Matt Gutman, NO TIME TO PANIC: How I Curbed My Anxiety and Conquered a Lifetime of Panic Attacks
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[1:03]Matt Gutman is the author of No Time to Panic, How I Curved My Anxiety and Conquered a
[1:08]Lifetime of Panic Attacks.
[1:10]Matt Gutman is ABC News' Chief National Correspondent.
[1:14]By the way, if you go on his Instagram account now, you will see that he has been in
[1:18]Israel on the ground reporting live through this entire situation.
[1:23]It is unreal.
[1:24]I am like really worried for him speaking of calming anxiety.
[1:28]But anyway, so he doesn't just market his book.
[1:31]He is out there doing the thing and it is remarkable.
[1:34]Okay, moving on, a multi-award winning reporter Gutman contributes regularly to World
[1:39]News Tonight with David Moyer, 2020, Good Morning America and Nightline.
[1:43]He has reported from 50 countries across the globe and is the author of The Boys in the
[1:47]Cave Deep Inside the Impossible Rescue Thailand.
[1:50]He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children.
[1:53]Welcome Matt.
[1:54]Thank you so much for coming on Monster and have time to read books to discuss No Time
[1:57]to Panic.
[1:58]How I Conquered a Lifetime of Panic Attacks by crying with strangers, bare-hugging my fears
[2:02]and dialing down my anxiety.
[2:05]Congratulations.
[2:06]Thank you so much, Sydney.
[2:07]It's good to be with you.
[2:08]Oh, you too.
[2:10]You sort of spill your whole heart and experience on the page in this book.
[2:14]All the things that you hid for so long with your anxiety and the attacks that some people
[2:20]said they can't even tell when they have it to you, but you feel them so much and you
[2:23]describe in huge detail what the panic attacks feel like.
[2:27]You say in the book, secrets make loners and here you are getting rid of all the secrets.
[2:33]Tell me a little bit about why you decided to write the book, when you decided to write
[2:37]the book and how it's been getting it all out there.
[2:41]I've had panic attacks for 25 years.
[2:44]First one happened in college and I was defending my college thesis and I knew it cold and
[2:49]I got up to speak and the floor fell out.
[2:53]I started thinking, I felt like I was molting it to a werewolf, right?
[2:58]I was like, my skin is coming off, my heart is smashing against my chest.
[3:02]I couldn't breathe.
[3:03]I couldn't see.
[3:04]I couldn't remember anything that I was supposed to say, but I didn't even know what
[3:07]it was for so many years, to be 15 years after that to figure out that this was a panic
[3:12]attack.
[3:13]And then in January 26, 2020, I had a reckoning.
[3:16]I was reporting on the Kobe Bryant helicopter crash and I had a panic attack during our
[3:23]on air special event.
[3:25]And I couldn't separate the two things that I was supposed to say.
[3:28]It was just happening and I made a catastrophic mistake because when you're having a panic
[3:33]attack, your brain is really good at figuring out where you are, where you need to go, spatial
[3:38]awareness.
[3:39]One of the things that can't do is process long term memory.
[3:42]So anything longer than 30 seconds, you're toast.
[3:45]I made a terrible mistake.
[3:46]And then at that point, I realized I have to have to quit TV or figure this panic thing
[3:52]out.
[3:53]And I've been talking about it for years with my wife, like I'm unhappy doing television
[3:56]news.
[3:57]I love my job.
[3:58]But going live sometimes just it's so painful because of the panic attacks and she was incredibly
[4:02]supportive about it.
[4:03]So I started on this road and as you know, I started trying every pharmaceutical.
[4:08]And then I tried altered states and about a year and a half into it, I, well about a year
[4:13]into it.
[4:14]I did something that I'd never done, which is I had had another panic attack on air.
[4:19]And I was sitting on, I remember distinctly 13 C on the Southwest plane and I started to talk
[4:24]to the lady next to me, her name is Kat, her motto, if you're listening, Kat, hi, she
[4:29]and I are still close friends and I basically just like spilled the beans and I never told
[4:33]anybody about panic.
[4:34]It's something I was telling this complete stranger.
[4:36]And I felt this overwhelming relief like, ah, this, this, this sharing thing, this is good
[4:42]medicine.
[4:43]I started looking for panic attack support groups and I couldn't find virtually any in the
[4:48]whole country.
