, I have to remain calm at all times. I can't let anything bother me. And as you know now, that made it intensely worse because I was stuffing and stuffing and stuffing and stuffing and stuffing. And I exploded. I was a week in and I just started having panic attacks.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
I got good news that there was nothing wrong with me, by the way. So I'm good. It's an okay thing. Nothing's wrong with me. But the panic attacks, even after I got that news and that relief, they were happening every day now because I had conditioned that neural pathway. So I had a panic attack when I was driving over a bridge on the way to a restaurant once.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
And every time I drove over that bridge again, which is by my house, I had another panic attack. I had a panic attack in my kitchen. So when I went down to my kitchen the next day, I had another one. These moments trigger and trigger and trigger. That's why people's walls cave in is because you're training your brain and neural pathways to recognize, oh my gosh, that's a scary moment.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
And so my walls just started closing in, even though I was physically okay. So it's crazy that these things can develop. And that's the time that I realized I needed to drastically change every approach that I was doing.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
That's when I learned it was an emotional root issue, how to lean into it, how to feel it, how to let it surge through me, along with a couple other things that I teach, which are regulating your nervous system. And I also help people or release some of the bigger boulders inside of them, you know, the biggest events in their life that really are holding them down.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
Yeah, on the surface, that looked amazing. Like many of us do at the top, quote unquote, right? We got it all together. But you were going through your own struggles. I didn't realize I had anxiety. Since I was 13, I probably had it.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
I just thought that was normal to be in my head, to survive in my head, to feel dread every Sunday evening because I'm going to school on Monday or going to work, right? It was a normal thing for me. I feel to shut down and feel overwhelmed, to get paralyzed when I got overwhelmed, all those things. But And that's the thing, Ilana, is I tried all the mental stuff to overcome it.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
Everyone listening is probably trying some sort of reframe your thoughts. to a positive or go meditate to calm yourself down or do self-care or exercise or journal or do hypnosis or supplements or some type of mental ritual, right? Like I was. Like I'm a mental genius, some people call me, right? I love the mind. I love performance. I love the brain. But the brain isn't the answer.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
The brain, the mind is not the root cause of all of this internal stuff that we're dealing with. It's an emotional thing. root issue.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
So I also need to share that with people is maybe you're trying all this stuff like I was trying to make it look like everything's okay on the inside, but you're also dealing with pressure with the boardroom or anxiety when it comes to school or the overwhelm of having to deal with life. All of that is emotional root issue, just like I had.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
And it's completely normal for a human being to feeling those things. It's just the things that we're trying these days, the mainstream conventional performative methods are won't get to the real root of it. And that's the real, the mission I have these days is to share that part of it.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
You don't step out into the world and do the things on your heart all of the time because you're paralyzed. You're afraid of the reaction it's going to get. Everyone's like, oh, you're afraid of other people. People say, oh, don't worry about what other people think. Oh, if I just believe that, I'll overcome that. But no, at your core, you're afraid to feel embarrassed.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
That uncomfortable feeling of embarrassment, that's what you're afraid of. Not what people will say online, but the feeling. So it's all emotional root. So when you release that emotional root, when you feel through that pain and you release it, you become what I call unbotherable. That's why, like, I'm here sharing all these details because I don't give a rip anymore.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
I wanted to be somebody. I wanted to be someone that everyone looked up to. And this was sort of an avenue for me. I thought, wow, I could be like a grandmaster. People will be in awe at what I do. I mean, it's funny because that's what happens now, right? People are in awe. It's not my motivation now, but yeah, it's, I shattered my belief that I had a bad memory when I read that book.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
I'm here to share all these vulnerable stories. It doesn't scare me anymore like it would have, you know, years ago. I'm unbothered by this stuff. And so that's really what's going on for everyone out there. It's not a mental belief that you need to change. It's an internal root, emotional roots, depressed issue that's holding you back.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
I get asked this a lot of like thinking about my childhood or thinking about that one issue. I haven't found it yet. I haven't found that one thing. And that's actually good news because people don't need to find that one thing or the real root of the moment or the pattern from your childhood or what your parents said to you or your teacher to figure out exactly. And you really, really don't.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
And I truly mean that. That's why I'm totally against cognitive therapy. And I know That's pretty bold to stay on here, but it won't get to the root. Digging for that stuff will only create those neural pathways, like I said, that I caused the panic attacks for me digging in the past. But how do you access these emotions to free them? Because everyone wants to know how to do that.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
That's the real key. Every single moment in your day that bothers you is a portal. I call these portals to higher potential. This is what I teach. If you're bothered or triggered by something, in that moment, a portal opens, so to speak. Now you have the opportunity to step through, to feel that stuff, to allow it to move through you, to expand.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
