Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - Why We Panic: A Journalist Investigates Anxiety, Fear, and How To Deal With It | Matt Gutman

Episode Date: October 9, 2023

Gutman also discusses imposter syndrome, grief and his experience with psychedelics. Matt Gutman is ABC News’s chief national correspondent. A multi-award winning reporter, Gutman contributes regularly to World News Tonight with David Muir, 20/20, Good Morning America, and Nightline. He has reported from fifty countries across the globe and is the author of No Time to Panic: How I Curbed My Anxiety and Conquered a Lifetime of Panic Attacks and The Boys in the Cave: Deep Inside the Impossible Rescue in Thailand.  Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/tph/podcast-episode/matt-gutmanSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

It's the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello, everybody. Panic attacks can be terrifying, debilitating, and humiliating. They're scary in the moment, obviously. If you don't deal with them, you can find your life getting very small very quickly because it will severely limit your activities because you will be avoiding so many things. And for many of us, myself included, it's just plain embarrassing to be freaking out like

this. It can make you feel like you're broken or defective. The good news is there are a lot of ways to treat panic. I've seen it in my own life as somebody who famously had a meltdown on live television and who also quite recently dealt with a raging case of claustrophobia that was making my life pretty hellish, especially when it came to airplanes and elevators through therapy and medication. I've been able to get back on my feet. It's frequently a struggle, even now, but it is totally doable. My guest today, Matt Gutman, is a friend and former colleague who, like me,

was experiencing panic attacks on live television. And like me, he went to Great Lens to figure out how to deal with this condition. But I have to say Matt has gone way further than I did. He's written a whole book about this. It's called No Time to Panic in which he lays out the physiological and the evolutionary causes of panic. And then he takes a whole epic journey to treat panic disorder through therapy, medication, all kinds of psychedelics, breathing exercises, meditation, and more. The takeaway is very reassuring.

Hanuk is both completely normal and very treatable. A little bit of information about math before we dive in here. Matt is the chief national correspondent at ABC News where he's won a bunch of awards while contributing to such shows as World News Tonight with Davidure. 2020. Good morning, America at Nightline. He has reported from 50 countries across the planet. This is his second appearance on this show. I'll put a link in the show notes to his first appearance where he talks about his prior book, which was called The Boys in the Cave, Deep Inside, the Impossible Rescue in Thailand. Very excited to bring you, Matt Gutman. the impossible rescue in Thailand. Very excited to bring you, MacGumman.

I'm Rob Briden and welcome to my podcast, Briden and. We are now in our third series. Among those still to come is some Michael Pailin, the comedy duo, Eggg and Robbie Williams. The list goes on, so do sit back and enjoy. Brighten and on Amazon Music, Wondery Plus, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ghosts aren't real. At least as a journalist, that's what I've always believed. Sure, odd things happened in my childhood bedroom, but ultimately, I shrugged it all off. That is, until a couple of years ago, when I discovered that every subsequent argument of that house is convinced they've experienced something inexplicable too, including the most recent inhabitant who says she was visited at night by the ghost of a faceless woman. And it gets even stranger. It just so happens that the alleged ghost haunted my childhood room might just be my wife's great grandmother. It was murdered in the house next door by two gunshots to the face. From wandering in Pineapple

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Matt Gutman, booby, my man, Crush. Welcome back to the show. It's so good to be back. Always good to see your face, Dan. Congratulations on your new book. It's a big deal. I think it's gonna help a lot of people. Let me just start at the beginning with you. When did you start freaking out? When did you start

having these panic attacks? So everybody background, Dan Harris and I worked with each other for so many years. I didn't actually know what a panic attack was for a long time, basically until I started talking about these symptoms with Dan. He was describing his book, this 10% happier thing. And it was only then that I knew what a panic attack was. But for years before that, I'd been suffering Dan from these bouts of nerves. And the first one, and I think I told you in that conversation, was in college, or was defending my college thesis. It was about Turkish-Israeli relations, slightly esoteric.

And like, I knew this thing cold. And just before, or just as my name was being announced, Matt Gutman, with his Turkish Israeli relations thesis is gonna talk about blah, blah, blah. I certainly felt like my heart was pounding through my ribcage. I couldn't breathe. I realized that I didn't know how to swallow anymore.

My vision constructed to seeing through the eye of a needle. I had dry mouth and I literally thought I was gonna fall through the floor and I somehow made it to the podium and I distinctly remember gripping the podium so tightly because I was afraid I would fall down. So I was white knuckling the podium and I literally remember nothing of what I said that night. I was wearing a turtle neck, and I thought it was really academic,

and it felt like cats were clawing at my neck. And I never did anything about it. And I was in therapy at the time, and I didn't even talk about it with the therapist, because I just discounted it as nerves. I don't even know what I thought happened, but I just moved on. I mean, that is the cognitive dissonance and the shut-off that was in my brain for many, many years, about 15 years. 15 years between having that panic attack in college and then kind of waking up to the

fact that you were suffering from panic attacks? Yeah. I mean, I knew that I had nerves. So after college, I a traveled and started reporting in First South America, the Africa, and then I landed in Israel on the peak of the Intifada, which is the Palestinian, the second in the Defada, the Palestinian uprising. And this is what I wanted to do. And so I was a print reporter for the first five, six years, and then I started doing ABC radio. That was the first time I met you in 2006,

covering the Israel Lebanon War. And I realized that when I was going live for these very brief live radio hits, oftentimes words that I was looking at on the page would magically disappear. And I would skip at on the page would magically disappear. And I would skip words, the page would shake. And again, I would realize that I was going through these symptoms that I remember from college, but I didn't know what it was.

And I guess part of me thought, well, that's just normal. These are nerves that people have when they perform live. And watching people like you do live TV, that was unbelievable. So how does that guy even do that? Just standing up there and rattling off line after line. So again, that was the initial bout of it during radio. And then the same thing would happen

when I started doing television. And I found myself at my best in massively chaotic situations, where there was zero expectation of flawlessness or perfection. But the hardest thing for me, especially with radio and TV, and radio is you have a page, you have to read 65, 70 words, 20 seconds of copy, it's so easy that how could you foul that up? There is an absolute expectation of perfection

or flawlessness, and that just killed me. So I found that when stuff was literally blowing up around me, or there was chaos of a hurricane or tornado, or some sort of disruption that made it almost impossible to perform flawlessly that I was at my best and most at ease. Yeah, you were the guy who was known for being like the master of chaos. I mean, you're still known for that. You can send gutmin into an oil spill or a wildfire or the aftermath of an earthquake or a combat zone. And he's going to be able to on live television walk you through the damage destruction debris, the chaos seemingly utterly in control in his element, high intensity.