[4:49]And you can find some online, but they're only for people to vent or to post their latest
[4:55]crisis.
[4:56]There's no sharing and there's no community.
[4:59]And I now realized at that point that I had a constituency of more than one.
[5:03]And that's when I decided to write the book.
[5:06]And then I started really going down the road of altered states because the pharmacology
[5:12]wasn't working.
[5:13]to summarize the benzos, the gabas, the stratera, the stimulants.
[5:18]I tried everything and it wasn't working.
[5:22]And the older states really did help.
[5:24]Anyway, that's, that's a long way of saying how I started to think about this as a book
[5:28]and it's something that was larger than my own little journey out of panic.
[5:32]And do you feel that now you are better, much better off having shared, like does it
[5:37]help on a deep level?
[5:39]It definitely helps.
[5:40]But can I see that I'm not going to have a panic attack?
[5:42]No.
[5:43]And like to be frank to all the moms out there and the dads who might be listening,
[5:47]the preparation and publicity ahead of this book has been massively anxiety building.
[5:52]Yeah.
[5:53]So like I am not immune to anxiety.
[5:54]I am not over anxiety in any way.
[5:56]Like I am totally wired for this, which I'm going to wager to say, you know, it makes
[6:02]me a very good journalist because I'm highly attuned to the facial expressions to be sensitive
[6:09]to other people.
[6:10]To try to lead to what they're thinking, which I think is also your secret sauce, which
[6:14]is why you can extract things from people that they might not tell other people.
[6:18]So this sensitivity has a flip side sometimes and that's anxiety because we are so
[6:24]attuned so aware that it's sometimes it just it overwhelms our senses.
[6:31]I actually didn't even know that everyone didn't have anxiety for a long time.
[6:36]I was like, what do you mean this is a thing?
[6:38]You know, it's like everyone in my family, like my grandmother calls it like the worry
[6:41]jean and like it just like, wait, you don't go through, you don't spin around in your
[6:46]head all the time.
[6:47]Like, what do you mean?
[6:49]What does that like?
[6:50]So you know, I think that there is a, okay, I'm going to not get to soapboxy, but I think
[6:56]that there is a fallacy that is the wellness world that our natural disposition is to be
[7:03]sent and to be called.
[7:06]Humans are not engineered to be content or happy.
[7:09]We are engineered to survive and to procreate.
[7:12]And this is one of the other little rabbit holes that I went to in the book, which is about
[7:17]evolutionary science.
[7:18]Like I couldn't figure out for the life of me much if this thing causes me so much suffering.
[7:23]If anxiety is so bad for us, you know, it causes heart disease, gut problems.
[7:28]I blood pressure like it's so unhealthy.
[7:31]Why do so many people have it?
[7:32]Why is it so deeply embedded in the human gene and why haven't we selected out of it?
[7:37]And so I started asking evolutionary biologists and psychologists and they're like, oh no,
[7:42]this is meant to be there.
[7:45]Anxiety was the secret sauce that made humans so very successful.
[7:49]It's the reason we were able to get bigger brains at smaller bodies, less muscle, less
[7:54]speed because we cooperated so intensely.
[7:57]We needed those big brains and being able to be scared sooner was a huge evolutionary
[8:03]advantage.
[8:05]And it refrained the way I thought about anxiety and panic.
[8:09]And in terms of panic, Randy Nessie, who is one of the founding fathers of evolutionary
[8:14]psychiatry, was telling me, he's like, the panic is like a smoke alarm and your brain
[8:21]would prefer pulling that smoke alarm in error 1000 times in favor of missing a real
[8:29]alarm.
[8:30]Okay.
[8:31]Because if you pull it and you like burn 100 calories freaking out and being whatever,
[8:35]it's okay.
[8:36]You burned 100 calories much better than being dead.
[8:39]And so your body is naturally geared to air on the side of panic or anxiety rather than
[8:45]missing one of those cues or alarms and he told me, panic is perfectly normal.
[8:53]And it's so simple and it also just changed my complete framework of how I thought about
[9:00]him.
[9:01]Oh, I am not some miserable, you know, stinky kink in the human genome.
[9:09]I am not like a mutant.
[9:11]This is normal.
[9:12]I'm like, I'm a successful part member of this human genome.
[9:16]And I'm just doing what the brain is supposed to do.
[9:19]And it gave me such relief as well.
