Tami Simon: Hello friends, my name’s Tami Simon, and I’m the founder of Sounds True, and I want to welcome you to the Sounds True podcast, Insights at the Edge.
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In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Matt Gutman. Matt is ABC News’s chief national correspondent. A multi-award winning reporter, Matt contributes regularly to World News Tonight, 20/20, Good Morning America, and Nightline. He’s reported from 50 countries across the world, and Matt Gutman is the author of a new book. It’s part memoir, part science digest, and dare I say, it’s filled with heart and humor. It’s called No Time to Panic: How I Curbed my Anxiety and Conquered a Lifetime of Panic Attacks. Matt, I’m so happy to get this chance to talk to you, and I have my own sort of secret life as a broadcaster, so here being with someone who’s a professional broadcaster at your level of influence, I notice I’m on edge, I’m excited, and dare I say, a little anxious.
Matt Gutman: It’s funny because you make me feel calm, because you feel, you sound, and you appear, and you seem—and I think you are—very centered.
TS: All right, well, you make me feel anxious, so here we go. This is great. It’s a match made.
MG: Normally, everybody makes me feel anxious. OK, well, we’ll switch roles now.
TS: Tell me, why did you decide to go public about having two decades, really, of working deeply with panic attacks, and having a panic disorder? What informed that decision?
MG: I guess, it began with a reckoning. It was January 26th, 2020, and I had been assigned to go cover the Kobe Bryant helicopter crash, which literally happened about 10 miles away from where I am right now. And during ABC’s first live report, I made a catastrophic mistake. I won’t get into it exactly—people can Google it if they’re super interested—but I made a bad mistake, because I was having a panic attack.
And yes, there was a lot of stuff going on. Kobe Bryant was—my dad died in a plane crash, was killed in a plane crash when I was 12 and he was 42, basically the same age that Kobe and his daughter Gianna were. And somewhere subterraneally in my subconscious, that was lurking, and my brain couldn’t navigate all the lanes of traffic at once. And it was the first time in my career that I’d ever made a mistake like that, even after having suffered hundreds of panic attacks on live TV before. And so, I decided along with my wife that I had to quit TV news or figure this out, because I was miserable. It made me anxious with her, with the kids. It wasn’t a good situation. I needed to work this out.
But it wasn’t until about a year and change later that the idea that I had a constituency of more than one dawned on me. And that was—we’ll talk about the other stuff I learned in the interim, but I realized that disclosure, that sharing, was really powerful medicine. And I did that because I had a panic attack on air. It was the last one I had, December 4th, 2020, and I carried my shame hangover onto the Southwest flight. And in 13C, there’s a lovely person who was crocheting. Her name is Kat Armato, and we’re still close today. And for some reason I felt comfortable with her, and I just started telling her everything. And she was the first person with whom I confided, to whom I confided, that I have panic, I’m not perfect, that I have this big chink in my armor. And it was so good.
Anyway, I decided, “Oh, I need panic attack support groups, let me go find them.” And very quickly I learned that there are virtually none in the entire country. There are a couple on Facebook, but you are only allowed to post your crises, or what medication you’re on, and you can’t actually have human-to-human interaction. And it was at this point, in the middle of 2021, that I realized I need to write this book, I need to share it with people my journey—it’s a bit of a hackneyed term at this point, but it’s true. And that set me off on what became this book that you read. Thank you for reading it, by the way.
TS: Yeah. Now, it’s interesting—disclosure is good medicine for the person who’s disclosing, but it also has an impact. It helps de-pathologize whatever you’re talking about. And I wonder if you can talk some about that, because I think that’s part of the ripple effect that your book will have.
MG: I certainly hope so. One of the things that made panic for me so damaging was the shame, the stigma. And that’s why I kept the secret, and secrets fester inside of you like some sort of incurable MRSA bacteria. And we are told, especially men—and this is a masculine thing, that we have to stay in control. And this is inculcated in us, since we’re young. And that was me. I had to stay in control. So I couldn’t tell anybody, really, this terrible secret, because it would show that I’m weak, and I’m imperfect, and that’s what I had to present on TV.