And so I think a lot of people, anybody who's ever seen you on television, myself included, will be surprised that even in the best of circumstances, and again, for you, the best of circumstances are perversely chaotic you, the best of circumstances are perversely chaotic, you're still feeling really nervous and wondering whether actually your body is going to mutiny against you at any moment. Right. I'm actually curious about you. So in the periods of the most chaos, I felt comfortable because it's like, oh my God,

there's no way he can do this well because, you know, there are people falling down, there's potential for him to slip, it's raining, it's windy, it's whatever it is. So those were the easiest. It's like when it was a live shot outside the bureau or on a street corner where it's so calm, you're an absolute safety, all you have to do is regurgitate 15 seconds. That's where I started to bolt into a werewolf and have these panic attack symptoms where I felt like my skin was coming off and the dementors from Harry Potter were breathing in death into me and suffocating from it. But I wonder if

it was like that for you because I have seen Dan, you know, a talented everything and speaker. My favorite Dan story, we're in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake and it was just gut wrenching and we were traveling all day together. I was a radio reporter and Dan and Almeen, who was now the executive producer of World News tonight, was working with Dan and we just bounced from place to place and did our reporting all day long.

And on the way back to our hotel where he was going to front and anchor World News tonight, that night Dan wrote some stuff in his laptop and I counted it was literally eight minutes. He wrote the whole show in eight minutes and then delivered the show that he had written in eight minutes off the top of his head without a prompt or. And I was like, ah, if he could, how, that's not even, you know, I was so unbelievably blown away that that's even mentally and physically possible. I just, I'd never seen anything like it. I didn't know it was possible. And so I always wonder, I wonder if it was the same for you. If under this unbelievable pressure that you had this huge story on your hands with death

and devastation, if under that kind of massive crucible, there's no way that Dan can deliver the entire show off the top of his head, but Dan can do that. But if it was easy and there was an expectation of flawlessness, if that affected you. Yes, I think to a lesser extent than you, but I mean, it might be worth my, I mean, I'm gonna hopefully let you do most of the talking here, but it might be worth answering your question

and adding a little bit of color. So for people who don't really know the network news business that well, when you do a live shot generally in network news as opposed to cable news, it's actually a very odd situation because the anchor says ABC News correspondent, Matt Gutman is in fill in the blank tonight, Matt and you, Matt, then have some words

you're gonna say 15 seconds of words. And by the way, it is literally 15 seconds or 10 seconds. You agree upon that with the senior producer on the show in advance, because every second of this show is timed out in an insanely minute way. Again, unlike cable news, where they're kind of doing rolling coverage all day long, network news, we have a half hour minus commercial breaks. So really like 17 minutes of show at 630 every night. So the anchor, David Murrer, or me when I used to work there with Tostomeck Gutman, and you've got 15

seconds to say your thing, which you've agreed upon. So it's scripted. It's not off the cuff. And then it rolls into a taped piece that you've spent all day shooting and writing. And then on the end of it, you have what's called a live tag in other 10 or 15 seconds. So for me, having to get that right, no matter where I was in the world, was insanely difficult. And it's so surreal because whether you're on the street corner, talking about the latest ups and downs on Wall Street, or you're in the middle of a war zone, it's still you and maybe a small crew of people and a camera. So it doesn't feel like you're in front of a huge audience, but you know that in the other side of that lens

is 7, 8, 9 million people who are judging you. And so that, all of that did my head all of the time. So it's so interesting you brought up the 7, 8 million people. That never bothered me. I never had a fear of fouling up in front of the 7, 8 million people. You can say fucking up here by the way, just to see. Really? I'm so used to network news.

Where's the FCC? They have no jurisdiction here, government. They're a renegade operation. Look out, everyone. You can hear some serious. That bombs. We're appropriate. So, you know, in my conception of the world, well, I'm going to take a step back.

So having this fear of failure that caused the panic attacks. For years, made me think that I had some sort of deficiency, some weird kink in the human genome that still resided in me, and that caused me to have these strange panic attacks. When I know that performatively, I was up to the task, and I've done it in much more difficult situations and I've flourished. So why was it under these particular circumstances that I choked? I thought it was just because I was born defective, right?

And one of the seminal questions at the start of this book for me was Am I Broken? And to take another step back, the reason I actually started on this journey I actually knew that I wanted to write the book was that I fucked up. I was reporting on the Kobe Bryant helicopter crash in January 2020, and I had a panic attack. And I had the other stuff going on in my brain at the time, and I basically couldn't separate what was reportable, what was fact, and what was hearsay. And my brain couldn't simultaneously navigate all of the lanes of traffic that I asked

it to do. And so for the first time in a 20 plus year career, I said the wrong thing live on air. And it was catastrophic. It was terrible. I was suspended for a month for it. And at that point, I decided that, well, for years, I'd been thinking about quitting TV, and I told my wife for years, we talked about it, that I was just so miserable. Like, it sucked, having to worry about failing on live television.

And consequently, I would smoke cigarettes because I thought that they imbued me with some sort of supernatural power to stop panic attacks because it's so unbelievably unhealthy. Dan, I had magical underwear that I ended up buying in Paris during the Bata Clana attacks. I bought these underwear, I did really well in the Paris terrorist attacks and I was like, oh, these must be magical underwear that give me luck. So I'll wear them every time I have a live shop.

There are a couple of pairs, so don't worry everybody. But it's demented. I would do push-ups, back bends, all sorts of twist and stuff because they say that exercise helps to reduce the incidence of panic. All these crazy things so that I wouldn't panic. And I was convinced that I was broken. And in my mind, the reason I felt so much pressure was not because of the 10 million people. I went back to that dimly lit cave on 47 West 66 Street,

where the EPs and the presidents of the company and the David Meurs and the Dan Harris's and the George Stepanopolis and Robin Roberts and all the people who like deeply respected as fellow journalists, I was terrified that I would fuck up in front of them and they would lose faith in me. And basically I'd be ousted from this illustrious group. That was my fear.

So it wasn't the 7, 8, 10 million. It was just this small group, my little tribe that I was so afraid of being ousted from. You touched on something fascinating there? Just to recapitulate some of what you just said, Matt started having panic attacks in college. They dogged him throughout his meteoric rise through the news business and then culminated with a panic attack that led to a factual error of vis-a-vis Kobe Bryant who tragically died along with friends and family members in a helicopter crash.

A few years ago, that got Matt suspended from ABC News and then he went off to try to figure out what was going on. And the result is this book that we're going to talk about now. And one of the truly fascinating things that you describe in the book that I as a longtime panic attack sufferer was vaguely aware of, but didn't really know was that a huge component of panic is the fear of social ostracization. You said a little bit about that because you were worried and probably still are every time you do a live shot that there are a bunch of people, your bosses and peers and colleagues sitting in a control room back at ABC News headquarters

at 47 West 66th Street judging you you're more worried about them than the 7 million people watching. But nonetheless, whoever you're worried about, you're worried about somebody in social approbation or disapprobation. So why is that so important and what roles does that play in panic attacks? The central question that I had that I started out with before I knew that there was a book, but when I knew that I needed to fix whatever was broken inside of me was why am I defective?