[9:21]So anyway, anybody out there, whoever experiences panic, it's normal.
[9:26]And it's fleeting.
[9:27]You're going to get over it.
[9:28]You're actually in many ways wired for it.
[9:30]So remember that.
[9:31]Big release.
[9:32]That's lovely.
[9:33]Yeah.
[9:34]You wrote a lot about the different things you tried that was circling as you mentioned, you
[9:38]know, I'm like, okay, he tried this drug, he tried that drug, you tried this drug, I'm
[9:41]like, which one's going to work?
[9:42]And then you go into detail about the psychedelics and all of those that you went through
[9:48]at the end.
[9:49]And the one, I think this was ketamine.
[9:52]Ketamine.
[9:53]Yeah.
[9:54]Let me just read this paragraph.
[9:55]Then all the colors fused into black, then there was nothing, not even me.
[9:58]That gutman had ceased to exist.
[10:00]The person who was me had disappeared.
[10:02]So had the pillows, the bedroom, the state of California,
[10:04]the earth, the known and unknown universe.
[10:07]There was no time, no space, no history, no self.
[10:09]I retained just enough baseline consciousness
[10:12]to know that I was a speck and a limitless void,
[10:15]but not enough to know who I was
[10:17]or to recall any prior existence.
[10:20]Whoa.
[10:21]Okay, so how do you come back from that?
[10:23]Because that's what I hear the death or the afterlife.
[10:26]Like I've read descriptions similar to that
[10:28]for people who have died and like come back to life
[10:30]or whatever.
[10:31]Oh, it's exhilarating.
[10:32]First of all, coming back is great.
[10:33]She's like, oh, thank you.
[10:35]My mom's like, this is fantastic.
[10:37]It just makes you so grateful for having any baseline
[10:40]consciousness.
[10:41]For me, that was one of the top several profound
[10:43]experiences of my life.
[10:45]And I recorded the the ketamine sessions.
[10:48]And in them, I'm mumbling semi incoherently
[10:51]like some maniac.
[10:52]I'm like, oh, that's amazing.
[10:54]That's the most profound thing ever happens.
[10:58]There is another thing that actually really grounded me
[11:01]and connected me to something I hadn't expected.
[11:04]It'll kind of had in my subconscious, which was my wife
[11:07]had a terrible experience during her caesarian her C
[11:12]section with our now 15 year old daughter.
[11:15]I was working in Jerusalem at the time
[11:17]we were both living there, obviously.
[11:19]And she tried for 55 hours to give birth naturally.
[11:24]And we were really into it.
[11:25]And at the end of the doctor's like,
[11:26]we got a rush you went to surgery.
[11:27]And we were like, OK, you know, we've
[11:29]got to get this baby out healthy.
[11:31]And at the very end of the surgery, she sort of came to,
[11:33]and they gave her ketamine.
[11:34]She still put her down for like another 15, 20 minutes
[11:37]while they finished stitching her up.
[11:39]She went into the K-hole, but she didn't have,
[11:42]I had two psychologists, psychiatrists,
[11:44]and psychologists by my side, literally holding my hand
[11:47]through my experience.
[11:48]And she didn't have that.
[11:49]And so many women are in the same position.
[11:52]And that experience, the negative experience
[11:55]she had with the K-hole and ketamine
[11:58]propelled her into a pretty severe postpartum depression,
[12:01]which changed part of the trajectory of my daughter's early
[12:05]childhood.
[12:05]And it was really difficult.
[12:07]My ketamine experience enabled me to sympathize
[12:11]and be with my wife.
[12:12]And essentially, commune with her in a different plane,
[12:15]that sounds very woo-woo.
[12:15]But it did, like connect with her in the way
[12:17]that I'd never really had.
[12:18]And that pain that she'd been through.
[12:20]And all these other women who have to go through this stuff,
[12:22]and nobody's telling them that they're
[12:24]being given ketamine, and they might
[12:26]have a pretty significant psychedelic experience.
[12:28]So look out.
[12:29]So that was like an ancillary thing that
[12:31]happened to me during this experience
[12:33]that made it even more powerful personally.
[12:36]And so for me, ketamine was just fantastic.
[12:39]It's legal.
[12:41]It's easily administered.
[12:43]It's highly accessible.
[12:44]It's fast acting.
[12:45]It goes away quickly.
[12:47]It gets you to the ego death with so many people
[12:50]want to achieve.
