Matt Gutman - Chief National Correspondent at ABC News | How to Overcome Crippling Anxiety

I had like hundreds of panic attacks on air over the years. A panic attack actually lasts anywhere from 15 seconds to 90 seconds. That is the period of panic. But a panic is your brain assessing a threat. Definition about panic attack is your brain registering a threat and telling your body it's in trouble. Your heart starts going fast. You start breathing heavy that sometimes your greatest weakness becomes an asset. 40% of all the patients who turn up at our nation's ERs, complaining of heart failure, heart attack, they're having a panic attack. Panetic is the maximal expression of fear. I describe panic as the orgasm of anxiety. The medicine itself helps relieve anxiety. Your fear is very likely never going to happen. Welcome to Success Story. I'm your host, Scott Clary. The Success Story podcast is part of the HubSpot podcast network. Very exciting news. HubSpots inbound converts is back, which means you got to clear your schedules. Mark your calendars, get the sitter, three jam pack days from September 18th through the 20th live emboss and you're going to hear inspirational narratives, candid interviews on the highs and lows of incredibly notable figures, business owners, politicians, you're going to learn from successful entrepreneurs like Ryan Reynolds and Serena Williams on how they reinvented themselves and their businesses to achieve massive success. They're going to gain valuable insights from industry leaders, visionaries on effective strategies for personal and professional growth. And there's so much more. And on top of all that, I'm speaking again. This is my third inbound. So I'll be doing a segment. So if you want to hear from Ryan Reynolds, Serena Williams, or you want to hear from me, go to inbound.com, go see the lineup and grab your ticket today. I'll see you in Boston. All right, Matt. Thank you for coming on. I appreciate you. Appreciate your time. It's going to be a lot of fun. And we're going to teach people a lot. And I think it's very useful. Everything you put into this book that you sort of discovered over your life is not discussed enough, which I think is why this is going to be a really good show. So I just want to start it here, even the name of the book, how I curved my anxiety and conquered a lifetime of panic attacks. When did you first realize that you were having panic attacks? The question of when I first realized that I was having a panic attack versus when I first actually had a panic attack are two very different things. So the first time I had a panic attack, well, I probably had many ones. I was school council president. High achiever at high school, like great grades, school council president, captain of the football, captain of the cross, you know, had to be very intense. And I would do these presentations in front of the school every morning. And I realized that I just got so nervous. And I was like, pit in my stomach and then couldn't really speak straight. But the first time I had like a underpants wedding mind rattling like earth shaking panic attack was defending my college thesis, senior year in college, the very end of college. So I was like, it wasn't even graded. It wasn't mandatory. I didn't have to do it. There was nothing writing on it. And yet when my name was called to go to the podium and speak in front of my classmates and the faculty at the political science department, I felt like I was molting into a werewolf. Like, yeah, my heart felt like it was just being ripped from my chest. I couldn't breathe. I had tunnel vision. I was shaking. I felt like the floor was falling out. I was at this white knuckled grip on the podium. Because I was like, I was going to fall down. I could remember a thing I said. I couldn't see anybody in the crowd. It was a pretty humbling experience. But you know, already by then, I was so good at compartmentalizing that as soon as it ended, I'm like, I had fucked that I've never, I don't know what that was. That was the most horrific experience of my life. But I'm not going to think about it again. I'm going to put it in this place and I'm not going to deal with it. But then whatever that experience was, started to happen again once I started doing radio for ABC and then TV. And it wasn't until I was in my 30s, like mid 30s that I finally realized, like this thing that happens to me that makes me have this incredibly painful and miserable experiences, a panic attack, and I'm having, I had like hundreds of panic attacks on air over the years. And I wasn't quite sure what it was. I just knew I didn't like it. So can you describe a feeling of a panic attack versus stage fright? Because I think a lot of people can totally understand what you went through when you're doing presentations in school and then also when you're defending your thesis. And now I'm curious just thinking back to when I step on stage, it's gotten a lot better. But when you start to go on stage, you start to get stressed out, you start to feel your heartbeat, your mouth gets dry. These seems like classic signs of just stage fright. But obviously it's not just stage fright. It's taking it a step further. So what defined your panic attack like when you were doing ABC? Well, I think it's, I mean, so what happens when you go on stage? You just, you feel like, and then what happens? Like, how does it end? How does it subside? For me, I think that after I go on stage, about five minutes in, I get too distracted by the thing that I'm speaking about and then I forget about the stress. But in the 30 seconds before somebody calls my name to go on stage, or even in a, the most ridiculous example is when somebody is going around the room and asking people to introduce themselves. Totally. Pretty sensitive. You're bracking. That's ridiculous. It's stressful. It's horrible. But