Lessons - The ABC News Anchor Who Had a Panic Attack on Live Television | Matt Gutman - ABC Chief National Correspondent & Bestselling Author

In this lessons episode, discover how understanding the body's stress response can change the way anxiety and panic are experienced. Learn why repeated exposure alone may not address the root cause. Understand how processing buried emotions can build resilience and explore how simple habits like exercise, movement, and human connection can help regulate stress. I was just going to ask... When you look at sort of the point in your life when you realize it was a major issue, you do some breath work, and you go back to work. You're still reporting. You didn't change your career. Was the solution breath work? Was the solution therapy? Was the solution awareness? Was the solution... All of those things combined with doing the thing that gives you anxiety another 200 times, being cognizant of the fact that this feeling is actually going to arise, but working through it anyways with a little bit of a more educated lens. Like, how did you evolve from that point? Well, I definitely had not evolved when I went back to work. I was presented with, you know, like I could have stayed out, but like I am the sole breadwinner, right? Like I couldn't quit my job, so I needed to find an exit ramp. And in my brain... I was like, okay, just take everything easy. Just don't take it so seriously. You know, breath work had definitely helped to open up my mind a bit and relieve some of the pressure that had been building up just emotionally. So I did it a couple times with Lane, and I had, you know, a couple of really good experiences during my suspension. I also went to Alaska, had a near-death experience, and the sergeant said, like, okay. I got lost near Denali in the snow in mid-February in Alaska, which is typically not a great thing to do as it gets getting dark. But I had a surge of adrenaline, which is basically your stress response, which is the same thing essentially as a panic attack, but it was for... the real reason you should have a panic, which is your body being like, holy shit, Matt, you're alone in Denali, it's three o'clock in the afternoon, it's getting dark, you have no food, you have a little bit of water, and you're stuck in snow that's over your head and you can't get out, you're fucked. And I'm like, oh, I'm fucked, then look how I feel, that's like exactly what I feel, I have a panic attack. Okay, well, this is my body working as it should, During the stress response. And in fact, what happened was it triggered something in my brain that allowed me to think of a novel way to get out of this snow that was so deep I couldn't get out of it. It was like quicksand of snow, so powdery I couldn't get on top, so I was like drowning in it. So before I'd seen snowshoe hare, so I'm like, I'm going to make myself like a snowshoe hare. So I thrashed around to this spruce tree, and I apologize to the tree, but I start snapping off branches, and I'm putting them in my clothes, into my jacket, and in my hands, and in my feet, and all over, and I'm basically being a snow angel to get out of the deep snow, and that's how I got out of there. And because... One of the things that does work when you're having a panic attack is your internal GPS system. I had gone down the mountain in a very different way than I had come up off the trail because I'm like, hey, let me take off the beaten path of Denali when I'm hiking it alone in the middle of the winter. That was dumb. But anyway, your internal GPS system works really well when you're having a stress response. And it totally oriented me on the right path. I did not have a trail. And somehow, an hour later, I figured out how to cross the trail, and I got back on the trail. All the stuff that happens in a panic, in a stress response... worked as it should. I'm like, okay, so this obviously just had a stress response and it worked to my advantage. I've had stress responses in a panic that do not work to my advantage. So part of it is okay. Let me figure out how to deal with the part that's not working for me. Yeah, I had to go back to work because I needed the paycheck to be quite honest. But the journey of figuring out panic and getting to the end of panic, I don't know if it's not sure I'll never have a panic attack again, but I'm in a lot better place than I was. But that was years. That took three and a half years of maintenance and work and lots of psychedelics and therapy. And I tried every pharmaceutical out there that you could ever imagine. Yeah. ADHD medication and Ben's and antidepressants and anti-seizure medication, everything. And it didn't work. What worked for me best was learning that I'm okay evolutionarily. This is part of the human DNA. So that I'm not fucked up. That I am as a human is. That I'm not totally broken. and learning that a way to express the feelings that I've been bottling up inside for so long through getting out of my right mind with altered states. Because in my right mind, I was way too controlling of my emotions. But when you're doing an altered state, you have no control, whether it be breath work or ayahuasca. You lose control, and once you lose control, you can start to expectorate, to cough up, to get rid of all of this anguish and grief inside or whatever it is that you're dealing with. And when you do that kind of work, it does carry over into your day to day. So when you do the breath work or even the psychedelics, when you sort of confront these demons, when you're going in, you notice a significant decrease when you're about to go on air next time? Oh, you're asking. Yeah, I mean. I'm asking. I have no idea. I haven't done breath work or psychedelics yet. Yeah, definitely. I'm asking for me, dude. I'm asking for me because I've only dealt with it by just doing it more. So now my strategy is like throwing myself into more speaking engagements on purpose so that I just get more shots at it. And then every time it gets a little bit easier. Isn't that funny? People would be like, hold on, I don't get it. You have a problem speaking publicly, but you literally do it for a living. You're speaking publicly now. I mean, okay, so there are humans in the room with you, but you talk for a living. It's funny. And no one would say, there's no way Scott experiences stage fright. How would that be possible? He's so fluid. He's so