So if I'm bothered by someone who cut me off in traffic, right, almost an accident, and I get rage and I tense up, in that moment, I can relax, allow it to move through me. There's a couple other things that you can do. If I process that out, that means that whatever was inside of me is released.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
That thing that's inside of me, the reason you were bothered by that person cutting you off in traffic isn't because of that driver. It's because of something that happened five years ago, 10 years ago, 30 years ago inside of you. If I'm overwhelmed at the day in my to-do list, it has nothing to do with my to-do list.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
It has everything to do with all of the stuff from years past that I'm holding inside of me. So you don't need to figure out, oh, where's this overwhelm coming from? You just need to feel it when it comes up.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
Because it is. It's just that it's a belief, right? We know how powerful beliefs are. But many of us don't know the alternative. We're not shown an embodiment of a person or someone who does that to know that it's possible. That's why this day and age is so powerful because we can pull up YouTube or this podcast and see, oh my gosh, that's possible. And that opens so many doors.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
Yeah, I know. Initially, I thought it was like a conspiracy theory, like they're suppressing the truth from us. But like, I don't think a lot of people know about this, right? Kids are really, really good at memory. Why? Because they use their imagination. I'm 38 years old, and my imagination is as good as any seven-year-old. That's part of it, is I've cultivated.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
It's not that I'm training my imagination, I'm allowing it to come back, because we all have it. It's just an innate ability that we block and say, oh... Be serious, be logical, right? That left brain type of dominance of the world. So a technique, let's talk about memorizing names, which you said you're horrible at. And I was too.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
Before I became a memory champion, I was absolutely horrible at names. To memorize something, one of the key things Techniques is to turn that piece of information into something visual, create a story with it and connect it. So with a name, you want to associate that name to someone's face or their body, right? So now let's create a story. I'm going to use Ilana. So when I look at the name Ilana,
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
I want to turn that into an image or a story. And immediately I think of ill, because it starts with ill, right? Alana. So I imagine maybe that you're ill and you're puking on a, you know, whatever, on a microphone. That sucks. Or on your body. And so here's the thing. It's completely weird and over the top, but that's why it's memorable, because it made you sick.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
Or like John. John, people think of like a toilet. It's a name of a toilet right in the U.S., a John, right? So imagine a toilet seat around my neck and you got my name, right? Or you think of your Uncle John with his arm around me like we're friends or whatever. You make that type of connection to remember it.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
Yeah, I'll tell you, I'll give you a secret or a real nugget here. And so just to brag here on the names thing, to give you an idea, in the US championship one year, I memorized 229 names and faces in 15 minutes. This is all I got pictures on paper and names. So I was not able to do that initially. This is not a natural thing. Just using the technique I gave you. So there's two ways to do this.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
So we're in a very... wonderful time. And that's what happened to me. That book just shattered everything that I knew. I thought photographic memory was a thing. I thought, you know, eidetic memory was a thing. It's not. It's largely a myth, believe it or not. It's on TV. We watch too much TV and movies to be convinced of all these things, right? So I learned what the mind wants.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
I would say a slow way, which I just gave you the technique. Most people try it this way or the fast way. So the wrong way, the slow way, is left brain. Meaning, okay, I look at Alana. I think of all the possible ones. I could do, okay, ill. I could do Lon, like I know someone named Lonnie. I could do I-L-L, like that's Illinois.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
I could do... So what you're doing is you're doing a Google search in your brain. You're looking logically through all the correct... Or the best answer. You're looking for the best answer, right? Think of how many of us wanted to have the right answer, right? Will this work? No. You're judging and you're thinking and you're analyzing. That's really, really slow.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
Or I could look at Alana and trust the first thing that comes to me. The instant it downloads in, it's like creativity. It just comes in. And I trust it. So I've trained my brain, I've trained myself to trust the first thing that comes into my mind. And that's how I go fast is I just trust, I trust, I trust, I trust, I trust instead of Google searching through my brain for the best answer.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
Oh, yeah. What I taught you with the names is a linking method. I'm connecting the name. I'm creating an image for the name and connecting it to the person, to you. You can do the same thing with vocab words. Think of like foreign languages. The foreign word, the national word, and connecting those two in a story. I give an example like piscina means pool, a swimming pool in Spanish, right?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
Piscina. So I always like piscina sounds like Peace or piss, right? Piss, like pissing in a pool. If you imagine pissing in a pool, you got piscina, right? And I'm sorry to offend anyone. I'm not sorry. People should know that in school, like a simple visual story method, a technique to remember vocab or definitions or things. especially like med students, right?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
Or just people going through a really hard test. So yeah, it should be in schools. We've tried, many of us who know about this, but the school system, the government's so archaic and dogmatic that they don't change. It's another battle.