[12:51]It was a very profound experience.
[12:53]Wow.
[12:54]Have you ever tried it?
[12:55]No.
[12:56]No.
[12:58]I don't like being out of control.
[12:59]So I mean, I understand.
[13:01]I don't know.
[13:02]I'm just not up for it.
[13:03]The only way that I could really go on this journey,
[13:07]and it's so hack-knee to say journey,
[13:10]but it is fitting in this case,
[13:12]was to do it in the only way in the mode that I knew,
[13:15]which is reporting.
[13:16]And like my style of reporting is to go all out, right?
[13:20]I covered dozens of wars.
[13:22]And my style is to just throw myself into the deep end
[13:27]and see what happens.
[13:28]And so that was my reporting style for this book.
[13:31]It's like, I'm going to figure this out.
[13:32]And I'm going to make it as painful as possible.
[13:34]I'm going to get into the gizards of all these things
[13:36]that I'm trying to study and learn.
[13:38]And that's the way I'm going to come out of this,
[13:40]because that's how I know how to do things.
[13:43]And that might not work for everyone.
[13:44]It probably won't.
[13:46]And I say it in the introduction, like,
[13:48]this is not advisable necessarily.
[13:49]This is a perhaps circuitous route.
[13:52]The roadmap is not direct.
[13:54]I recommend people using the GPS or IMAPs or Google Maps
[13:57]is a better roadmap than what I did.
[14:00]But it was the way that I could do it.
[14:02]And it was, it serves well for telling a story.
[14:04]But I needed to do it in the mode
[14:06]that I felt comfortable with.
[14:07]And that was the way I went about doing it.
[14:10]And my gosh, speaking of your reporting,
[14:12]I was literally reading the book.
[14:14]And then there you were on the TV,
[14:16]reporting on Burning Man and the Daily News.
[14:18]And I was like, oh my gosh, that's my book.
[14:22]So funny.
[14:23]So yeah.
[14:24]That was quite a scene.
[14:26]I can't.
[14:27]It sounded just insane.
[14:29]I just got back last night, I was just not all over
[14:31]the place.
[14:32]Oh my gosh.
[14:34]Wow.
[14:35]Talk about a lot of psychedelics, yeah.
[14:37]And by the way, I think that that's great.
[14:41]That people who go to Burning Man experience that,
[14:42]I think it's wonderful.
[14:43]And there is a wonderful sense of community.
[14:46]For people who think that like my experimentation
[14:50]with multiple psychedelics was like,
[14:53]Huntress Thompson's slalomings around Vegas
[14:56]and a Chevy Caprice.
[14:57]It's not, I was like in a couch, on a couch
[15:00]with a psychedelic coach or a guide or a shaman
[15:03]or actual psychologist or psychiatrist
[15:05]the whole time.
[15:06]So it was like, very thought out in that sense.
[15:09]And like, I wasn't trying to mess around or have fun.
[15:10]This was like, this was extremely dedicated
[15:14]to figuring out and getting to this well of grief
[15:18]that I've described myself as having inside
[15:21]this pit of sadness and grief that was so deep
[15:25]that I couldn't access it in my regular brain.
[15:28]I had to go into an altered state
[15:30]because I too, like you like control.
[15:33]And I needed to give that up.
[15:35]I needed to give up that control in order to heal
[15:39]and the healing helped with the panic
[15:41]because it's all tied together.
[15:44]And you mentioned some of your family history
[15:46]of tragedy and the loss of your father at young age.
[15:50]I'm so sorry about that.
[15:51]And the litany of other things facing your family
[15:55]and how do you even cope with something like that?
[15:57]How do you move on?
[15:59]At age, you were nine, right?
[16:00]Nine.
[16:01]Oh, yeah, I was 12 when my...
[16:02]12, I'm so sorry.
[16:03]So second.
[16:04]No, that's okay.
[16:05]It's pretty good that you remembered anyway.
[16:06]Humans are incredible, right?
[16:07]We're remarkably resilient and we get through so much.
[16:12]But it's not always the happiest getting through, right?
[16:15]It's sometimes difficult.
[16:16]And we carry these scars throughout our whole lives.
[16:19]And sometimes they have these knock-on effects
[16:21]that we might not foresee.