then you start to speak, but I need five minutes to speak before I forget about it. So here's the thing, the problem you're hitting the nail in the head. The problem for me was that I also get over it within five minutes and most people, and I bet you get over it even quicker than that. A panic attack actually lasts anywhere from 15 seconds to 90 seconds. That is the period of panic, right? The rest of it is anxiety. It's your body getting over this very unpleasant experience that it just had. But a panic is your brain assessing a threat. Holy shit, they're coming around the room. And I have to come up with something clever to say about myself other than my stupid name and where I'm from, but I have to like sound intelligent. And they're coming around all got them two people away. Your brain is assessing a threat, a social threat. That is very real, right? Because people judge us upon our behavior and our performance. And the problem for me in my line of work is that often my presentation on air is about 15 seconds, maybe 30 seconds, sometimes longer. So I am like existing in that full nut kick of panic for the full time that I'm on air. I didn't know any of this at the time, but that's what I was living through all the time. And when it was the longer the performance on air, if I had to talk for a minute or three minutes, the easier it would be for two reasons. One, your panic is already subsided. Your adrenaline is washed through your system. You're beyond the actual panic stage. And two, the longer you have to talk as you do during your talks to crowds, the less need for perfection there is, right? If you talk for 15 seconds, like we often do on national television, on network TV and it's a pretty short thing, you're expected to be pretty damn near flawless, right? You've got to hit that perfection. If you talk for five minutes, I mean, nobody cannot make a single verbal mistake in five minutes. You do an um or a ha or a repeater word. But in the 15 seconds that we perform on TV or 30 or a minute, it's got to be pretty near perfect. So all that was getting into my head. So the longer I got to speak, the less I felt of the panic symptoms. Except in that first time in doing the college thesis in which I felt like it lasted the whole time. I don't even know like it was a very, I feel like I had barrel cats attacking my neck. And they're just like, because I was wearing a turtleneck sweater because I thought it was professorial or smart looking. And I was like, I'm dying the cats. No, I'm just thinking about all those like, I like to reenactment by the way. Wearing a turtleneck to speak on stage sounds like for me an absolute nightmare. But that is like the first thing I tell people, never wear stuff. I mean, if we have to wear a tie fine, but do not wear a sweater turtleneck. No, never. For me, I got my I got my uniform on stage. I got my v neck. I got my blazer. I got my jeans. I'm very comfortable. And actually, this is a big this is a big strategy from because if I overheat or if something's not quite right, it seems to just add on to the to the shit show that's happening live in real time. And I mean, when you describe it like that, it sounds like any time anyone ever has stage fright, it's just a panic attack or or or maybe your nerves that are not a full on panic attack, right? People can feel you there is nervous and then there's a panic attack. So the definition about panic attack is your brain registering a threat and telling your body it's in trouble. The way it tells and possibly going to be attacked. And the way it does that is by is a cascade of chemicals, a bunch of messages being sent. I'm not going to get into the whole thing of it because it's boring. But basically your adrenal glands begin to admit adrenaline. Your heart starts going fast. You start breathing heavy. Some people feel shaking, trembling, sweating. People feel like they can't breathe suffocation. There are feelings of derealization and pending death. Feelings of loss of control. All of that is included in the suite of symptoms. And some people can experience some of them. Sometimes people can experience almost all of them. I had a lot of them. I never thought I was going to die during one. But it definitely had like loss of control was a huge thing for me. I'm like, I've no control. That's why I like describe it as is turning into a werewolf. Because it feels like you have no control over something very critical that's happening in your body at the time. And like there is something that is visceral. And it's not just in your head what's happening to me is physical. I'm feeling it and I'm having a physical reaction. I'm sweating through my pants, going pale. I'm trembling like this is very, very real. I can't breathe all that stuff. So as you go through your career, you sort of just push this to the side. You push that you just assume this is like the cost of doing business. Basically, that's what that's what you assume. So what was the moment where it sort of came to a peak and it was no longer ignorable? So the irony is, Scott, that sometimes your greatest weakness becomes an asset. So I didn't know this at the time, because I didn't even know I was fully having panic attacks. I called it nerves in my head. I got nerves, but it's okay. But I was having such a physical reaction that it made me like zing with energy. And so when I started in TV in 2010, I did a print reporter and a radio reporter. And so when I started actually doing TV, people are like, holy cow, Matt Guppen really punches through the TV. It's got so much energy. They're like, I do have energy. But I'm also having the panic attack and basically shitting my pants. So you're watching people were watching me be like, and the executive producers loved it. So like, yes, put Guppen on live more. Like, no, no, don't put Guppen on live more, no more live. But