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Gosh, I'll give you my first gut answer. is I wouldn't change anything. I wouldn't tell him anything because the anxiety that I went through, the panic, sounds awful, right? To go through most of my young life suppressing and being vanilla and hiding my true self Why would anyone want to go through that? But it was actually the greatest gift that I've ever given myself.
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Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
To go through that, to overcome it, to realize the true root, to overcome it, to unleash myself and my potential, I wouldn't be where I am today, meaning I wouldn't have accomplished all of the
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Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
magnitudes of things that i've done without that pain and without that struggle and that overcoming and now the ability to help others pull through it i wouldn't have the tools or the knowledge that i'm sharing on this i wouldn't be on this podcast today sharing this message and touching at least one person's life inspiring someone so when i think about this i wouldn't go back in time and i wouldn't talk to her maybe what i would do is just give him a hug and say
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Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
The mind loves visuals. The mind loves emotions. The minds love places. Like think of a restaurant. Think of a specific restaurant like Applebee's. in your hometown. I don't like Applebee's, but think of a specific restaurant.
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Trust yourself. You've got this. Keep going. And I mean, I wouldn't even tell him that because where I am today is very powerful because of what that young man, that boy endured and went through. It wasn't a bad thing. It was just what I needed to be on my highest mission and my destiny where I am today.
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Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
I'm not going to save everyone with what I'm going to say, right? Because it's just the brutal truth of it is, like you said earlier, it's 100% our responsibility, our ownership, that even when I was five years old and someone yelled at me and I shut down, it was my choice as a five-year-old to stop that energy from flowing through me. And I know that's brutal to say, but it's the truth is,
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We have a decision now, if you're feeling anxiety and you know now, listening to me, that the root cause is suppressed emotions built up over time, like a pressure cooker. Now you have the opportunity to fully feel through that, to release it, to process it.
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And in that, number one, you overcome the daily high stress, overwhelming anxiety that you're dealing with, like the dread, the paralysis, the fatigue, all of that can be overcome. Not saying you won't get nervous for a test or feel anxiety at moments, right? That's normal human emotion.
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Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
But if you step in and move through it, because you basically have two choices now, is you can move through this, face it, not face it in the external world with a sword and your might and your will, but to feel all the voltage. right?
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Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
You walk into the restaurant in your mind right now and you go, oh yeah, I remember the time the waitress spilled all over my dad or the time we had this memory or the birthday party. You remember it instantly because of that location. We attach memories to locations as well. So I use strategies that involve using what the mind wants in order to remember massive amounts of information.
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Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
You can go that route or you can continue to bury it in productivity, to bury it in working, to bury it in, like you said, smoking or drinking or overeating or pornography or any type of vice. And there's no judgment on that because we all go through that. We're humans. But I want to inspire you guys. Now that you know the root cause, let's lean into it so that you can overcome it.
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Instead of battling it, thinking, just like with my memory, I thought, oh, I was never going to have a good memory. No, I'm showing you right now it's possible for you to overcome this too. The same demons that I went through, the same panic, the same anxiety, it's the same root cause.
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Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
We went through different childhoods and different things, but it's all the same accumulation that's building up inside of you that you can now move through if you choose.
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Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
That's the choice. All the stuff that's happening to you that you're feeling isn't a bad thing. That's your mind telling you. There's no such thing as good and bad. All of it. Let's accumulate all of this stuff that's inside of you. I'll access all of it. Not just the good. Not just try to feel good all the time because that's the reason we're going through all this. But we have that choice.