Why do humans still have the genetic propensity for anxiety and why do we have panic attacks? We know that chronic anxiety is so unbelievably unhealthy. We know this to be true. So how come humans haven't selected out of it? We selected out of tails. We don't have tails anymore. We don't have hair all over our body. We have opposable thumbs.

We selected for these wonderful traits. But why is that one still in the gene pool? And eventually, after talking to evolutionary biologists and psychologists and psychiatrists, I learned that there are basically two major buckets of human fear, right? We evolved over hundreds of thousands of generations to be scared sooner. Anxiety was an asset. Fear was an asset, right?

So instead of being in a herd, primates learned that, okay, why don't we run away before the lion starts chasing us, right? Like, why won't we start moving out of the clearing when we see a lion right away and just get out of its way and out of its eyesight? So the ability to be afraid sooner became a massive evolutionary advantage, and that just developed because evolutionary advantage is developed. So we learned abstract fear, and then like deeply abstract fear. So now I can go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, or the Guggenheim, or whatever, and I can see a piece of conceptual art that has nothing to do with live shots or ABC news, and that will trigger, could trigger a panic in me because I'm associating that

piece of art with the fear of being rejected by my peers. So we've developed fear and anxiety into an art. So our early human ancestors had two major buckets of fear. One was the physical fear, right? You're going to be on the savannah and a lion is going to come eat you. Or your progeny are going to die of disease, or you're going to be hit by lightning or the assholes over there in cave seven. They're going to come and bludgeon you with their clubs.

The second fear is a social fear. Humans developed not only to be afraid sooner, we gave up muscle mass, we're scrawny, we gave up speed and size for cooperation and for our brain. So we learned that we can basically, what we evolved to be massively cooperative, which meant that if we get kicked out of our group and we don't have a cooperation of our group mates

and our cave and our whatever it is lean to and the forest, we would be kicked out, banished to the savannah, whereupon a line would come eat us anyway. So we eventually associated breaking a social taboo, running a foul of our peers with death, which is why we have panic attacks, right? It's your brain telling your body that there is a very big social thread happening and you better fix that right now or you are going to die.

And so that's what a panic attack is. It is the biggest, most blaring alarm that can go off in your brain telling you, don't piss off your peers because you're going to get kicked out of the cave and then a lion's going to eat you. This is so fascinating. It really got me thinking about, so I've famously had a panic attack on television or infamously or whatever and largely dealt with it successfully in the subsequent years, but I had some more panic of big resurgence of it, and I've talked about it here on this show, so I won't go too deep into it. But I had a big resurgence of it about six months ago. I was able to treat that as well, and we'll

go deep on the treatments in a little bit. But one of the things I noticed in this most recent resurgence, and by the way, what I was panicking about in this most recent resurgence. And by the way, what I was panicking about in this most recent resurgence was claustrophobia, so elevators and airplanes. One of the things I noticed was that aside from the fear of being trapped, I was worried about what other people were gonna think of me if I lost my mind in this elevator or on an airplane.

Yeah, very common, yeah. Sorry, I'm just agreeing vocally with you. Keep going. No, I guess I don't have a question. I'm just sort of chiming on your observation. So common. Well, I want to talk about phobios and how we deal with it and are dismissive of it. And it's like, I definitely want to go back to that.

But so the culmination of the whole evolutionary thing and caring about our peers is that one, our parents taught us to not care what other people think, but to a certain degree, we must and we do and it's natural. And the second, I guess, the upshot of all of this learning about caves and humans and the two different kinds of fear is that social fear is normal. Panic attacks are normal. And so about a year into my effort to learn about it,

evolutionary psychiatrist Randy Nessie told me in an interview, he says, panic is perfectly natural, Matt. It is perfectly normal. He said, our minds and bodies are wired for us to have a thousand panic attacks, a thousand false alarms, so long as that we don't have a single mist alarm.

So if you mist an alarm, a pile up on I-95 and you're out to lunch and you don't get the cues and you slam it to the cars in front of you, you're dead. That's not a good thing. But a false alarm, a panic attack, it's just 25 or 50 burned calories sweating through your shirt. So your body wants to have false alarms, it just can't have a mist alarm because that means you're dead. And just being told that this is normal, that maybe the panickers, the anxious among us,

are the normal ones. It's just that alone was such good medicine. You know, being told that you are not broken. You are not a defective part of the human genome. You are a part and parcel of the normal functioning of the human genome because basically all evolutionary signs to say this, we're not wired or designed to be happy or to be content. We are designed to survive and to procreate. Anything else, and I think you'll like this part, this is how I think of it. Anything

above surviving and procreating or doing those things is a bonus. So if you can be content and you can derive happiness from your day to day, that's a win. I have a bunch of things to say about the latter point, but let me just go back to the thing you were saying earlier about panic being normal, which I think is just a super helpful thing to say. It was clearly a very helpful thing for you to hear. Yeah. And I expect there are many people listening right now or finding it to be a relief.

But I mean, think about being on an airplane. I feel like I'm the only guy panicking on there, but I think I'm the one seeing shit clearly. We're stuck in a metal tube going many, many, many miles an hour, many miles above planet earth. That shit is crazy if you look at it with dry eyes. So it does feel like anybody not freaking out, ain't paying attention. I literally say that in the book, the same thing. The phobies that people have are 100% legitimate. It doesn't

make sense to fly in an aluminum tube five to seven miles in the air with 200 other germ-spuey humans like ludicrous. And people who are afraid of driving. Oh, they're crazy. They're afraid of driving. We scoff at them. The number one cause of death for people our age, Dan, is driving. Traffic accidents are the number one killer for people 20 was at 18 to 54. So why wouldn't you be terrified of that? That makes complete sense. And yes, why wouldn't you be afraid of speaking in front of a crowd? Humans are not engineered or designed to speak in front of crowds. Public speaking was not something we did for tens of thousands of generations, right? It was the cave headman who would have grunted in front of the rest of the group and we'd

all nod in the scent and go off and kill some ameth. Right? Public speaking is a thing that has only come into common practice over the past couple of generations. People were not doing this even 500 years, about a few hundred years ago. All of this is new to the human experience. And yet we expect ourselves to be able to give Lincoln-esque addresses every time we get to a podium or go on a Zoom call.

Much more of my conversation with Matt Gutman right after this. We can't see tomorrow, but we can hear it. And it sounds like a renewable natural gas bus replacing conventional fleets. We're bridging to a sustainable energy future. Working today to ensure tomorrow is on. Enbridge, life takes energy. Emily, do you remember when One Direction called it a day? I think you'll find there are still many people who can't talk about it. Well luckily, we can. A lot. Because our new season of terribly famous is all about the first One Directioner to go it alone.