that's what was happening. So I was getting sent to do all these assignments and everything that was live. It was kind of this very strange irony. And I learned to start dreading going live because I felt this way. On the other hand, in some ways, it was the secret to my success. Because, you know, I really brought it. So it's that funny combination for me. Sorry, I was going to say it can happen. I was going to just tell you a quick story just to provide some context. So why this is actually such an important conversation for me. And I want to just sort of hear as it progressed in your life. But just to get some context to listeners and just to give you context for, you know, where I come from. So I actually had one of these about a year ago. And I've always had this stage fright. But this was in a grocery store. So this was not in front of an audience. And I'll tell you exactly what happened. I got, I'm walking through Publix. Yeah, super maddening. Yeah, super market chain in in in South Florida. I hadn't had a lot to eat that day. And got on a whim on a whim. I go to the blood pressure machine. I'm like, I haven't gotten a blood pressure check in a long time. I haven't gone to the doctor. So I put my arm in the blood pressure machine. And I check my blood pressure. And I'm a big guy. I used to play sports. I'm always trying to be healthy. But I'm always like, I want to watch my diet. I want to make sure that I'm not, you know, eating garbage. And I look at my blood pressure. And I can't remember if it's good or not. So I start to Google on my phone. Is this a healthy blood pressure? And it's like, and then the first Google result is it's a little bit high. And as I walk away from the blood pressure machine, I start to feel my heart racing. I start to feel that I'm getting cold sweats. I start to feel like I texted my girlfriend. I said, like, I think I'm having a hard time. I'm manifesting all this shit in my head. And I couldn't, I couldn't keep grocery shopping. I couldn't do anything. I actually had to sit down at the front. And I had to get a friend come and pick me up. Because I actually thought I was having a heart attack. And it was all manifested completely in my head. And then I actually drove to ER. Got all the EKG stuff done. And obviously nothing, nothing at all. Nothing in your blood. No, no sign of anything wrong. But dude, it felt so real. It felt like I was, like, that was the worst feeling I've ever experienced in my life. And it felt like a heart attack. But that was my one experience that actually made me realize that these things are not, these things are not messing around. They're not just nerves. So yeah. You know, there's a reason people, first of all, I'm just sorry that you experienced that. Because it's terrifying and it's miserable. And then you feel shame about it afterwards. Right? Then people feel embarrassed. Well, oh, I should have known it wasn't a heart attack. I, blah, blah. But I mean, one of the things that, so when, and we'll get to where your previous question went. But one of the reasons I wrote this book is not because I wanted to write a book at the start of it. I wanted to fix me because I had similar episodes as you did. And I'm like, I'm broken. There's something underlying all this. I don't know what the hell it is. But I'm broken and I need to fix it. And if I don't fix it, I'm going to die. Like I, this is not sustainable. I'm miserable. I hate my job. It's making me a miserable human being. This is not how I want to live. So I wanted to fix me. I honestly like, I love everybody. But I was not thinking about helping others and writing a book. But it's about a year later, once I started doing the research. I mean, I was doing a research for over a year. And when I got so deep into the research that I realized that I'm not alone, that 40% of all the patients who turn up at our nation's ERs, complaining of heart failure, heart attack, whatever you want to call it, they're having a panic attack. 58% almost two thirds are either having some sort of either a panic attack or anxiety related symptoms. So that just gives you a sense of how epidemic it is that people conflate a heart attack with a panic attack. In fact, it's in the introduction of the book. I talked to this 911 operator I've known for years. And he did was a 911 operator for 17 years. You hear a lot of heart attacks. You also hear a lot of panic attacks. She was never despite the fact of being like so good at her job. She could not tell the difference between someone who was having a bona fide, a heart attack, and someone who was having a panic attack because the symptoms so closely mirror of each other, shaking, sweating, that vice in your chest, the inability to breathe. This is exactly what a heart attack is. And we'll get to it a little bit later, but there's a reason for that. What the founder of evolutionary psychology, Randy Nessie, told me, is that your body wants a panic attack to be memorable. It wants you to suffer because it wants it to be memorable because it wants you not to repeat whatever behavior got you into that. And those are their big social reasons for that. But basically a panic attack is your body pulling the fire alarm, a false alarm, right? It's saying, hello, I want you to pay attention right now. Pay big attention. Well, you're having a big experience right now. Pay attention and your body is also willing to have a thousand false alarms pulling that fire alarm so long as you don't have a mist alarm. A false alarm, maybe you go to the ER or once you get used to it like me, you bird 50 calories sweating and like being frantic. But a false alarm, but missing a real alarm, you're dead, right? You're on the freeway, you're on the Julia Tuttle Parkway in Miami, or whatever it is. And there's a pile up in front of you. You don't see it. You crash into it and you're dead. But