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Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
It's just choice at this point. We all have free will. That's why half the people listening to this will dive in like inspired, right? And maybe another half will just keep doing what they're doing. That's okay. You know, eventually, like you said, it will get loud enough in their life where they will be forced to make another choice.
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You know, I wouldn't have shared it years ago, but I'm happy to share it now because it's really powerful. You know, it really, really is a lot of fun. So thank you for asking these questions for people to bring it forth to love this.
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Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
And we can all do this.
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Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
Good question. I don't get asked that often. As a child, I was very, very shy, reserved, cautious. I intuitively sought out the secrets of the universe. I was very different, and I never showed that with other people. I think I tried to fit in too much, and that blinded me for years.
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I just wanted to be like everyone else, but internally, and it showed up later in high school and college where I wanted to be somebody. I wanted to show my creativity to the world, but I was afraid, and We can talk about that later. There's a lot of wounding anxiety internally that suppressed what I had to bring to the world. But I always felt sort of like an alien in this world.
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And maybe I am, you know, in a way. I thought that many things were possible. And I think looking back, maybe I forgot about that over all the years, just trying to fit in and be okay with the crowd.
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Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
Every moment of your life that you've ever pushed away, that you couldn't handle, it's still inside of you. It's suppressed. I was having panic attacks every single day, multiple times a day. That's when I learned it was an emotional root issue.
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Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
Well, you learn, or I learned, and it goes along with wanting to be somebody, right? I said earlier, I wanted to be somebody. I learned that when the adults around me had a look of disappointment or the parents or whatever, that I was doing something wrong. And internally, you try to figure out how to avoid moments like that because they're painful.
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Being embarrassed or having someone disappointed in you for your choices or what you do or your grades is extremely painful emotionally. And that's sort of the crux of where anxiety starts is you try to build your life to avoid moments like that. That's why we're always thinking ahead how to play out this scenario or what to say to this person so we don't give too much and are hurt on the inside.
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Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
And that developed my programming. And the best way to cope was just to be vanilla or neutral around people and not give my bold opinions or not to show my true self too much. Because what if that's embarrassing or what if they make fun of that or things like that? So I was a very, very reserved person for many, many years, even around close friends and family.
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The panic attacks started more within the last five years. So really late. The anxiety was probably always there. When I was 13 years old, I had a chest surgery. My sternum was kind of caved in. I have sort of like a chest bowl. Like I always joked you could eat cereal out of it if I laid down. And it was kind of cool. Like everyone loved it, but I was very insecure about it.
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And so I got it fixed through surgery. At the same year, I changed schools. Completely new school, lockers. It was eighth grade, all new teachers, all new environment. And here I was, I couldn't carry more than five pounds of books to class because of my surgery. And I was healing and I had to leave five minutes early to avoid bumping into people.
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And it was those extremely scary, anxiety-filled time. I remember walking to class Mr. Bailey's woodshop class every morning. And I would look outside and if there was snow on the ground, I had this irrational thought that my mom was going to get into a car crash because of the icy and that she was going to die. And I would worry about her all throughout class.
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You could tell, you know, looking back, anxiety was very, very prevalent then because of how unsafe I felt in my environment and all the things that were going on.
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Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
We cope with it in so many different ways. I think me personally was productivity and achievement. accomplishment. I always needed to be doing something, earning something, achieving something, making something. And there's nothing wrong with that. But always being busy and rushed and thinking about the future can be very much a coping mechanism for that, just to bury those feelings.
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Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
I earned my third trophy, my third USA Memory Championship trophy about a year ago. And it was an amazing feeling. You're holding in your hand, it's like everything I've imagined and earned, and I love it, I'm so happy. And then I put it on my nightstand that night, and I felt immediately a little empty. And I thought, I need to prepare for next year.
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Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
So how can I go in front of 400 million people and memorize 700 different things without collapsing to the ground? It's because...
