Lessons - The Hidden Psychology of Crisis Survival | Matt Gutman - Chief National Correspondent at ABC News

Today's success story podcast is brought to you by Van to now listen up this matters for your business and today's digital landscape security isn't optional it's essential without it deal stall sales cycle stretch out and scaling becomes really difficult why because investors customers partners they all expect businesses to demonstrate strong security practices before they commit to anything and if you can't prove trust you lose opportunity so whether you're a startup founder trying to lend that first big client or an established company scaling your security program vanta helps businesses of all sizes prove they're trustworthy by automating compliance across 35 frameworks like sock to ISO 2701 and hipa the exact certifications your prospects your customers are demanding and here's why you need to pay attention vanta gives you back precious time you're currently wasting on compliance their platform automates up to 90% of the tedious compliance work and it helps you respond to those endless security questionnaires up to five times faster and they also connect you with experts to get your security program running immediately in the results they speak for themselves a recent IDC report found that vanta customers achieve over 535 thousand dollars per year in benefits and the platform pays for itself in just three months so join over 10,000 global companies like Atlassian, Kora and factory who use vanta to manage risk and prove security in real time and don't miss this for a limited time only my listeners can get a thousand dollars off vanta that's real money back in your pocket visit vanta.com slash scott now before this offer expires that's vant.com slash scott for a thousand dollars off in this lessons episode discover why panic is wired into human DNA as both a survival mechanism and a challenge learn to differentiate between debilitating anxiety and natural stress responses and explore techniques like breathwork intentional exposure and psychedelic integration to transform panic into resilience you mentioned something i just want to ask you one thing on that point because you said it's built into our genetic our DNA into our genetics right this is this is how we survived as a species and evolved but it's also it's also partly built into catches and past trauma so how do you know when it's working the way it should versus if it is maybe working on overdrive because of things that have happened in our past i mean i think it's a brilliant question and i'm not just buttering up the interview i think it's a really good question we don't know um the thing is if the panic is debilitating to your life then it's something you've got to deal with then there's something going on there with the trauma that you need to deal with if it's a one-off like you had on an extraordinarily hot day in Miami when you're hungover and you see some weird stats about your blood pressure and you have and you have a panic attack that's a different issue right that it's environmental maybe you have a greater predisposition for panic because you are higher on the anxiety scale possibly it's not a bad thing by the way but when it's like debilitating your life then that's when you need to deal with it on a more holistic way and that's what i needed to do i needed to like basically treat panic as i treated the big stories i worked on in my journalism career which is like and that's how i played sports you know in high school and college like if there's a wall i'm gonna run through it i'm gonna do whatever i need to do and that's what i sign myself with panic i'm like okay first i'm gonna learn everything there is to possibly learn about panic then i'm gonna figure out why it is that i'm broken and why humans evolved to have panic in the DNA or anxiety because all the science tells us it's so unhealthy and then once i looked looked into that of realizing yes it's kind of unhealthy but it's also one of the things that preserves humans and your body doesn't care if you suffer a little bit it wants you just not to be dead anything to not get dead no i was gonna say i mean that's a good that's a good nice little built-in uh uh uh safety mechanism i mean i'm not gonna complain about that but 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 wasn't was the solution breath work was the solution therapy was the solution awareness was a 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 i definitely had not evolved what i went back to work i was presented with you know like i could have stayed out but like i had i am the sole breadwinner right like i couldn't quit my job so i needed to find an exit ramp and my in my brain uh i was like okay just take everything easy just don't take it so seriously uh 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 get it a couple times with Lane and i had you know a good a couple of really good experiences uh during my suspension also went to Alaska had a near death experience in the sergeant like i got lost on on near denali in the snow and in mid-February in Alaska just typically not a great thing to do as it gets getting dark but like 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 that you should have a panic which is your body being like holy shit Matt you're alone in denali it's 3 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 look how i feel that's like exactly what from a level panic attack okay well this is my body working as it should it during this 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 this that was like quick sand of snow so powdery i couldn't get on top so i was like drowning in it so i before i'd seen snow shoe hairs i'm like i'm gonna make myself like a snow shoe hair so i thrashed around to this spruce tree and i apologize to the tree but i start like snapping off branches and i putting them in like clothes in my jacket in my hands and in my feet and in like all over and i'm basically like being a snow angel to get out of the deep snow and that's how i got out of there and because the 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 a very different way than i come up off the trail because i'm like hey i'll let me trick off the beat and got the finale when i'm hiking it alone in the middle of the winter that was dumb but anyway my 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 like somehow an hour later i figured out how to cross the trail and i got back on the trail like all the stuff that happens in a panic in a stress response worked as it shook 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 um yeah i had to go back to work because like i needed the paycheck to be quit honest um but like 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 um but i'm in a lot better place than it was but that was years that took like three and a half years of like maintenance and work and lots of psychedelics and therapy and i tried every pharmaceutical out there that you could ever imagine adhd dimension and bends in antidepressants in anti-seger medication everything um and it didn't work what worked for me best was learning that i'm okay evolutionarily like this is part of the human DNA so like that i'm not fucked up that i am like as a human is that i'm not totally broken and learning that like 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 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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 you notice a significant decrease when you're about to go on air next time or you're asking yeah I'm on I'm asking I have no idea I haven't done breath workers psychedelics yeah yeah uh 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 my strategy is like throwing myself into more speaking engagements on purpose so that I just get more I get more I get more shots at it and then every time it gets a little bit easier isn't it funny how people would be like hold on I don't get it like you have a problem speaking publicly but you literally do it for a living like you're speaking publicly now I mean okay so humans in the room with you but like you talk for a living I mean it's funny and no one would say be like there's no way Scott experiences stage fright like how would that be possible he's so fluid he's so confident but that's how humans are right we're we're an interesting species um so yeah like it works through reps but for me I'd had thousands of reps alive TV and I still was having panic uh 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 the psilocybin mushrooms and there is a a physical impact host treatment of these things that it definitely reduces the incidence of anxiety and depression but there also images that you get from having these psychedelic experiences that you take with you and that um I use this sort of like a treasure box to go back to for periods of calm like I'm thinking about you know 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 nose dive into the forest and the dirt thousand feet below and instead of just like smashing my face into the forest or the the the forest floor the forest rose up to meet me so in my afterwards as them doing what's called integration which is like you think about and and you get help with this psychologist 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 gonna let myself down or that someone's gonna 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 gonna be okay everything is gonna be okay and it like hey maybe that wouldn't work for everybody for me that gave me a really a real sense of peace like I'm gonna be caught in the trust fall of life and so that's one of the things I keep in my little treasure box of images 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 you