a false alarm, you're just burning 50 calories. And it is massively common in America. And unfortunately, they probably told you that you're probably having some sort of anxiety or panic related episode, right? Well, they had no idea what was going on, but yeah. So the problem is, and a lot of people like you are not diagnosed, they don't go home being told, hey, listen, you had a panic attack. This is how to deal with it. Let me get you some help. Most people are sent home not being told what it is because physicians, internations, ERs feel much more comfortable talking about physiological issues than emotional or psychological issues. So they don't feel like they should step into the psychological realm, even though that's what's happening. But what I want, like, your listeners and viewers out there to come away with is that panic attack is normal. It is just a way of your body signaling that it wants you to pay attention. It's normal because we have half of Americans are going to experience a panic attack in their lifetime. What your body doesn't want is for you to have a mist alarm and they're short. The panic is really the 15 to 90 seconds of your brain assessing the threat. The rest of it is anxiety. It's painful. It's awful, but we live with anxiety every day and we can get through it. Those are the broad parameters of a panic attack that a lot of people have. And what you add is super common because people have stage fright, but people also have panic when they drive a car. I can't tell you how many people experience panic talking to a cashier at a supermarket. That's like a big deal for some reason. A lot of people have those interactions and can't cope. Plains just in day-to-day life, it is massively common. Sorry, long-winded answer. No, no, no. It's a good answer because I always are trying to figure out what it was. And it was me over complicating and over concerning my own health and just making all these, I'm a healthy dude. I'm 33. There's no reason why anybody who's 33 who plays sports should be having a heart attack. But for me, it was just in that moment. I just let my head just, my mind just run, right? And then all of a sudden, this was the result of it. And we also have to pay attention to the environmental factors as well. Right? You didn't eat that morning. You mentioned that. Yeah. It's probably Miami, so it's hot as hell and humid. It was one of the hottest days. And I think I drank the night before too. So I was a little bit hungover. Hadn't eaten super hot. Get a blood pressure. It was just like, I felt like shit already going into it. That's all the parameters for that kind of panic attack. And there are so many people like you have been to the same ER in Miami for the same thing. Hungover, it's hot outside. Something spooks them. And the brain goes into overdrive. Tells them that they're under threat that they're going to die. And they think they're having a heart attack. It's a panic attack. It's massively common in America. But what like the book hopes to do is to create more awareness so people don't have to go to the ER. So they can understand that in the moment, this is, you know, it's painful. But I'm not having a heart attack. I'm having a panic attack because of X, Y and Z. So let's go back to the question I asked before. So as I interrupt, you know, that was my bad. But I wanted to tell that story just so you understand that I dealt with this shit. And it was not fun. And I realized as a Canadian that you can't just just take a limit of trips to the ER. Like you can't back again. Welcome to America, my friend. No national health service. It costs it. It should cost. So when was the, when was the moment that this sort of turned into a major issue for you? Like you, you obviously had these micro attacks or you understood it was happening. But there was a point, a moment when obviously everything just sort of peaked and you're like, I got to figure this out. I got to get my shit together. I got to sort of take this and tackle it head on. Yeah. I was, it was a Sunday, January 26, 2020. And I was cooking pancakes for the kids. I had been on a road trip for like 30 days before that, just like almost never home. So I was excited to be home. And I got a call. My boss says, hey, listen. We think a helicopter carrying Kobe Bryant. And maybe some members of his family just went down in Calabasis in California. And that's about 10 miles from where I live. And it's a massive story. Kobe Bryant, you know, one of the greatest basketball players ever. Patrons, Saint of Los Angeles. Hugely philanthropic, philanthropic, beloved here. And his helicopter went down. He used to travel around in the helicopter because LA traffic, you know. But like I looked outside and it was really overcast. Low ceiling of clouds. It was not a great day to be flying an helicopter. I'm like, oh, that is bad. So like within minutes, I'm in the car. I'm driving to the scene. We do our first special report. And like you know, in the old maps of the world, they had like at the edge of the map where they hadn't mapped the rest of it. They had like, you know, the sirens and and and weird like sea monsters and creators. Like I'm I'm talking in the special live report. I'm seeing the end of the map because I've nothing to say. I'm in the midst of a furious panic. I can't remember the things I had planned on saying because the panic saps you of your short-term memory and I'm like, what and so like my mouth starts talking. And I did what happens is that you your your brain loses short-term memory. Your brain loses long-term memory. You can't remember anything that you did before 30 seconds ago. You're in a panic attack. Your brain is focused mostly on surviving this moment right now. So everything is focused on the right now. Um, not on whether what you got from the sheriff's sergeant 10 minutes ago was