confident. But that's how humans are, right? We're an interesting species. So yeah, it works through reps. But for me, I'd had thousands of reps on live TV and I still was having panic. So I needed to figure out this other way out. And so there are a couple of things that happen with altered states. One is the medicine itself helps relieve anxiety, right? Like especially with ketamine, they've done a lot of it, a lot of studies on ketamine, but also MDMA and psilocybin, mushrooms, and... There is a physical impact post-treatment of these things that it definitely reduces the incidence of anxiety and depression. But there are also images that you get from having these psychedelic experiences that you take with you and that I use as sort of like a treasure box to go back to for periods of calm. I'm thinking about... One of these things in ketamine is that I was flying over this forest, just like me, Matt, or my avatar, soaring over this forest. And I perch on this high cliff. And for some reason, my avatar decided to take a nosedive into the forest and the dirt 1,000 feet below. And instead of just smashing my face into the forest or the forest floor, the forest rose up to meet me. So in my afterwards, as I'm doing what's called integration, which is like... You think about, and you get help with the psychologist, of like, why you saw the stuff you saw, what experiences you had, and how to work that into your day-to-day life and gain meaning from it. I was like, that's like the trust fall of life. I'm always worried that I'm going to let myself down or that someone's going to let me down, so I have to have hyper control. But look at that. The earth met up, rose up to meet me. It's going to be okay. Everything is going to be okay, and it like, Maybe that wouldn't work for everybody. For me, that gave me a real sense of peace. I'm going to be caught in the trustful of life. And so that's one of the things I keep in my little treasure box of images. Did you go back and did you explore if there was some childhood trauma or something that just exacerbated this issue more than it probably should have been? Something that happened when you were a kid that you didn't address? My dad's death. My dad died when I was 12 in a plane crash. And again, even before that, I was always into adventure and I was pretty good at compartmentalizing stuff. But I did not, I mean, nobody, how can any 12-year-old grieve? I cried for a few days and then my house was full of friends and family and fattening food and I ate and played and I tried to avoid the pain and then I became really good at avoiding the pain. And we grieve throughout our whole lives just as we heal throughout our whole lives and You know, that wellness stuff is really work, and you got to keep at it. And it wasn't, you know, I didn't just do those psychedelic experiences, but I've been working on this stuff for five years now, pretty much. Or four, yeah. Yeah. I used to work, unfortunately, but that's the nature of it. You also mentioned you tried a whole bunch of different... pharmacy, pharmacological fixes for this that didn't really work out. Is there any supplements that reduce anxiety or even complement the therapy, the psychedelics, the work that you're putting in? I don't know. I've heard about beta blockers. I've never tried those, but things like that. So beta blockers are... a pharmaceutical that basically prevent your body, your heart from reaching a certain heart rate. It basically will not let your heart beat super, super fast. So you won't breathe so heavily. You won't feel like you're having a heart attack. And just knocking that one symptom of panic down helps a lot of people because then you don't get into the full cascade of panic symptoms. Um, it didn't work so well for me. It made me feel sluggish as did, uh, Xanax, which is like a go-to for a lot of people. Um, and also like, I didn't want to be taking, you know, if I'm on air every day, like I'm going to take a Xanax every day or a couple Xanax. Like how much can I take? I really, I've always, it's a great drug. It does great things, but like I couldn't see myself on it every single day. And I felt like there was something fundamental in me that needed to be addressed. And I- And after a while, like there was so much, only so much pharmacology could do. My favorite drugs though, are the drugs that our body produces endogenously. You know, like we hear the word endorphins, but we- forget that it means endogenous morphine. And endorphin is the morphine your body creates by itself. And you do it when you have 30 plus minutes of exercise and it's a painkiller, right? Serotonin is like the best feel-good drug. There is a reason The SSRIs, the antidepressants, are called SSRIs because they basically make you uptake the serotonin faster. But the same thing can be done with a five-minute walk or being outside in sunshine. There are ways of capturing these drugs that are endogenous in our systems that we can achieve very, very easily by doing a couple of things. Crying releases oxytocin, which is the bonding drug hormone. That's what happens when a mother looks at her child. Or when you hug someone and you hug them chest to chest, not like side man hug, but like you hug someone chest to chest and you feel your hearts beating against each other. You may not feel that, but like when you have like an actual heart to heart, your body releases oxytocin, which is this feel good chemical. So there are all these ways of achieving this stuff that we can do by just being a little bit kinder to our bodies. So people don't like to hear it, but yes, I'm a huge advocate of exercise and of eating right and of taking a five-minute walk to make yourself feel better. There are all these things that I try to keep in my daily routine that help me not get to the point of I'm likely to have a panic attack. Like, think about if you had eaten that morning before going to Publix, not supermarket where you got your blood pressure, or if you had not been drunk the night before, or if you had had more of a walk before it, you probably would have gotten to the point where your body would have been like, okay, no loss, something real bad is happening here, and I'm going to pull the panic alarm, the fire alarm, and I'm going to let Scott know that something is not right here and that he's got to pay attention. Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.