And so there is this pathology, in all society really, about attaching negative consequences and negative connotations to panic especially. And there is a correlation to—they used to call it hysteria, and the root of the word hysteria is hystera in Greek, which is, it’s “uterus.” It’s the same thing that defines a woman.
So part of my journey, to cut to the end, is that I learned how to cry better. I learned how to emote better, and that is being in touch with my more feminine side as well.
TS: All right. Well you know, there’s a part of me that wonders, even as we have this conversation—and I admitted my anxiety at the beginning—do you have fears that you’ll have a panic attack again? Or when you put a subtitle like, How I Conquered My Panic Attacks, like that’s behind you now, you can talk about it in the past tense? Or is there something always forever potentially lurking on the side?
MG: An excellent question. It’s one I’ve been asked a lot. I think the conquered part—listen, I have not had a full-blown panic attack on air since 2020. But that’s a lot of pressure to put on yourself, right? To say, “Never going to have this mental health episode again.”
So I prefer saying, “I’m good for now.” The conquering is in that I have retired this drill sergeant who has been telling me for so many years that I’m failing, that I’m not good enough, that I’ve got to be perfect, that I’ve got to continue and prolong this mirage of perfection of the television correspondent, of always being absolutely in control. That drill sergeant who’s saying, by the way, in the back of my head whenever I did have a panic attack, “You’re blubbering. This is a panic attack. You’re doing it. This is cataclysmic.” I’ve retired that drill sergeant. There’s a much more forgiving person in his place, and I am more forgiving of myself.
So if it happens, it’s going to be OK. I’m going to get through it. Panic is only about 15 to 60 seconds long, maybe 90 seconds. But it’s mostly your brain’s assessment of a possible threat. And once you assess that threat, and it jolts you with adrenaline and then a little bit of cortisol in case you have to keep that threat assessment going and run away, or fight, or do whatever, it’s over—and after that it’s anxiety. And all of us can handle that. All of us, most of us, deal with anxiety on a day-to-day basis in one form or another. And so it’s just—a lot of the conquering is about shifting my perception of panic, and perception of what I need to be and who I need to be in my own head.
TS: Now, Matt, you said something really important. This drill sergeant has now retired, or you’ve retired this inner part of you. And I think a lot of us have some inner part—whether we call it the critic, or the person with a whip. I mean, it comes out in our life in different ways. Someone at—the jailer, whatever, the stern—some part. And maybe we have the experience of this inner part of us receding, but actually retired?
So I want to understand about that more. I want to understand, if you were to share—and then, of course, in the book No Time to Panic, you go into quite a bit of detail about your quot-unquote “journey,” and the many different kinds of healing interventions you experimented with, and how effective some of them were. But when it comes specifically to the retirement of the drill sergeant, how did that happen? And what recommendations do you have for people who have that perfectionist critic that’s inside their head, working on them?
MG: How did it happen is the story of the book, so that’s a three-and-a-half-year journey. I tried everything, Tami. So first of all, I think we should say—so after my dad died in that plane crash in 1990, my mom put me in therapy. And basically I was in therapy for the rest of my adult life, in and out. And so, you would think that someone like me who is super privileged, goes to one of the best colleges in the country, is certainly intelligent enough, certainly aware enough, in a lot of therapy with lots of different kinds of therapists, would know a panic attack when it hit them.
But I didn’t.
The first one for me was in college, my senior year defending my college thesis. And I mean, I thought I was molting into a werewolf. I had no idea what had possessed my body. My heart was hammering against my ribcage, and I was wearing this, I thought, very academic-looking turtleneck, and it felt like cats were clawing at my neck. I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t see, my vision had narrowed to a pinpoint. I was sweating, I was trembling, and I could not remember the most basic elemental facts about this 200-page thesis, which I spent the past year writing. And I didn’t know that I suffered from panic attacks for another 15 years, maybe 14.