reportable or that other piece of information you got was actually confirmed and reportable. And what I did in the special report was I mixed up one thing that I knew to be correct was something that I did not know whether it was correct or not. And I said that thing and it turned out that it was wrong and it was very wrong and I made a horrific mistake. And it's the first time that this had ever happened on TV. Despite all those panic attacks, I was always able to keep my shit together in my brain. And this was different. And I had a terrible failure. And I kept reporting throughout the rest of the day. But the next day or the day after ABC told me like, you know, this is big and you're suspended for a month. And, uh, you know, this is, this is a real problem. I obviously felt guilty because my dad was killed on a plane crash when he was basically the same age as Kobe. And I was the same age as Gianna Kobe's daughter who died with him in the helicopter. And so there was this crazy parody between these two events that had happened. And like obviously that was in my head as I was starting to report it. But, um, that's not anybody's fault, but my own. And it was like, I was definitely in my head. And I felt really, really, really guilty. Um, I saw you also posted on Twitter like you posted the apology. Just, just coming to terms with the fact that you screwed that statement up. But ABC didn't really take it lightly. I don't think a lot of people took it lightly, but you still, you still obviously recovered from that hindsight's 2020 and you realize that this is going to potentially negatively impact your career. Like this was, well, I didn't know you two would take me back. Like I thought I might, there were a couple of things that happens. First, I wasn't sure ABC would take me back. I thought they would. Like, and then there were people like, well, ABC overreacted. I think that's a material. Like the biggest question that was happening within me was like, okay. I am not happy doing my job because I am so honestly terrified of having a panic attack. Like I was miserable. So am I going to keep doing this job? And my biggest fear throughout having all these panic attacks, I never told anybody about because it was my deep, dark secret. Right? Like, well, I can't tell anybody about this because I'll be fired or they'll think, my God. Gotman is vulnerable. Chief National correspondent of the ABC has a vulnerability. No way. Right? Like I couldn't let any wonder, like if you're a liability, what you could say on air now, if you just, if you just have a bad moment, right? That's the concern. And that was my fear. And it happened. It was like, you know, one of the things they teach you in cognitive behavioral therapy, which is one of the, like the gold standard of dealing with panic disorder is that your fear is very likely never going to happen, right? Like people who have a fear of flying, like you're not going to die in a plane crash. It is extremely unlikely. You're much more likely to die of literally a thousand other things. But like, I actually had my worst fear happened to me during a panic attack, which was losing control and saying the wrong thing. And so I had to grapple with that. Like, is this something that I want to keep doing? Do I want to stay in television journalism? Like I could go back to, not radio because it was still performative, but I could go back to print or I could think about something else to do or I could go and consulting. And I talked about it with my wife. And as all this was happening, I kind of had a breakthrough. Because, you know, suspension does have a way of freeing up your schedule. And I'm putting a little bit. Yeah, you know, a little bit, a month. So I've been putting up a buddy of mine from high school, who was on the lacrosse team and like an amazing athlete. And he now had become a yoga instructor and a breathwork teacher. And this is an early 2020, right? Like, this is before the pandemic. This was not a big thing then. People were talking about Wim Hof. But he was doing this thing called breathwork. He's like, dude, it's changed my life. You've got to try it. Like, okay, I'll try breathwork. And I thought it was like meditation or something. I didn't know what it was. So I go in this class with this guy. It's like crisp. This sunny morning in California in January or maybe early February. And he's like, okay, here's what you guys do. And he's coaching us through and it's polytropic breathwork. So it's two breaths in, one through the belly, one through the chest. One being breathed out. And you just keep doing that. And eventually, what you're going to do is deprive yourself of oxygen. By hyperventilating over breathing, you deprive your body of carbon dioxide, which helps you break down the oxygen. So it's kind of an inverse relationship. It's kind of a, you know, a weird thing. And eventually, what happens? You get lobster claws in your hands. Your feet kind of curl up and you go into an altered state. And he's like, coaching us through this. And suddenly I'm like, wow, I am not in this. What is happening here? This is a total out of body experience. I had no idea what to expect. And then I start crying. I start sobbing. And I'm like, in this room that stinks of patchouli with all these, you know, like super crudgy people. And suddenly I'm like, like having this amazing cathartic experience. And my buddy Lane, who still practices breathwork and teaches classes here. Lane Jaffee, great guy. Like comes, he holds space. So he's just like, he just like makes me know, makes me know he's there. So he just presses on my legs. He's like, you're okay. He's like, keep going. He's not trying to take me out of it to let me know I'm okay. He's like, you're good. Keep going. I'm here if you need me, but keep going. And I had this amazing cathartic experience that I never would