Zayn Malik. We'll take you on Zayn's journey from Shilad from Bradford to being in the world's biggest boy band. And explore why, when he reached the top, he decided to walk away. Follow terribly famous wherever you get your podcast. It's terribly famous. And don't miss out on celebration of Sharon Salzberg's

new book. We've made her course on loving kindness, which we call 10% nicer. Free over in the 10% happier app until October 23rd. Download the 10% happier app today, wherever you get your apps and get started for free. You talk in the book about having imposter syndrome. Can you define what that is and how that played a role in your panic and also in the social

approval and validation piece of all of this? I mean, very roughly in Postor Syndrome is thinking that people are going to find out that you're a fraud, that you're not capable of doing whatever thing it is that you're doing and the fear of being outed for it. And typically, I've heard it describe as the friction between two types of experiences. One is growing up your parents tell you you are God's gift to man, you can do anything you want to do in the world, and then when you realize you go into the world that you can't do everything you want to do, you get imposter syndrome because there is this friction between what

your parents told you and what reality tells you or the opposite. You grow up and you come from nothing and a lot of people of color, a lot of women experience this and they're told they're not going to be anything. And then they go into the world and reality tells them, wow, you really are talented. You're good at whatever it is you're doing and that friction sends them into a posture syndrome. So it's basically like the rub that fine edge where expectation meets reality and it creates this little dissonance in your brain that you think, I am not up to this task and everybody's going to find out that I'm a fraud and everything, all this facade that I have built about Matt Gutman, the absolutely unflappable TV correspondent who goes to war is going to be blown up.

You describe yourself in a way that I never thought to describe myself, but really resonated with me. You call yourself a courageous coward. You were definitely a courageous coward. I mean, I don't know about the coward part, but I didn't like you went to scary places and did scary things too. Yeah, everybody, Dan, is one of the probably the correspondent I wanted to emulate most. So, massive respect. I loved danger and I loved danger from the crib, right? I literally would take headers out of the crib. I would cross the street as a two-year-old.

I have a very high tolerance for physical threat and physical danger. I have a low tolerance for social danger. I'm extremely conservative when it comes to social threats, and I am extremely triggered by social threats, which is why I have panic attacks when I go on air, and obviously from my college experience, when I speak publicly sometimes. So yeah, that's the courageous coward.

You also have a high tolerance for pain and discomfort. I mean, I remember you telling me a story about how you needed to get an endoscopy, but you didn't want to be medicated because you had an assignment afterwards. And so you did an endoscopy, which by the way people, is when they shove a little camera on a tube into your stomach, you did it, unmedicated. The only reason I do endoscopies is because I love the medication. Just knock me out, do it twice, but that kind of intensity and drive

is a huge part of your character and also the fear that can come from social approval or lack thereof. It's such an interesting, not a contradiction if you look at it in a holistic way, but it can seem like a contradiction. You know, when people always asked or now ask once they've read the book or I've told them my experiences, I mean, if your job made you so damn miserable, why did you do it? Because I consider myself a collector of experiences, right?

I was kind of curious about what it would feel like to do an endoscopy without any sedation. So they stick the thing in your stomach, they take pictures inside and like grab stuff. In order to do that, they have to fill your stomach up with air and your stomach is massively distended. And once they take the tube out, you let out the most unbelievable burp that you have ever heard. You didn't even think that such a thing was possible. It was really sad, I'm getting it some way.

So like, I'm this collector of experiences and in our line of work, we get to do some really cool things. I'm really gregarious, I love meeting people. And sometimes I did love going on air when there was stuff happening, but it was the time where I feared social judgment most that we're so acutely painful that I learned to dread them and to try to avoid them and then create these safety behaviors,

which were tragically comedic, but just tragic, like smoking and magical underwear and all the other messagos crazness that I was doing. You really go into great detail about the things you tried to deal with panic and I want to go into great detail as well because I actually think there was no short amount of courage that you demonstrated in attacking this problem. But before we do that, one last sort of high level question about panic, which is what did you learn about what is happening physiologically when we panic and what did you learn about the long-term implications of panicking a lot on a human? So it's a great question. So in your brain, these two all-man-sized nodes, called the migdoline sense incoming danger, they're sort of like,

they're playing center field. You can hear an audio version of danger or visual version. You can sense it, you can smell it, but whatever it is, they're sort of playing center field in getting all these incoming stimuli. And once they sense danger, they send a message to the hypothalamus, which then releases adrenaline in your system. And if the threat persists, they will release cortisol, basically, into your system, which pumps glucose to your big muscles, which helps you run fast and keep going. That's why you breathe heavily to get oxygen into your bloodstream, your vision constricts, because you only need tunnel vision, right? Your body's not worrying about

anything else around you. It needs you to get from point A to point B and run fast You begin to sweat and Evolutionarily they think that this is because humans became more slippery when they were wet To get away from an animal But basically all of this chemical cascade that's happening in your body is Engineered to help you escape from a predator, to run away, or to fight, or to fight. That's, and some people have flight and some people have fight.

And so the fight is, you know, people you can see them, they'll clinch their jaws, they'll clinch their fists, they're prone to bursts of anger. My stress response in a situation is flight. Flight and freeze are very similar. And so basically your body is preparing to mount a defense, and the defense can either be running away or fighting back. And it does depend on the situation, obviously, but that's basically the chemical components.

And it does that by first shooting a adrenaline into your system, which only lasts a short bit of time, and then 90 seconds later, cortisol. And so people will have chronic chronic anxiety. It's very unhealthy. It's like smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. But I approached these endo neural chronologists, I think I'm getting that right.

And I asked like, okay, how much damage? I mean, I've had hundreds and hundreds of on-air panic attacks. So I'm like, Dr. Gardner, okay, tell me how bad is it? I mean, how, like, do I have years to live? Like, how many years off my life have I taken? He's like, none. He's like, I had all my blood tested.

I got like the biggest blood test you can imagine. And I'm fine. It turns out your body is okay with this. I actually have low levels of resting cortisol. Like, how is that possible? I have several panic attacks a week. This is when I was having several panic attacks a week. He's like, we think evolutionarily,

your body is compensating for the fact you have several panic attacks a week. So it keeps your baseline cortisol levels low. This is normal. You're totally absolutely okay. And actually the first thing that the doctor said when he called me to tell me my blood levels and all this stuff, I was sure that was gonna die.

He's like, Matt, you have to call me right away. So we had this conversation. It was after hours, it was 8 p.m. on a work night. And I'm like, oh God, this is bad. He's gonna tell me some bad news about what I've done panic attacks and how they're killing me. He's like, Matt, do you like pickles? What? Piggles? He's like to tell me some bad news about what I've done panic attacks and how they're killing me. He's like, Matt, do you like pickles?