TS: Well what did you think happened? What did you think had happened?
MG: I thought I got nervous. I thought that was part of nerves, maybe anxiety, but nobody talked about panic. And panic can be as unique as a fingerprint, right? I mean, your colleague, Jen, described her panics. They’re slightly different than mine. They had a little—and I’ll let her explain later, but some people feel derealization, they feel the walls closing in. I feel a fear of losing control. Some people fear impending death, and it is such a visceral fear, and sense of impending death, that the symptoms of a panic attack are almost identical to the symptoms of a heart attack—which make it extremely hard, even for the most practiced ear like 9-1-1 dispatchers, to be able to tell the difference. So just even knowing what a panic attack is in our society is a little bit difficult. And once you’ve had one, and now you know the symptoms, it’s pretty easy to self-diagnose.
But basically for years after knowing that I suffered from panics, I really leaned into the pharmacology world. I felt like my psychiatrist’s magical prescription pad had to have the answer. And I tried SSRIs; and I tried benzos; and gabas, which are anti-seizure medication; and Strattera, which is a non-stimulant ADHD medication; and stimulant ADHD medication; propranolol, which is something that actually a lot of concert pianists and musicians take before performances because your fingers can tremble when you are having a panic attack and that’s not good for music. So they take propranolol, which is a beta blocker. Nothing worked.
And eventually, I gravitated to altered states, which helped me excavate this grief that I had buried for so many years, and that helped a lot. But basically, everything works. It’s about taking care of yourself, it’s about reframing the way you think about panic and anxiety. I don’t want to belabor it, but there’s all sorts of other stuff like evolutionary psychology, which really helped me understand why we are the way we are.
TS: Right, now, so it’s interesting, because I asked you specifically about this inner drill sergeant, right? And, because I’m trying to understand the connection between that inner—is it a voice? Is it a part of you? I’m trying to understand the connection between that part of you and its retirement, and the anxiety that you might feel in a situation not mounting to a point of a full-blown panic attack the way you’re describing it. Like, oh, if the drill sergeant were still here observing this conversation between us, then something different might happen. But no, the drill sergeant’s been retired, so that’s why I’m curious about that, to understand more specifically about that.
MG: Yeah. So part of it is—again, the drill sergeant was retired because he was made redundant in many ways. And one of the central tenets of the book is understanding why we have panic attacks. OK, so if we’re talking me, my mom—I’m [from a] nice Jewish family—my mother thought—most mothers, Jewish mothers, they say, “Oh, I want my son to be a doctor, a lawyer, an accountant or something.” My mom legit—like she said it tongue in cheek, but she legit said it a lot. She’s like, “You could be a prophet.” [LAUGHS] That’s a lot of pressure to put on a teenage kid, right? And I was massively high achieving. I was captain of the football team, and captain of lacrosse, and president of the school council, and all AP classes, and great grades, and went to a great school. But it was too much. It was too much.
And so once I started having panic attacks—and not blaming my mother here, this is way too much on the nose. This has a lot more to do with other things. But once I started to have panic attacks, and after that reckoning with the Kobe Bryant thing, I really started to try to understand why it was that humans at all suffer from panic attacks. All of the science says panic and chronic anxiety are massively unhealthy. It causes heart disease, terrible gut problems, it ages you. It’s everything bad that could happen, it shortens your life. So why does it persist in the human genome, and why do I have it? Like panic, why am I afflicted with this kink? Am I some mutant? What is wrong with me?
And so I started talking to evolutionary psychologists and biologists and psychiatrists, and eventually I learned that humans are wired to be anxious. We are not wired to be content. We are wired to survive and make offspring. That’s it. The rest is a bonus. If you feel contentment and happiness on a daily basis, that is great, but that is not how we are wired genetically.