[16:23]And for me, not having really dealt with,
[16:27]I mean, I guess it is a pretty significant trauma
[16:30]at the age of 12, you know,
[16:31]waking up in a morning to a good body or dad,
[16:33]and then he's dead in a plane crash that afternoon.
[16:35]Oh my gosh, it's tough.
[16:38]And I was really good at putting one foot in front of the other.
[16:41]And I've been, you know, it's my claim to fame.
[16:44]I can always do that, which is why I'm a good journalist.
[16:46]But that's not necessarily the best thing for your soul, right?
[16:50]It's good for journalism.
[16:51]It's good for moving on, for career,
[16:54]but you're hard in your soul sometimes to man something else.
[16:57]And it was time that I went back inside
[17:00]and spoke to the heart and the soul
[17:02]and addressed them and gave them, you know,
[17:04]their due because it was time.
[17:07]Don't you think this whole experience
[17:09]and depth analysis of yourself
[17:11]is just gonna make you a better journalist?
[17:13]I love that you say that.
[17:15]Yeah, I guess so.
[17:16]I hadn't really thought of it that way.
[17:18]I was actually putting my journalism hat aside
[17:20]for a while to focus on me.
[17:22]But I think you're right.
[17:23]I mean, one of the things that it did give me
[17:26]is so much more compassion, you know,
[17:29]I have a lot of compassion because I can speak to people
[17:32]who've suffered in, you know, common language of grief,
[17:36]but it made me even more compassionate.
[17:38]And in many ways that, you know,
[17:39]one of the things that I couldn't understand
[17:41]is, cause I'm, you know, very precarious.
[17:43]I will literally, the other asset that I have
[17:45]is a journalist is I will literally talk
[17:47]to anybody, anytime, any place,
[17:50]which is really annoying to my producers.
[17:52]Like, oh my God, I'm talking to someone else.
[17:54]We gotta get out of here, Matt, come on.
[17:56]Mm, mm, mm, mm, mm, mm, mm.
[17:59]But you know, there's this whole world
[18:01]of people who panic and some of the people
[18:03]have become hopelessly goryphobic.
[18:04]Some of them have struggles just talking to people
[18:07]in the supermarket.
[18:08]And that was the one thing I couldn't understand.
[18:10]It's like, what, just talking to a regular people,
[18:13]you can't do that.
[18:14]And when I actually had long story,
[18:17]you'll have to read the book, folks.
[18:18]But I actually had a panic attack in a novel way
[18:21]that I never had had before towards the end of the book,
[18:24]just talking to someone because it had been so much
[18:27]in my head.
[18:28]And I'd never experienced that in my 45 years of existence.
[18:31]I'm like, what is this?
[18:32]It's just like, there's my superpower gone,
[18:34]my superpower being a talk to anybody.
[18:36]Is that, is that evaporated?
[18:39]And it hadn't.
[18:40]I did have this panic attack.
[18:42]I was able to store it in a place of understanding
[18:44]because I'd just undergone this other treatment
[18:46]called carbon dioxide CO2 challenges like hours before.
[18:50]So like I got it and it gave me compassion
[18:53]for a different classification of panic attacks
[18:56]and a sense of compassion for people
[18:59]experiencing something that I'd never thought
[19:01]that I'd be able to feel.
[19:02]And so that was really profound for me as well.
[19:04]So all of it is just about, you know,
[19:05]embracing life from different experiences.
[19:07]And yes, thank you, Zippy.
[19:09]It gave me more compassion
[19:11]and perhaps maybe better as a journalist.
[19:13]See, there you go.
[19:13]You'll just have to pay attention.
[19:14]You'll be like, see, she was right.
[19:16]There you go.
[19:17]Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, funny.
[19:20]So how are you going to get through
[19:22]doing all the publicity for the book?
[19:23]Like, what's the plan?
[19:25]How much you're strategy?
[19:26]How do you go through like things
[19:27]you know are going to be challenging?
[19:28]It's a really good question.
[19:29]I had a tough couple of weeks,
[19:31]especially on vacation this summer.
[19:33]And I don't know.
[19:34]I just feel like I'm in a better place.
[19:35]Right at the finish line too.
[19:37]And now I'm just starting, you know,
[19:39]I had the period of peak anxiety.
[19:41]And then I crusted that.
[19:42]I'm over the hill.
[19:43]And I'm like, okay, I got this.
[19:46]This is what I do.
[19:47]I love talking to people.
[19:48]This is going to be fun.