What? Piggles? He's like pickles, yeah, do you like pickles? Yeah, it's good. Eat more pickles because your sodium levels are low. Sodium, yeah, you had nothing to do with the panic. He's like, you need more salt in your diet. So it turns out that like the evolutionary scientist said, but I can quite believe them, your body really is primed to have a lot of panic attacks and be perfectly okay.

But chronic anxiety on a different level, like if people go home to parents who are abusive or they are in abusive relationships, that is a different story than what I have experienced. I'm experiencing these massive spikes, these highs and lows, but not that elongated prolonged exposure to cortisol in the system, which really, really is unhealthy. But that wasn't the trauma that I was dealing with. I want to pick up on your mention of your trauma because that will come up in this next section of the interview where we talk about what you did to deal with your panic attacks. There's quite a long and impressive list of things you did, not. I just kind of like to tick through these and hear how much help or not these techniques were. The first one on the list is breath work. What is breath work and how did it help?

Have you ever done it? We've had an episode here or two about breathing exercises, and I've done a little bit, but not in an intensive way. Okay, so, Hallitropic Breathwork, and I did do a different kind. It's part of this group, but basically, it is not what I thought it was. And the first time I was exposed to it was, on a weekday in early February,

friend of mine from high school, Lane, it was like the star lacrosse player and captain of the team and captain of his team at Rutgers, but he turned into this yogi and he is a breathwork coach. So he'd invited me a couple of times, but I never had time to go do the breathwork. And finally, you know, suspension has a way of opening up your schedule. So at the time in the middle of the day, they go, do a breath work class with him. And I thought it'd be sort of mellow and just kind of relaxing.

And so I had no idea what I was getting into when he goes in there. And he's like a coxen of a crew boat, right? And he teaches you how to do this breath. It's pretty simple. It's two breaths in, one breath out, but fast. So it's, and you It's two breaths in, one breath out, but fast. So it's, and you really want to fill your belly. And so eventually, you do that enough that you go into an altered state. You breathe in so much oxygen that you actually deprive your body of carbon dioxide, essentially hyperventilating, depriving your body of carbon dioxide, which

inhibits your body from intaking oxygen. So, it's counterintuitive. Basically, you're depriving yourself of oxygen by over breathing. This is why when people hyperventilate to get paper bags, because you're re-breathing your carbon dioxide. Oh, okay. So, you go into the state and you get locked physically in your body. My hands are sort of clamping onto themselves sort of folding in fetally.

Your feet go the same way. You begin to go numb in your body and they call this lobster claws because you can't move your hands or feet. And Elaine is still telling you, breathe, you know, he's doing the cadence and he's telling you what to feel and he's telling you what to feel, and he's telling you what to focus on, and eventually you can't focus on him because you are off. And I went, I go to some altered state, I'm gone.

And the first time I did it with him, I started crying. And not just like, it was full on, sobbing and excavating this pain that was inside me. And I didn't feel shame. I just let it out. And so Lane came and he grounded me by holding my legs, not getting me out of that state, but grounded me. And so that was just so good.

And I felt relieved and refreshed and light afterwards in a way that I had not felt in many, many years. And I was stone cold sober. It was like 9 a.m. on a Wednesday morning. So that breath work is basically that. And it has the capacity to take people into this altered state. Some people laugh, some people cry, some people just go off in their own space. But for most people, if you go deep enough, you will have some sort of powerful experience. But the feeling of being locked in your body, that would make me panic.

Yes, so people get scared and then they come out. And the way to come out is you just slow down your breathing. So the only way, Dan, that I could figure to get out of being locked in my panic in this brain of mine that was always afraid was to do what I do for work, which is, okay, I have an assignment. My assignment is to figure out my panic. The way I go about doing my assignments is to go punch that assignment in the face, right? Like my senior editor, the producer says, Matt, go into that tornado. Okay. You know? And so Lane tells me to breathe. I'm going to breathe the hardest in the room. I am going to do absolutely everything. I'm going to do it to the max. And with some of the stuff

it really worked to my benefit. And so I did go deep and Lane describes seeing me like often space and then crying and sobbing. But that kind of intensity is the only way that I could really go about figuring out what was wrong with me and finding a way out of it. So in the crying, were you crying because of psychological content, i.e. the trauma that you've referenced but not told us about, or was it just purely a physiological response? Oh, that's a great question. No, I think it was the psychological stimulating, the physiological, right? But I couldn't pinpoint the pain.

I just knew it was grief. It was sadness. And in the book, I talk about the well of grief. And I've had this conception since I was a kid. So when I was 12, my father was killed in a plane crash. So, and that's the symmetry with the Kobe Bryant situation is that my dad was the same age as Kobe, and I was the same age as Gianna. And so, as I'm reporting about Kobe's helicopter crash, and we're hearing the first 10 bits of news about Gianna, I'm understanding that there is incredible symmetry here between that helicopter crash

and my dad's plane crash. And so I talk about trying to navigate multiple lanes of traffic at once, and I failed to do that at the time. So during breath work and other altered states, it was hard for me to pinpoint the exact trauma. Was it that was it being held by the Venezuelan secret police, which really messed me up for a while? Was it just like the day-to-day absorption of other people's trauma in this line of work, right?

Like, I've talked to people on the very worst day of their life hundreds and hundreds of times. People whose children have been killed in mass shootings, people who've lost their home, lost their dogs, everything on everything, right? Victims of war. So is it that? Then I can't pinpoint exactly what the pain derives from, but I can tell you that there was this sorrow

and this pain that needed to be excavated. And once I realized that this crying is good medicine and worked for me, I went about trying to find other ways to get to that core of grief and sadness in me and find a way to let it go to release it. Two points of factual clarification or amplification to Gianna. People might have picked this up either because they remember it or via context, but Gianna was Kobe Bryant's daughter. She perished in that helicopter crash as well. And then Matt's reference to being held by the Venus Will

and secret police that happened when he went to Venezuela to do some reporting and he got picked up by the bad guys there. And I can only imagine an incredibly stressful and traumatic experience. So you, I should say, having issued those clarifications, the breath work was really just the beginning. You then moved into psychedelics, including psilocybin sometimes referred to on the street as magic mushrooms. What was that experience like? It was really pleasant. So I had expected to be crying and sobbing and sniting through

whatever blanket this practitioner gave me. So mushrooms, psilocybin, are decriminalized in the Bay Area. So my wife had actually gone up to do a session with this practitioner there a few months before me. And she had this epiphany, right? She was in the jungle in Central America. There was this Mayan temple. And in the opening of this Mayan temple was a lion. It's slightly miscast because there are no lions in Central America, but that's okay. And the lion opened its maw and this light beamed out of the lion's mouth and it shone on my wife

Daphna. And it divulged to her her life's purpose. And that was that she has to continue her music. She has to continue music education and bringing it to the public. And she did that. She fulfilled the prophecy of the lion with the light coming out of its mouth. So who doesn't want to fulfill the prophecy

of the lion with the light coming out of its mouth? I wanted that. So I went there and I expected a slightly different experience which I got, but I actually saw these visions of strength. I found myself inside the guts of your semity, inside half-dome peeking out through the skin of the granite. And I had these images of solidity and strength that kept recurring.