And furthermore, I mean, basically there were two major buckets of fear that humans had. And we’re talking about hominins 50,000, 30,000, 100,000 years ago. So for many, many thousands of generations, humans feared primarily two things. One is death by some sort of violence act—a lion eating us on the savannah, a rockfall, a splinter actually causing an infection that would kill us, the death of our offspring. These were visceral fears that caused the stress response. The other bucket was social. Because humans evolved to be massively cooperative. We needed each other in order to survive; without each other, we were dead.
And so we gave up muscle mass and speed and a lot of physical attributes in order to focus on this big, wonderful brain that allowed us to fear stuff sooner, which allowed us to plan and allowed us to think about the future in a way that enabled us to make some nice loincloths and plan the next hunt and a seasonal festival in which we’d meet people from other caves.
But if we shirked our responsibility in our own cave group or our own tree group or whatever it was, we could be excommunicated. We could be banished. And being banished from your group made you as good as dead, because you weren’t going to be eaten by the lion on the savannah immediately, but a couple of days later you might, or get hit by lightning, or die of the elements.
And so understanding that made me understand that panic and anxiety are normal. That’s what Randy Nesse, who was the founding father of evolutionary psychiatry, told me when I started telling him about this. He says, “Matt, panic is normal. Your brain is wired to have a thousand false alarms as long as it doesn’t have a missed alarm, because one missed alarm means you’re dead.” False alarms mean you burn 50 to 100 calories—OK. But miss an alarm, miss a social cue, and you’re a goner.
TS: OK, so let me see if I can try to piece a couple things together here, because I want to really understand the phenomenon of panic attacks. And as I shared with you, I’m someone who has been anxious, I would say, quite a lot in my life, but I’ve never had a panic attack. So I don’t really know what that’s like from a personal, in-my-own-body experience. But when I hear you talk about our need and our desire for social acceptance, obviously here you are, you’re a newscaster. You’re standing in front of a class when you were describing in college, and you could be humiliated largely, publicly. Oh my God, social rejection. I get that. I get how that could lead to a panic response, the fear of social rejection.
Now, the fear of death because social rejection will lead to death. We all have a fear of death, I think, to some degree, until we’ve worked it out. And then you bring up—and I’m bringing a lot of things here so you can help me untangle it—you brought up your own grief, and that underneath your journey, you saw that there was a well of grief that was somehow the grief of your father’s death, and probably other things as well, that somehow the panic attacks were an expression of buried grief in some way. You talked even here about how important it’s been for you as a man to come into more vulnerability and cry. So help me understand how this all fits together. What’s underneath the panic attack? That’s what I’m trying to understand. Is it individual, in addition to social humiliation?
MG: So for me in general, or anybody?
TS: Both.
MG: I think for me it’s social rejection. That is an absolute fact, right? So on a given night, probably 9 million people watch ABC World News Tonight With David Muir, who is a savant, right? And in my head when I’m about to go live, I think not about the 9 million people who watch, I think about the dimly lit cave of the control room in New York, with the executive producers and the senior producers with whom I’ve worked to put on my piece or to put it together, and David Muir and Robin Roberts and George Stephanopoulos, people I deeply respect, and I want to please them. I want to be a successful, cooperative member of this group that we have. And I fear failing them, or being considered someone who weakens the group in general.
So that’s my personal begetter of panic. It’s the fear of social rejection by this group, who I consider a great group to be in, and I’m so honored to be part of it and so afraid of being excommunicated from it. In general, people can have panic attacks from a million different things, right? It’s as individual as a fingerprint I said, right? There’s agoraphobia, [and] a very natural cause of panic attacks is a fear of suffocation. So that can happen in an elevator, in a crowded room, in your office, anywhere.
TS: So that’s more the fear of death that I was pointing to—
MS: Right.
TS: —That for some people, it may be something or other that brings that up in them. Nothing to do with other people’s impression of them, but just some way that they’re facing, “Oh my God, I could die,” whether it’s true or not.