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I stepped back for a second, I said, this never ends, does it? Like I had a real life-changing moment. I said, this never, ever ends. And I realized all the money I was chasing, you know, the tens of thousand dollars a month or whatever goal I had or the travel or the family or, you know, the cars, all of that, anything external from me,
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can't give you lasting fulfillment or happiness or contentment ever, ever. And that's always been my driving force. Achieve, get, acquire, accomplish, right? Accumulate. And it doesn't last. My life changed in that moment. It's not that those things are bad. It's not that I don't have those things. But to have that as your driving core force will never solve anything.
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Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
All of this happiness that we could talk about, this is all internal. It's an internal releasing of all the blockages in the way and the preferences that we have that block us from feeling that flow of happiness at all times.
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Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
Yeah, that's a good question. I was sort of a jack of all trades at the time, meaning I was afraid to dive into one thing exclusively. Magic came to mind. Not that I was a magician or anything, but I was like, I want to be really cool. I want to have an ability that everyone drops their jaw and like wonders what I'm doing and like amazing. And when I read that book, I thought, this is it.
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Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
This is a superpower. Not everyone knows about it, right? Everyone I meet to this day doesn't know about memory competitions in these feeds. So I thought, I'm just going to go all out. I'm going to win Grandmaster of Memory, that certificate that's behind me. I wanted to win that in my first competition.
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Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
And so for that, at the time, I needed to memorize 1,000 digits in an hour in one of the events, 10 decks of cards in one hour in another event, and one deck of cards in under two minutes. And I thought I could do that because when you read the book, you believe it's possible. So I trained for like four months, signed up for my first competition. This was in China. That's another story.
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Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
I'm traveling through China with my girlfriend, who's my wife now. Signed up. I'm sitting down at the first event, which is 30 minutes. We memorize names and faces on a piece of paper. There's like 300 people in the room memorizing, which basically looks like you're taking a test. It's super intense. My heart is pounding out of my chest.
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Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
Psychologically, I've never been that stressed before in my life. Never felt that much pressure. I almost got up and walked out. It was so intense. And that's sort of my story is how to overcome that, right? How to merge with that feeling. But I almost gave up and I bombed. I completely bombed in that competition.
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Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
Because there was a couple core things I didn't know what to do, like how to review. So I started talking to some of the best people in the world. Nelson Dulles is a friend of mine. He's a five-time U.S. champion. Boris Conrad from Germany. These people from all over the world were just gifting me insights. Like you talk, meet people who know what they're doing as mentors, as friends.
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Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
And I started befriending these people. And years later, I kept going. I learned from the mistakes I made. I learned how to train with that pressure because the pressure was the number one challenge for me. It wasn't the memory techniques. I could do that. I could visualize. I could store the information in my memory palaces. We talk about the techniques, but it was the pressure.
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Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
It was sitting down and having your heart race out of your chest, having the voice in your head tell you, you already made a mistake. You're going to F up. Look at all these people. They're better than you. And feeling like the mouth go dry, feeling the head go hot, all of those things, I had to learn how to perform under that.
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Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
Yeah, this is the best question. I hope people really listen to this. At the time, I was told by another competitor. His name was Brad Zupp, a friend of mine. He trained in Starbucks. So he would go to Starbucks, he would get his memory gear out on the table and have people walking all around looking at him like, what's this guy doing? Having the noise and train under those conditions.
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Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
So I thought, wow, that's really cool. I need to train under those conditions. And another champion, Ron White, he got a waterproof deck of cards and he would submerge himself underwater, holding his breath and memorize under the psychological pressure. He actually hired a Navy SEAL to train him for the mental, psychological, physical pressure.
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Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
And so I took those to heart and I started doing them myself. I call this chaos training. So most memory competitors will sit in their room. They'll put these nice ear blockers over their ears, get nice and quiet and learn the techniques and memorize. And there's nothing wrong with that.
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Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
But clearly when you're in a competition or a TV show and there's massive pressure, you crumble because you're not used to that. That's what happened to me. So I would literally get my stuff ready to memorize, my paper on the sheet, my timer ready. I would get down, do 20 pushups holding my breath.
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Crippling Anxiety: How I Beat Panic Attacks to Become a 3x USA Memory Champion | John Graham | E75
I would have already chugged a ton of water to make sure I had to pee like the moment I had to memorize. I would put a podcast in my ear as loud as I possibly could push it. And it was a podcast that I actually wanted to listen to that I hadn't heard before. So immediately, like, I got to pee. My heart's racing. I'm out of breath. I got the podcast mirror.