I also had a little bit of a cry, but not nothing massively cathartic. And at that point, I was still taking SSRIs, anti-depressants. And so that has a way of dulling the experience of psychedelics, especially psilocybin. So even though I had two extradoses, I didn't have like the on-insp on inspiring earth shattering experience that I had hoped for on that first try. Were you taking the SSRIs the anti-depressants to deal with the panic or something separate? I'd been taking them for 18 years. I had a little bit of PTSD when I covered Iraq the first time and came back. I was living in Tel Aviv and came back and I saw psychiatrists who prescribed Paxil and basically that was 2003 and I stayed on Pax Aviv and came back. And I saw psychiatrists to prescribe to Paxil.

And basically that was 2003. And I stayed on Paxil on and off for 18 years. And Paxil has the ancillary benefit of helping with panic. And so I'd gone off of it for a little bit. And I saw psychiatrists here at NLA and told him about the panic. And he said, well, you should really go back on Paxil because it has this secondary

benefit of helping panic, but it did not have that effect on me at all. Yeah, that's interesting. I've been told the same thing. I've been on Zoloft for 15 years, very low dose. Sometimes referred to as like a subclinical dose, but it is said to help with panic. I don't know. It's very hard for me to figure that out. But you kept going with the psychedelics. And the next one on my list here is Toad Venom. Oh, Toad Venom. So five MEODMT is made from the excretions of the Sonoran Desert Toad found sort of in the Arizona, Mexico border. And it's rendered into a powder and then put into a beaker. And I did this at a retreat in Peru and the Sacred Valley in Peru near Machu Picchu.

And basically they burn the bottom of a beaker and you almost drink this syrupy smoke from this thick rubber straw hose. It's pretty weird. And immediately upon taking it in, you start to pass out. Like it knocks you out almost immediately. Like you can't get through the beaker. And so the practitioner, Gloria, capped me awake, I'm going to take it, take it, finish it.

And I finished this thing. And so like this shimmering screen covered my consciousness at first as I passed out. And then sort of everything went to black. And I kind of died. My existence kind of shut off briefly. And then I came flopping back out into the world. And literally flopping off the mat onto the floor. And suddenly I'm alert and awake.

And I'm sweating. And I'm like tearing up my face and my hair. And I'm screaming and I'm like tearing up my face and my hair and I'm screaming, not crying, screaming at the top of my lungs. The kind of primal yell that I didn't even think I was equipped to do. So embarrassing in our day-to-day lives. Like the kind of thing you would never do. And this went on for over 30 minutes. And I had a facilitator there, a Manuel who was sort of this willowy French male ballerina who was tempted himself over me and protecting me and just like, let me scream my guts out. And people were a little bit scared because this is not like the typical reaction.

Most people just are in their own world, absolutely silent, and just awake, having had this amazing trip aboard this velvet rocket ship that takes you across the cosmos. I was flapping on the floor like some sort of beat up fish, sweating and slimy and screaming my guts out, and all I knew, my entire existence in that moment was there only to extricate and expel this pain inside of me. And all I knew was that I had to get it out. And so I kept screaming as long as I could basically tolerate it. This guy named Glenn, who's still in front of mine, who's had the most amazing experience at this retreat in Peru. But he's like, Matt, you shut the fuck up already? But finally when it was over, the whole everybody there, they're like 12 people on the retreat

and all these facilitators and everybody just started clapping the world claws because they realized that I had been through something absolutely incredible. And it was, it was life changing. I didn't even, yeah, I didn't even know that I needed it. I didn't know it was capable of that. It was a little scary that that was inside me, but I felt a thousand pounds lighter when it was over. Just to clarify though, that screaming was not in terror. It was like an exorcism, not a panic attack.

I didn't want to use the exorcism, but yes, it was an exorcism. It was not panic, I was not afraid, I was not in any physical distress. I had this baseline consciousness of knowing and I was sort of in my right head that I just needed to scream. You know, it's actually very moving, thinking about it.

I was in a place that afforded me the space to do just that. And my whole life, I've been in control, keeping control, maintaining control, maintaining equilibrium. Even when I'm being erratic, there is a purpose. There is an element of keeping control. And in that moment in Peru, I seated control. I allowed something to happen completely to me. And I let it happen without feeling shame,

without feeling bad or stupid about it. I just needed to get it out and I didn't care what anybody thought. More of my conversation with Mac Gutman right after this. Bosh Legacy returns, now streaming. Maddie's been taken. Oh God. His daughter is in the hands of a madman. What are the police have been looking for me? But nothing can stop a father.

We want to find her just as much as you do. I doubt that very much. From doing what the law can't. And we have to do this the very way. You have to. I don't. Bosh Legacy watched the new season now streaming exclusively on FreeVee. What if we told you that there's a darker side to royalty?

And more often than not, life as a prince or princess is anything but a fairy tale. I'm Brooke Sifrin, and I'm Arisha Skidmore Williams, and we're the hosts of Wunderies' podcasts, Even The Rich and Rich and Daily, and we're so excited to tell you about our brand new podcast called Even the Royals, where we'll be pulling back the curtain on royal families, past and present, from all over the world. On Even the Royals, we'll cover everything from stories you thought you knew, like Marie Antoinette, who was actually a victim of a vulgar propaganda campaign which started a wild chain of events that led to her eventual beheading. Or, Catherine Damodici, who was assumed to be responsible for one of the most devastating

massacres in French history. But in reality, she was a mother holding on to her dying dynasty. Royal status might be bright and shiny, but it comes with the expense of everything else, like your freedom, your privacy, and sometimes even your head. Follow even the royals on the Wendery app or wherever you get your podcasts. If you don't want to wait for more episodes, join Wendery Plus today to listen exclusively and add free. One of the things that's, and I've said this before on the show, so I apologize to loyal listeners who would find this repetitive, but one of the things that really blocked me from doing

psychedelics is fear. I mean, that my earliest panic attacks, I was not defending a thesis, I was smoking weed. Very common, yeah. And so I really don't like giving up control of my consciousness. I mean, it's probably why I'm such a terrible meditator. So I'm just curious, you did not, and we have more psychedelics to talk about, but thus far I'm not hearing you say, yeah, I was freaking out about having to relinquish control. Dan, I thought there was no such thing as terrible meditation.

Come on, yes. Well played, I love when people use my own words against me. My son does that too, sometimes I'll be saying like something reassuring, reassuring to him, and I'll say, is this like an inspirational speech? Because if it is, I don't want to hear it. Ha, ha, good old Alexander. That's what happens when you raise kids and they're smarter than you are.