MG: You know, a lot of these panic syndromes—A lot of people’s specific symptoms can metastasize. So in the book, I interviewed a guy, and he was a high-tech man, high-tech employee in Austin, Texas. And he started having panic attacks from public speaking. But then he started obsessing about how much he sweat during his panic attacks. And then the panic was just about people watching him sweat. It wasn’t about glossophobia, which is the fear of public speaking. It was about, “Oh my God, I’m going to be judged for the amount I sweat. And then he became essentially agoraphobic because he was so afraid of people seeing him sweat, which I guess is a social fear, or act erratically by wiping his sweat all the time, that he realized the only domain of safety was his house. So he started to not leave the house.
And this is how a lot of people can go from a one-off panic attack into full on panic disorder, which then metastasizes into panic disorder with agoraphobia, which means they’re afraid to leave the house. Again, it’s super diverse. The one uniting factor are the symptoms that typically are associated with a panic attack.
And we talked early before everybody came on about how pervasive it is. The data right now that we have—and I think the surveys are off, because if you had surveyed me a few years ago, I would not have known that I had a panic attack, even if I’d answered the survey accurately and willingly. So the surveys say that about 28 percent of Americans will have a panic attack or experience a panic attack in their lifetime. Mike Telch, who is the head of the Laboratory for the Study of Anxiety at the University of Texas, and who’s one of the most cited academics in the panic world, believes that the number’s probably closer to 50 percent. So about half of Americans will experience a panic attack in their lifetimes. And those symptoms that we talked about, Tami, are so powerful and so overwhelming that 40 percent of people who present at the nation’s ERs, thinking that they’re having a heart attack, are actually having a panic attack. That’s over 3 million people every year at the ER who think they’re having a heart attack when it’s actually a panic attack. I mean, the numbers to me were mind blowing when I finally learned them.
TS: OK. Now, I brought up, and it may have seemed a little bit like, whoa, this is a curve ball from left field—which is the grief, the well of grief that you excavated as part of your journey to heal your panic attacks. What you discovered was that this was buried material inside of you that you hadn’t really been in touch with. It sounds like it wasn’t necessarily directly connected to the panic attacks, but it’s more something you discovered and this has softened you to now be able to talk about your panic and be more open and vulnerable. Or am I missing something here?
MG: I love your questions, because they’re actually making me think rather than regurgitate the stuff that I know. It’s a really good question. And I mean, I think it’s both. For me personally, it’s about having kept control for so long. And I don’t know, there’s no way to quantify the derivation of one’s panic exactly. But I can tell you that once I did dive into that well of grief that was so deep and so dark that I never wanted to go in there because I was afraid I could never claw my way out. But once I did start to do that with the assistance of altered states—holotropic breath work, and psilocybin, and ayahuasca, and 5-MeO-DMT, and mescaline, and ketamine—all these different modalities, they helped me get into the place that I so feared. And by allowing myself to cry—and not just whimper, but to sob and scream and shout and rend my clothes essentially, and tear at my hair, it was healing.
Now was that the source of the panic? Partly, probably. I don’t know exactly. I just know that it really helped. It just helped in general. And it needs upkeep, right? It’s not like a one-off. We need maintenance, we humans. And so I need to do more of that, and I have to keep doing that. And it’s a practice like everything else, and it’s one that I do work on and need to keep working on.
TS: All right, let’s talk directly to that person who’s listening to this and says, “Look, I have panic attacks. I’m one of that 25 to 50 percent of the population. Matt, you’ve done a lot of personal research. You’ve interviewed a lot of people. Tell me what works.”
MG: So in the words of my psilocybin facilitator, everything. I mean, first of all, Tami, it’s the basics, right? The most simple things probably make the biggest difference, which is sleep, nutrition, sun, exercise. These are the basic things that humans need in order to function happily and well, or as contentedly as we possibly can, given how we are wired. And I went off SSRIs, antidepressants, so I was on Paxil for about 18 years. Some of them work for people. And if SSRIs or benzos, the Klonopins and the Xanaxes of the world, help people and help them live a content, fruitful life, I’m all for it. I am. Do not pass judgment. It didn’t work for me. Neither did propranolol.