have expected. And it's at that point that I start realizing, okay, there's something more than just panic going on here. The panic is a symptom of something much deeper. And then I need to start figuring out how to get there. And maybe that's how I figure out why I'm broken. What's wrong with me? And eventually I would realize that panic doesn't mean you're broken. And I'm not broken. Like we have evolved to have panic as part of our central operating system as humans. Fear is one of the greatest assets that primates and then apes and then great apes and then humans were able to evolve. One of the reasons we're so successful is that we worry. We fear and we fear sooner than almost any other animal which allows us to prepare. It allows us to plan. It allows us to look deep into the future and think about stuff because we're worried about what might happen. We're concerned. So we do stuff. Panic is the maximal expression of fear, right? Like I described panic as the orgasm of anxiety. Right? If an orgasm is the maximal expression of pleasure, right? Then a panic attack is the maximal expression of anxiety or fear. It's not pleasant, but it also could leave you wanting a cigarette and shaking and sweating out. I just want to take a second and thank the HubSpot podcast that we're sponsoring. The show's success story. We've been part of their network for the past three years now. If you're a podcast fan, you have to check out some of the other incredible podcasts in the HubSpot podcast network. Like my first million hosted by Sam Parr and Sean Perri. They feature famous guests like Alex Hermosi, Sophia Emma Russo, Hassan Minhaj, sharing their secrets on how they made their first million, and how to apply their learnings to capitalize on today's business trends and opportunities. Listen to my first million wherever you get your podcasts. For all the wrong reasons, but 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 how we survived as a species and evolved, but it's also it's also partly built into potentially some 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, it's a brilliant question. I'm not just buttering up the interview. I think it's a really good question. We don't know. 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 hung over and you see some weird stats about your blood pressure and you have an eaten 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're 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 in high school and college. It's like, if there's a wall, I'm going to run through it. I'm going to do whatever I need to do, and that's what I sign myself with panic. I'm like, okay, first I'm going to learn everything there is to possibly learn about panic. Then I'm going to figure out why it is that I'm broken and why humans evolve to have panic in the DNA or anxiety, because all the science tells us it's so unhealthy and then once I look to 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 going to say, I mean, that's a good, that's a good, nice little built-in safety mechanism. I mean, I'm not going to 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, was the solution, breath work was a solution, therapy was a 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 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 have, 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 of times with Lane, and I had, you know, a good, a couple of really good experiences during my suspension also went to Alaska, had a near death experience, and then started to like, I got lost on, on near Denali in the snow, and 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 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, look how I feel, that's like exactly what I feel of 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 this, it 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 my clothes, into my jacket, into my hands, into 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 in a very different way than I'd come up off the trail, because I'm like, hey, let me trick off the bean path, I did only 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 and 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, and yeah, I had to go back to work because like I needed the paycheck to be quite honest, 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, but I'm in a lot that are placed in 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 medication, and Ben's in anti-depressants, and anti-seger medication, everything, 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 breathwork or ayahuasca, you lose control and what you lose control, you can start to expecturate, to cough up, to get rid of all of this like 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 breathwork 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, or you're asking, yeah, I'm asking, I have no idea, I haven't done breathwork 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 it 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, like you're speaking publicly now, I mean, okay, so there are 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 an interesting species. So yeah, like 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 studies on ketamine, but also MDMA and the psilocybin mushrooms, and there is a physical impact, host 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 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, 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 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, 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, but for me that gave me a really a real sense of peace, like I'm going to 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. Did you go back and did you explore if there was some childhood trauma or something that just like exacerbated this issue more than it probably should have