[19:50]And I started to embrace it.
[19:51]I know I'm kind of jazzed by it.
[19:53]Okay.
[19:54]So it's just I had the reframe.
[19:55]I allowed the anxiety to come in.
[19:57]I allowed it to reside in me for longer.
[20:00]then I anticipated it would.
[20:01]And then as it started to ebb, I bid it for a well.
[20:05]I said, thank you for coming.
[20:07]I acknowledged it, and I'm moving on.
[20:09]And now I'm trying to embrace the experience and enjoy it.
[20:12]So I mean, and like seriously, how bad
[20:15]can it be when I get to talk to people like you?
[20:18]No.
[20:18]And that's not to butter you up.
[20:19]But like, it's a compliment.
[20:21]It's a nice experience to be able to talk
[20:22]to a fellow intelligent, bright human who
[20:25]is interested in books.
[20:26]No.
[20:27]Thank you.
[20:28]Yeah, I think parts of book publicity
[20:30]can be really interesting.
[20:31]And you meet lots of bookish people, people who,
[20:34]and I have found, to be honest, after interviewing
[20:37]a lot of people, so many authors have anxiety and anxiety
[20:41]disorders.
[20:42]It's like, I should go back through the interviews.
[20:44]There must be, it must be like 70% of authors.
[20:47]There's something about the writing and the observing
[20:49]and all of it.
[20:52]It's part of the human experience,
[20:53]people who write books typically are more sensitive.
[20:57]But humans are sensitive.
[20:58]I mean, I think that there is a catastrophic lack
[21:02]of understanding about what panic is
[21:05]and how pervasive it is in society.
[21:09]We know of people who answer the surveys
[21:12]that there are 28% 28% of Americans
[21:15]will suffer a panic attack in their lifetime.
[21:18]That's a lot.
[21:19]But psychologists who might work on this book
[21:21]believe the numbers much closer to 50%
[21:23]because think about how many people there are like meat.
[21:26]People who had done therapy for 20 years,
[21:28]before they realize, oh, the nerves that I feel,
[21:30]every time I go on air, that's panic.
[21:34]If I didn't know that,
[21:36]it was someone who literally thought about this for years,
[21:39]how are other people going to be able to figure that out?
[21:40]So lots of people don't know what panic looks like
[21:43]when it actually hits them.
[21:45]Another crazy factoid talking about the effect on society,
[21:48]40% of all patients who turn up at our nation's ERs,
[21:53]complaining of heart trouble,
[21:55]thinking that they're dying of a heart attack
[21:56]are actually having a panic attack, 40%.
[22:00]And only one to 2% of those people
[22:02]are actually treated for panic on the scene,
[22:05]given whatever, and released.
[22:07]The rest are told, you're not having a heart attack.
[22:09]We're not quite sure exactly what it is.
[22:11]But 40% that's 3 million Americans every year
[22:14]presenting at ERs taking their having a heart attack
[22:17]when it's a panic attack.
[22:18]It is so pervasive.
[22:20]And people still aren't able to diagnose it themselves
[22:23]because we don't have much intervention.
[22:25]People aren't told what a panic attack looks like,
[22:27]how pervasive it is, what it feels like,
[22:30]so they can't self diagnose.
[22:32]It's so sad to me.
[22:34]It's like that scene with Jack Nicholson.
[22:36]As good as it gets?
[22:37]As good as it gets, is that what it was?
[22:39]Or something's got to give?
[22:39]I don't know one of those, and he thinks
[22:40]he's having a panic attack, and he goes to the ER.
[22:43]I'll have to look it up and send it to him.
[22:44]Yeah.
[22:45]And he goes, and he's like, what do you mean
[22:46]I'm having a panic attack?
[22:47]You know, and it's like part of TV and movie lore,
[22:52]and then we still don't get it.
[22:53]Even I don't get it.
[22:55]Because one of the crazy things about panic
[22:57]is that it's as individual as a fingerprint, right?
[23:01]It varies for so many people,
[23:03]people have never had derealization,
[23:06]or like, you don't really know where you are
[23:07]and you lose sort of self awareness.
[23:10]I have rapid heart rate, rapid breathing,
[23:14]tunnel vision sweating, trembling.
[23:16]I feel fear, a loss of control.
[23:19]I feel like I'm just going to lose it
[23:20]and I'm going to blur something out.
[23:21]That's my fear.