So what helped a lot was achieving these altered states. I was able to process and think about panic in a different way. Also sharing, talking to people like you, to talking—my wife, eventually, pretty much everybody I meet about panic—was very helpful because it removes the shame and the stigma. And when you don’t have anything to hide, it relieves you of a pretty major burden. So I would say that was some of the best medicine for me, having community around me.
Cognitive behavioral therapy helped. There are certain limitations to cognitive behavioral therapy, that’s exposure therapy. It has two major tent poles. One is psychoeducational, teaching you that the thing you fear is unfounded and unreasonable. I don’t always think that that’s a correct theory, because in my case, I feared losing control and in fact I did lose control. And then my very worst fear came true. I lost control on air, made a mistake, nearly lost my job, right? So it would be hard to tell me that my fear is unfounded.
People who have a fear of flying in airplanes—yes, statistically you are not likely to die flying in an airplane. But cognitively when you think about it, so you’re flying in an aluminum tube, five to seven miles in the air, with 200 other germ-spewing humans at the same time. That’s terrifying.
Driving in a car—there are lots of people who have fear of driving in a car and they literally—the people in our panic attack support group, they drive with cold compresses, with drinks riding shotgun beside them because they need that. The way I am most likely to die not from disease is from a car accident. It is the leading cause of death for people 18 to 54 in the United States.
So the cognitive behavioral therapy psychoeducation part is a little bit weak. The other part is exposure therapy, which works for so many people. But I will tell you—this is a long-winded answer. I will tell you what worked for me in cognitive behavioral therapy, and that is shedding my avoidance behavior and my safety measures, my safety behavior.
I used to smoke cigarettes before live shots for some reason because I thought it gave me—it was so bad for me that it would make me impervious to panic. I had several pairs of lucky underwear in the rotation because I thought it saved me. I would do stretching. I would show up very late to a live shot. I chatted with people. I’d do pushups. I would do all these things. I would basically hyperventilate before because I was so afraid of going hypoxic on air because I couldn’t breathe that I’d pre-breathe. I’d be like [GASPS] so pack in the air, which only sent the message to my brain that it’s about to be threatened. So all of those things only increased the chances of a panic attack. And so I learned from cognitive behavioral therapy not to do them. So that was helpful. All these things can help. There isn’t one solution, and I have not found the magic bullet. And had I found the magic bullet, it would’ve been in the book and it would probably have sold even more.
I think that the way to help people is to tell them, I don’t actually have the answer. I have lots of answers. Everybody can get help, and really anything you do to try to help yourself is ultimately beneficial to you.
TS: Let me see if I can tease out a couple of things here. You said exposure therapy as part of cognitive behavioral therapy. What is that?
MG: It depends on what kind of panic disorder you have or what your specific fear is. But exposure is essentially exposing someone to the very thing they fear. So a therapist would take, let’s say someone who’s afraid of flying. So they confine them in a room, and they’ll have them exposed to that. Then they’ll take them in a bus, maybe a train. Eventually they will graduate to an airplane and they will show them that no harm will come to them while they’re flying. And it’s building up to that thing that you are most terrified of. Same thing with cars or people with fear of public speaking.
TS: So how did this work in your case? What kind of exposure therapy did you go through?