been something that happened when you were a kid that you didn't address like my dad's death, my dad died when I was 12 and a and a plane crash. And again, like even before that, I was always into adventure and I was pretty good at compartmentalizing stuff. But like I did not, I mean, nobody, how can any like 12 year old grieve? I cried for a few days and then like my house was full of friends and family and batting food and I ate and played and you know, like I was, I try to avoid the pain. And then I became really good at avoiding the pain. And you know, we grieve throughout our whole lives just as we heal throughout our whole lives. And you know, that 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. And I didn't work. Fortunately, but that's that's the nature of it. You also mentioned you tried a whole bunch of different pharmacy, pharmacological fixes for this. It didn't really work out. Is there, is there any supplements that reduce anxiety or even like compliment the therapy, the psychedelics, the work that you're putting in? I don't know, like 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, right? It basically will not let your heart beat super, super fast. So you will grieve 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, right? Because then you don't get into the full cascade of panic symptoms. It didn't work so well for me. It made me feel sluggish as did Xanax, which is like a go-to for a lot of people. 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 looked, it's a great drug. It does great things, but 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 only 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 endorphine is the morphine your body creates by itself. And you do it when you have you know, 30 plus minutes of exercise and it's a pain killer, right? Serotonin is like the best feel good drug. There was a reason the SSRI's the antidepressants are called SSRI's because they basically make you uptake the serotonin faster. But the same thing can be done with a five minute walk. Right? We're being outside in sunshine. Like there are ways of capturing these drugs that our dogginess 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 hear 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 like people don't like to hear it, but yes, like I'm a huge advocate of exercise and of eating right and of taking a five minute walk to make yourself feel better. Like 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 it, if you were to eat in that morning before going to the public's not super where you got your blood pressure or if you had not had not been drunk the night before or if you had had, you know, more of a five up more of a walk before it, you probably would have gotten to the point where your body would be like, okay, no loss. Something real bad is happening here and I'm going to pull medical arm, the fire alarm, and I'm going to let Scott know that something is not right here and that he's going to pay attention. Yeah, 100% and I also believe that there's so many societal factors, especially post COVID where everyone is isolated. I'm sure that didn't help. I think that I mean, I don't work in an office anymore. If I don't make an effort to go out and see people, I'm working in like my podcast studio right now doubles as my actual office and I've blocked out the windows because I want the lighting every time I record something. So I mean, that's not a healthy environment, isolate yourself in every single day. You never go outside and I know a lot of people don't find time for the gym, find time for their health and well-being. You can have the whole argument about why food in the US is so damn unhealthy and all the added is and all the garbage is put into it and I think the state of health in the US is not great. Outside of COVID, it's just not great, it's not everything is almost like setting people up for this, this perfect storm of overworked isolation, poor health, physical, mental. This is what you get. Like for me, caffeine gives you and like I still drink it y'all. I drink a shit ton of caffeine. I, but I try to limit it before I'm about to go on air. Like I'm not going to chuck a coffee before air, you know a few hours before I'm going to stop drinking caffeine. Doesn't always work out that way, but like I am much better when I don't do caffeine, but I'm, I like it. I like that drug. I like it too. Actually for me, it's always balancing and other people that have the same issue as presenting on air or for me presenting on stage or even jumping onto a podcast. For me, it's I want that cognitive performance that comes with caffeine, but then I don't want the anxiety. And it's always the balance here. Here is one little trick. Elfianine can help balance the jitter knee jitteryness of caffeine. If you're looking for supplements, like that's something that a lot of people take this sort of gives you a little bit of the edge, but takes away the anxiety. Hoson's definition. You know, you wrote this book now a while back and then I know you got tied up with work and in this book of process, the writing process, the research process super time consuming and lengthy as well. When you look back at all the stuff that you put into the book and even in the past year or two years, what is one thing that you've learned about yourself or about panic attacks, anxiety that you wish you could have put in that maybe you didn't? I think a lot of it has to do with male self care. Like what I realized is that this three and a half year journey is something that I had not afforded myself for, you know, 20 years of the career before that, which is to take a little time out for me. Like yeah, because I, in order to do the reporting of the book, like I ended up going on a retreat to, I was already in Peru doing a story, but I ended up taking a week for myself to do an