[23:22]Other people feel like they're going to die.
[23:23]But they actually think that they are dying,
[23:25]which is why so many people present at the nation's ERs.
[23:28]But they are so different and so individualistic.
[23:33]And one last thing I wanted to mention,
[23:35]you said people ask you a lot with anxiety.
[23:39]Why did you pick this profession?
[23:40]Like you could do a lot of other things.
[23:42]And aren't you nervous going live all the time?
[23:44]And you said, you don't think about all the people,
[23:46]you're actually just mostly focused on the people
[23:48]in the control room, like who you're working for.
[23:50]And those people, not like the public at large.
[23:53]Tell me about that and has that shifted.
[23:56]I mean, this goes back to everybody at home.
[23:58]If you're hearing chair, I'm seeing my wife's office today.
[24:01]And I never realized how squeaky her desk chair is.
[24:03]So I apologize if you hear constant squeaking behind me.
[24:06]But this is part of the evolutionary psychology thing, right?
[24:08]There are basically two major buckets of human fear.
[24:12]And mothers will know this well.
[24:14]The first is the fear of us,
[24:16]essentially, like think about a cave person,
[24:19]living 30,000 years ago, right?
[24:22]You had these two major fears.
[24:23]One is like being out on the savannah
[24:25]and being eaten by a lion or clotted by bear,
[24:28]hit by lightning, having your offspring die
[24:30]in a rock fall, being slaughtered by the bozos
[24:35]and the cave next value over who are murderous, whatever.
[24:39]Some sort of physical fear that you are going to die.
[24:43]The other is a social fear.
[24:45]We feared losing our group.
[24:47]We feared being kicked out of our group,
[24:49]which is why we became so exquisitely attuned
[24:53]to the facial expressions of others to social signals.
[24:58]Because if you missed a social signal
[25:00]and I got you and you were accused of either being like lazy
[25:03]and shirking your duties and weakening the group's strength,
[25:08]then you would get kicked out of the group
[25:10]and excommunication meant death,
[25:13]which is why our social fears manifest so strongly
[25:17]and make us actually fear that we're going to die.
[25:20]It's the body, the brain said a signal to the body,
[25:23]you've got to deal with this, you've got to deal with it now
[25:26]and if you don't deal with it, you're going to die.
[25:28]That's why a panic attack is such a powerful,
[25:32]overwhelmingly consuming experience.
[25:35]And so like I don't worry about when I go on air,
[25:38]I am concerned about making my little cave group better.
[25:43]My cave group consists of the people sitting
[25:45]in the dimly room, dimly lit control room
[25:47]at 47 West 66 in New York, executive producers,
[25:51]the David Muir's, the Robin Roberts,
[25:53]the George Stephanopoulos, his people, I deeply respect.
[25:56]I want to make our group better.
[25:59]And my fear of weakening it by losing control
[26:03]and messing something up is overwhelming sometimes.
[26:06]And that's why I have the panic attack.
[26:08]It's not that they're, I don't worry about the 10 million
[26:10]people watching, I love them, but I really do.
[26:14]I'm not worried about them because they don't judge me
[26:16]personally and if I mess up, they have no power
[26:20]to change the course of my life or my career,
[26:23]the executive producers and the anchors do or Mike,
[26:27]but they don't obviously, but that's in my head.
[26:29]That's the story I told myself.
[26:31]Amazing.
[26:32]Matt, thank you so much for coming on.
[26:34]Hope to meet you, hope to see you in my store.
[26:36]And I'd look with the rest of all the publicity
[26:38]and congratulations.
[26:40]Thank you so much, if you're such a pleasure.
[26:41]Okay, you too.
[26:43]Okay, bye.
[26:43]Have a great day.
[26:44]Thank you, I really appreciate that.
[26:46]Thank you.
[26:47]All right, we'll talk.
[26:47]Thanks.
[26:49]Thanks for listening to this episode of moms
[26:51]don't have time to read books.
[26:53]Don't forget to follow me on Instagram, at Zebioans
[26:56]and at moms don't have time to read books.
[26:58]Also sign up for my newsletter at zebioans.com
[27:01]and sign up for my virtual book club
[27:02]and meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week.
[27:05]Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Texturesound
[27:08]for the Sound Editing.
[27:09]And thank you to Morning Moon Productions
[27:11]for providing this fantastic intro and outro music.