And you're like, why, why did you just say? No. Um, so the thing about psychedelics is that they're very different from cannabis. You don't have a choice. The beauty of psychedelics for me is they took me out of the realm of having a choice. I was not present anymore. Matt Gutman was not there to make the decision. No, I'm afraid of letting this out. I've got to contain this inside because people will feel bad. I will upset other people. I care what my cave group at that moment thinks. That consciousness didn't exist anymore.

And that's why psychedelics for me are so useful because I don't have a choice anymore. Matt Gutman's out of this picture. That social fear that had been dogging you as a correspondent, there's nobody in the control room at 47 West 66 watching you as you're freaking out. Exactly. Beautifully said, right, the control room was empty. I could scream to my heart's content. And so that's why I think it's so different from pot. Where are you like, you can get into your head. There is no head.

Like for all intents and purposes, that head is gone. It's all empty. Okay, so let's quickly talk about Iooska. What was that experience like for you? So, Iooska was really tough. Iooska is a brew for those who don't know. It's also often called a tea, but it's really like the consistency of river mud. And it's poured in very small doses, and it's a shamanistic medicine that originated

in the Shippewa tribe in the Amazon, and it's derived from two separate plants. One of the plants sends you off into the psychedelic hallucinatory state. The other plant basically creates the digestive path for your body to be able to break down the chemical compounds in the first plant, DMT, so that you can actually trip. So you can actually have this journey. For me, for some reason, it wasn't breaking down, right? So I don't know what was up with my digestive tract. Maybe it was my head. Maybe I was blocking it, asserting control. I don't know. So that first session, and there were three sessions at this retreat of Ayahuasca.

First time I did it, I took a dose, I didn't feel much. I took another half dose, didn't feel much at all. And that was five hours. I enjoyed the music, I enjoyed the chance, the Icaros as the cold of the shaman's, but I didn't feel anything. And like, I had people on this trip with me who are having the most unbelievable experiences. All around me, people are being rocketed into space. They're like, you know, in Saturn and Jupiter and I'm just like, do, dood dood dood don't feel anything. And then the second night I took twice that dose. So like three cups, three times more than anybody else. And then the third night I took five cups and it basically so destroyed my stomach that I thought I was being stabbed by knives.

And finally, five hours in, I began to have, you know, the visuals and the hallucinogenic experience. But the shamans were leaving the room. And I'm on the floor having had massive, explosive diarrhea. We can say that in this show, I guess. And just I was dying inside and they're like, okay, we'll put some Florida water on you and then leave. And then I just, I had a very delayed, very strange reaction to Iowaska. And like all around me, the next day, people were like, one of my friends had this experience and I'm going to read one of them for you. He just said that to me, he said, the Iowaska let me in completely. She turned me into a plant. I died and returned from a seed pod of pure energy.

I could feel the shamans. I navigated the space home. Poor love into my son as he slept. Had intergalactic soul sex with my wife became God, felt the pain of all of humanity. My hands admitted energy that I could manipulate at will. That's about half of it, pretty great. And I'm sitting on the toilet. So you have all these psychedelic experiences and we didn't even get to ketamine,

but you have all these psychedelic experiences. Does any of it help? I mean, it makes it for a good book, but does it help you with the panic? Each of them helped. The thing is, it really is maintenance, right? So every time I had either a cathartic experience by purging myself, which is what I wasca ended up being, this massive purge, and I was sick to my stomach for 10 days afterwards, lost a fair amount of weight, but there was catharsis and purging involved.

Each one of them enabled me to go to a place that I can't really go to in my quote unquote, right mind. So they were helpful, but it does take regular maintenance, just like meditation. It's not like you can meditate one day and then have a great session and then feel better for the rest of the week

or the rest of the year. It's practice. And so in my ketamine session, the psychiatrist who did it with me is like, well, this is maintenance, it's all work. And you got to keep the practice up. Interestingly, one of the ways that I access my journey's on psychedelics is through meditation, because I sit there and then the images start to come up. And that's one of the ways I can access these treasure boxes of moments that were actually strengthening,

like what I felt on mushrooms and what I felt in certain experiences on ketamine. So I think that there is this collaboration between the psychedelics and meditation, actually. What I'm curious about is when I've had panic, the modalities that have worked for me are, I put them in a couple buckets. One would be preventative stuff where exercise, and you write about exercise in the book, exercise, getting enough sleep, doing meditation, making sure that the nervous system is not janky and jangly. And so that reduces the odds of panic. So that's one. The second is medication like SSRIs.

I don't know how they work, but some SSRIs can apparently reduce the instances of panic. And then another kind of medication is beta blockers, which are these non-narcotic meds that many people in performing professions, even surgeons, take. It doesn't have anything to do with your psychology.

It's not like a Xanax. It doesn't relax you, but it puts a ceiling on the heart rate. So that's really helpful. So you can have the psychological part of panic, but not the physiological part. And so for me, that has been incredibly important. And then finally, psychological techniques that I can use in a moment of panic. Like, you know, if I'm on a plane and I'm freaking out, I can put my hand on my heart and talk to myself

in ways that I reassure myself that I'm fine and you've had these experiences before and you've always survived. So this is kind of like cognitive behavioral therapy stuff. Anyway, so those are the three buckets that have worked for me. And I'm not really hearing that in the psychedelics. That all seems outside of those buckets in some way.

The psychedelics, so first of all, thank you for your candor. I appreciate that you can say, listen, sometimes the propanural helps, the other medications help. And they do. And there are people out there, and I stopped Paxill after 18 years, which was really rough, but it enabled me to feel more, and I needed to start feeling. But medication saves some people's lives. Science still doesn't know how SSRIs really work.

They just released a report last year, a major study that found they are both more addictive and that the withdrawal symptoms of SSRI is getting off of it are more painful than anybody knew, and there is no informed consent with doctors. Still, for some segment of the population, not only do they work in helping producing an anxiety, but they are massively helpful in limiting panic. So I interviewed a bunch of people who can't live without them and for whom it enabled them to live normal lives,

which is great. So I just wanna put that out there. It didn't work that way for me. So the psychedelics helped me excavate this pain that was dragging me down. I'd say, I'd say. This grief that was holding me down and it was like like basically I was drowning

because of it. It was like a thousand pounds of grief on my chest and I couldn't get my face out of the water. And I think that that was exacerbating the panic attacks, exacerbating my baseline level of anxiety that brought me just closer to the threshold of having more panic attacks. Right. But you know what Dan? And I haven't had the time because I've been doing this book and the publicity, but I need to go back and do some maintenance on that. But day to day, I think you said this to me in one of our conversations. It's like, just don't be a dick to yourself. Be kind.