MG: Basically that, but it was not massively beneficial because I did public speaking for a living. So it was more talk therapy with this clinician about dumping the safety behaviors, thinking about the psychoeducational approach—that even when I did have panic attacks, and I’ve had a hundred of them on air, 99.9 percent of the time, I was fine and nobody noticed that I was dying inside. We’ll say 90 percent of the time, 95. There was some tiny hiccups sometimes, but most of the time he was telling me like, “Nobody notices. I can’t even see it, Matt. It’s in your head. Even if you have a panic attack, it’s OK because you always make it work. Your brain kicks into gear, you eventually remember what you’re going to say, and that so much of your failure in presentation is just in your head.” So that was helpful to me. Again, very hard to do exposures to public speaking when public speaking is your vocation, and very hard to mimic or recreate the intensity of going on live television for news. But there were other elements of cognitive behavioral therapy that were helpful.
TS: Now, it sounds like entering altered states through the use of psychedelics was the area that was the most profound for you, that created the most change and transformation. There are a lot of different psychedelics. You mentioned a bunch. Tell us a little bit about which experiences impacted you the most, particularly in terms of conquering panic attacks.
MG: When I mentioned, I rattled off all the psychedelics I did, I had a momentary fear that people would think that I’m Hunter S. Thompson going on a bender in Las Vegas with this convertible Chevy Caprice. But my mode of transportation to these altered states was typically a couch or a bed. I did it always with practitioners or guides, who were professionals, or actual psychiatrists and psychologists by my side. So it was very thought out and sometimes expensive, but I wanted to do it right. I did not want this to be a lark. This was not something that I did for fun or recreation. This was medicinal.
All of them were great, I would say. I’ll describe my experience with 5-MeO-DMT. This is the secretions of a Sonoran Desert toad. It’s basically a powder that you smoke. I did this in Peru. And it’s a short-acting medicine that catapults you beyond. And so I had a brief experience with sort of ego death, I sort of died—didn’t know where I was, completely gone. And then I came back from that state and I was on a mat in this room in Peru, in the Sacred Valley which is near Machu Picchu. And I came back screaming like a newborn into the world, literally flopping off the mat onto the floor, immediately sweating and hyperventilating.
But Tami, I had this—I don’t even know how to describe it. It was so profound. It was screaming. I shouted. I emptied my lungs of this pain that had been there that I didn’t even know was so intense, and I allowed myself to scream. I felt compelled to do it in a way I’ve not felt compelled to do anything in my life. This was not voluntary. It was as if these demons were inside my lungs and they were starting to fly out. It was like a reverse exorcism, whatever that was. And I basically screamed and cried and shouted and tore at my hair and my face. And I just did this a lot for about 35 minutes. And the other members of this retreat—and most people do it in silence, but of course I gotta to do it theatrically. And so my fellow retreat members, who were massively supportive and awesome, when it was over, just gave out this huge cheer because they could tell that I had had this seminal moment in my life of something—of getting this out, of crying in a way that I’d never done before. It was massively profound, and I will never ever forget it, and I will always be grateful for that experience, and the practitioner, Gloria, who helped me with it. Anyway, so that’s one type of experience. Ketamine was also very profound. I experienced ego death and literally I—
TS: Let’s slow down. When you say that, when you say, “I experienced ego death,” I think people could have a question there. What exactly did you experience that you’re labeling that?
MG: So ketamine—legal, administered by a psychiatrist here in Ojai, California. I did an intramuscular shot. So ketamine is being administered all over the country in clinics, typically through lozenges or intravenously. But you can do an intramuscular dose, which is a macro psychedelic, a powerful psychedelic version of it. To cut a long story short, you feel very comfortable at first. And then you descend deeper and deeper into the state. And I felt like the whole world, the universe, was spread out before me like a map.
Remember the old days when we used to have maps that folded up and you put it in your glove compartment? So my map folded and folded and folded, and eventually congealed. All the colors of the universe congealed into this sort of messy art project that kids make, and that congealed into a black. And very quickly, I disappeared. There was no bed that I was in, in this Ojai Valley Inn. California disappeared. The United States was gone. There was no earth, there was no galaxy. The Milky Way was away. There was no universe. There was no past. There was no present. There was no Matt Gutman. I had nothing to moor myself on. I couldn’t tell myself that I was in an altered state, that I was hallucinating, that I was subconsciously gone, because there was no Matt Gutman to talk to and there was nothing there. And so I only had this baseline consciousness understanding that I was this speck in a limitless universe.