ayahuasca retreat. So I did ayahuasca there and five amio and mescaline and I was with a group. It was a coed tour, but it ended up being just guys and like I basically had a week to bond with other men and like that was also one of the really healthy things like having that kind of experience that I'd never afforded myself because like I'm a worker, I'm a dad and that's what I do, you know, I'm a worker, husband, dad. And if it's up those three things, I don't golf, I don't have hobbies, you know, I have friends, but my focus is my work, my family, and that's it. And suddenly like I'm taking these years out of my life to spend time writing, to spend time interviewing, to go on these retreats, to do breath work, to do ayahuasca, to do these altered states, and that was part of it. It's like, oh, you know, I did a retreat at the Ohai Valley, which is like one of the nicest places on the planet. I'm taking time for me, to work on my own health. And that ended up being one of the real side benefits of it. And I realized that we don't do enough of it in the terms of like, yeah, guys play golf, but like in terms of really thinking about taking care of ourselves and nurturing ourselves. And I know people hate that word, but it is true, nurturing ourselves in a more holistic way. And it's something I'd never done and suddenly afforded myself the opportunity and low and behold, it worked. It made me feel a lot better. I don't, I think a lot of men in particular don't realize how high strung and how fucked up they are internally until shit hits the fan. And then they have something like what happened to you. I mean, maybe I've been worrying about my health for a while before that trip through publics. And it for sure. Oh, Scott, that's exactly it. That's it. Sorry, just don't be like, yeah, you just hit it. I'll tell you a story that I just saw that was really messed up. It was really sad actually. And I haven't verified the facts about this story, but this is like a Twitter story. So take with a grain of salt. However, if it if it played out the way that it did, then this is a combination of really sad story plus mental health crisis. So the story was in the UK, it just happened on the 25th, a guy who owned a luxury watch store was robbed. And that night, he killed himself. He killed himself after having, you know, probably a couple million dollars in merchandise stolen. So the point is it's horrible that he was robbed. A robbery should never lead to a suicide. If assuming there was no other factors at play, if it was just the fact that money was stolen or value was stolen, the point is the point is that's a completely avoidable scenario. And that's an extreme. But I think that on a day-to-day level, when shit goes wrong and most people's lives in their career, this is when they have breakdowns. This is when they last shed at their wife. This is when they have panic attacks. This was just an extreme example of a ton of values stolen from this guys shop and suicide. But on a much less extreme in a much less extreme way, I think this happens all the time with men. And this is what ruins careers, breaks up families because they don't realize it for the past 30 years. They just been dealing with shit and not really understanding the anxiety and the stress it's bubbling up in their body. And when something goes wrong, they can't handle it. And this is what I see happen all the time. But I don't know how to fix it. I guess it's just about being self-aware enough to understand that you should probably spend time on yourself, whether or not it's all the stuff that you went through because of the panic attack. But many take care of themselves too because a lot of men just go through life thinking they're okay. Exactly. No, I think you really hit it there. And it leads to some to the exact outcomes that we work so hard to try to avoid. Right? Exact failures that we think that we're working so hard not to have. And, you know, it's a lot of unintended consequences. All right. Where are people going to go get your book? Obviously anywhere books are sold, but also working to connect with you if you want to send them to social, website, anything. The book is no time to panic. You can find it anywhere books are sold, as Scott just said. You can find me on Instagram and Twitter. I should do TikTok more, but I don't. It's Matt got the ABC on Twitter and Instagram. Matt got the ABC. Perfect. You know, if you were going to go back and now you've gone through your career and you've sort of had different seasons to your career, especially since you had a pre-awareness season than a post-awareness season to your life in your career, what would be one lesson that you will go back and tell your 20 year old self? Oh, good one. Slow down. It's hard. You know, like the thing I would have said is slow down. On the other hand, like having a Ford motor up, you know, my butt is like my grandfather used to say because I was always running around. It's like that's also kind of my secret to my success is like I just had so much energy, you know, and like charging full speed ahead. And so I would have told myself to slow down. On the other hand, it has been a secret to success. But yeah, I would have said slow, there is a there is a happy medium, right? There is like you can be hard charging, but not suicidal. And I felt like I was really teetering on the edge of doing really, really dumb stuff. And it could have led me into trouble. And I think that was part of what the panic was is like my brain to let your brain telling you like for a long time, you've been preoccupied about your health. Mine was trying to tell me to slow down for a while. And I didn't really listen to it. And I needed to take care of my self in a way that I just would not afford myself. So yeah, self care and slow down is what I would have told myself that the 20 year old man.