It's sort of the inverse of the golden rule. It's due unto yourself what you would do unto others. Like, I think most of us try to be kind to others, but we're not as kind to ourselves as we should be. And so we've talked about the drill sergeant, and I've tried to retire that drill sergeant, and if I get anxious, and if I have a panic, he's not gonna make me feel like I'm a total absolute loser anymore. Like, I'm a failure. Like, I'm okay with it. Like, if I happen to happen, and I'm gonna be okay. I'm gonna failure. Like I'm okay with it. Like if it happens, it happens. And I'm going to be okay.

I'm going to survive. I survive the previous panic attacks and I'll survive the future panic attacks. And I cannot promise that I won't have panic attacks again. I just, I probably will. That's how I'm engineered. But I need to continue this maintenance that I've been doing. Eating right, limiting caffeine, severely limiting alcohol, exercising, doing my meditation, just a couple of minutes of it,

doing my mindfulness, these things absolutely help. And if we don't do them, then we come closer to raising that baseline threshold of anxiety that can lead us towards the paddock space. That's all super helpful. And I suspect maybe maybe I hope not, clinicians listening to this will go batch it at my terrible taxonomy here.

But I can see after having listened to you there, I can see like four buckets, four avenues of approach for panic. One is as discussed, taking care of yourself, like the daily maintenance, making sure your nervous system is in it as good a shape as possible through sleep exercise, meditation. The other is medications, including beta blockers or SSRIs,

if you and your doctor think you need them. The third would be stuff you can do in the moment, which can include learning how to talk to yourself in a healthy way, not being a dick to yourself or learning as I did through, and I know you did through CBT and exposure therapy that you can gradually get more and more comfortable with the things that are scaring you. And then finally, and this is what I was missing the first go around, I think is deep, deep work, like through either therapy or psychedelics or both, where you're really excavating

the root causes of what is gnawing at you, what is ailing you, and that it sounds like you've really checked all four of these boxes. I mean, I hope so, but it's, again, it's constant work. It's like a whack-a-mull thing. You can't check all the boxes all the time. And there is this sort of tyranny in the wellness world. You don't fall into this pitfall, but people do. You've got to do all these things. Get sun, get cold, exercise, eat well, meditate, mindfulness. Nobody's got time in the day to do all of this stuff. And then

we get into this feedback loop of like, oh, I'm not maintaining my body and my brain and my mind and my soul, and so I'm a failure. And like, I definitely want people to avoid that. And I definitely talk about it in the book like, it's okay. Just like, that's part of the whole being kind to ourselves. And it's sort of the philosophy of meditation, right? You lose your mantra.

Okay, don't shout it yourself. Just come back to your mantra. Do it again. It's all good. So it's the same thing with the wellness practice. But yeah, for me, maybe it's different for other people going into that well of grief worked because I'm too afraid to go in it in my right mind because I'm afraid I'll never come out. And I did a lot of therapy. The problem with me is that I'm such a pleaser, I form a relationship with my therapist, and then I want them to like me and I want them to be happy and pleased with me. So it becomes about working that relationship rather than dealing with my demons.

Yes. So I'm back in therapy now, but with a very issue-specific thing, like just one thing that I wanted to work on and it's temporary, but it's not like, oh, let me go talk about my mother for, you know, 16 years on the couch. I'm not doing that again, that didn't work. The practitioner with whom I did Silasai bin Farah, I asked her, I'm like, what works?

This is like my first foray. She said, you know, I worked for years with a shaman in Southern Mexico and he said, everything. I mean, everything does work in a way. Just thinking about it and being mindful of taking care of yourself. Bottom line though is what you've learned, if I could sum it up, is that you're not dysfunctional if you're having panic attacks.

It is natural and it is treatable. Now, there's a large menu. You've got to pick what works for you and it takes a lot of maintenance and it's easy to fall off the wagon, but you're not broken and you're not stuck if you're panicking or you have a high anxiety. Exactly. It is just part of how humans are wired to be. It is part of the human condition and we have to remember from what I learned,

the baseline human condition is not to be happy or even to be contented. The baseline is to survive. The second thing is to create offspring. After that, whatever you manage to do, if you can bring joy to your life, if you can recognize moments of feeling content or moments of happiness, that's all a bonus. That's everything that you've managed to achieve. So if you feel those things, you can pat yourself on the back for it. Matthew, is there something I should have asked, but didn't?

No. Before I let you go, can you just remind everybody of the name of your book and the name of your prior book and anything else you want to plug where we can find you on social media just purge yourself of all promotional materials. Please. So I'll try to go into an altered state for this.

So the book is called No Time to Panic, How I Curved My Anxiety and Conquered a Lifetime of Panic Attacks. Book I wrote before about is called The Boys in the Cave, Deep Inside the Impossible Mission in Thailand about the rescue of the 13 boys from the cave in Thailand. But no time to panic. Just one more thing about that. I talk about conquering a lifetime of panic attacks. It's something I've vanquished panic and I will never have a panic attack again. It's that if it happens, I'm going to be okay with it. I'm going to know how to deal with it and I'm going to be able to forgive myself.

And that is one of the most important things that I want to impart on listeners is that sense of self forgiveness and self compassion. And also a sort of healthy version of self reliance. It's not like rugged individualism. I don't need any help from anybody. But one way to understand hope and optimism is not that the way I feel is that I'm not of a healthy version of self-reliance. It's not like rugged individualism. I don't need any help from anybody. But one way to understand hope and optimism is not that shitty things will never happen to you. It's just that you can handle it if and when it does. And that is a hopeful

optimistic outlook. I like that, Dan. I'm keeping that one. Love it. All yours, buddy. I have to say as somebody who's always, you know, I'm a little older than you and our relationship from back when we met 2006 in Israel has always been like, I'm the older guy. I was in court. You were in radio and I was badgering you to go into TV because you get nice-looking face and such a dogged, excellent reporter. Just to watch you now writing this incredibly great book and then talking about it so well I feel very proud a lot of naches to put it in Yiddish Oh, Bobby. Thank you. I'm so happy to be here with you. I feel my heart. Thank you, Dan. Thank you Thanks again to Mac Gutman

Thank you as well to you for listening. We could not and would not do it without you if you want to do me a solid. Go in and give us a rating and a review on whatever podcast player you use because it really does help us work the algorithm and reach more people. Thank you most of all to everybody who works so hard on this show. 10% happier is produced by Lauren Smith, Gabrielle Suckerman, Justine Davie and Tara Anderson, DJ Kashmir is our senior producer, Marissa Schneidermann as our senior editor and Kimmy Regler as our executive producer, scoring and mixing by Peter Bonnaventure of Ultraviolet audio and Nick Thorburn of the band

Islands wrote our theme. We'll see you all on Wednesday for a brand new episode. We're going to talk to Alex Tussant who is a Peloton instructor and has an incredible story that I think many of you, if not all of you, will find very motivated. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and ad free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad free with 1-3-plus in Apple Podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at 1dory.com-survey.

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