And I stayed in that state for what seemed like a long time, but it probably wasn’t. And eventually I was able to croak out to the psychiatrist who was by my side, “Am I alive?” And he said, “Yes.” And then I asked a few minutes later, “Is this reality?” In like a baby voice, like a real kid voice. And he’s this six-foot-four psychiatrist with long, red dreadlocks called Mark Brownstein, and he wears velour tracksuits everywhere. And he says, “Yes, yes, this is full reality, man.” [LAUGHS] Then I kind of started coming back to life and then just having regular visions and experiences. But that sort of brought me out of that death space.
But it was profound for a lot of reasons for me, partly because you lose the ego and then there is a bit of euphoria coming back from a death space. It also helped me really understand my wife in a way that I hadn’t before, because she had an emergency cesarean C-section when we lived in Jerusalem when I was working there. And it was pretty traumatic for her. And she was given ketamine, and she went into the K-hole, which is that dreaded sort of teetering space between consciousness and subconsciousness where you think you’re dead. But she didn’t have a psychologist and a psychiatrist by her side, who I asked to hold their hand eventually, and they held me. She didn’t have this cozy bed with a thousand thread count. She didn’t have any of that, and she was lost in that space. And then she was lost when she came out of it. She had terrible postpartum depression. And I understood it and I was obviously sympathetic, but this made me communicate with her in this subconscious deeper level that I’d never been able to do. And I started crying for her and her experience, and our daughter Libby. And that was a very powerful experience too.
TS: Would you say that your relationship to physical death, whether or not you had a fear of physical death previous in your life, that that’s changed through all the altered state work that you did?
MG: That’s a great question. I’ve never really had a lot of physical fear—which is very good if you want to be a war correspondent, which is basically what I did, conflicts and troubles all around the world for very many years. My tolerance for physical threats is extraordinarily high. My tolerance for social threats is low. And so it embodies a paradox that I call the paradox of the courageous coward, right? Literally, I’ve jumped out of helicopters into shark-infested waters. I have been held by the Venezuelan secret police for five days, not knowing if I’d ever get out.
I’ve been shot at, I’ve been mortared, Ukraine twice last year. I’ve seen many dead bodies, terrorist attacks, everything. So I’ve never had that kind of fear, but it actually helped me with the fear of social rejection more—sort of social death, I would say.
I don’t know if it’s a result of my dad dying in a plane crash, but I’ve always sort of been a daredevil—more tame now in my mid-forties. But still, I’m willing to do things that a lot of people aren’t because I feel comfortable. I feel calm in those situations, in disasters and in chaos. I don’t know why, but it feels like I am in control and I can control those situations. And in certain social situations where social rejection is possible or probable, that’s where I feel out of control and scared.
TS: Now interestingly, I have to come back to the drill sergeant that’s retired because it’s so interesting to me, which is, so it’s this fear of social rejection that you really discovered was at the bottom of your panic attacks. What would make you freeze would be, “Here I am in a public situation and I’m going to bomb.” Is there some way that you feel now—this is strong language and it’s not language you used in the book, but I’m curious—some sense of being loved? Some sense of belonging? Some sense of like, “I’m OK. I’m OK. I’m OK, unconditionally OK,” something like that?
MG: Oh, you made me cry. That was beautiful. More so, but I’m not all the way there yet. The drill sergeant’s retired, but the loving mother in the back of my head or—whoever, I always think of it as a female presence—has not replaced the drill sergeant. It’s just a much calmer—not a calmer, but a less cruel task master that’s up there. But the fully OK-ness I don’t have. I’m so wired to anxiety that I’m still not there. And maybe this is my life’s mission, Tami. You put it so directly. There’s a lot of work left to be done and I in no way allude to it in the book that I’m finished. I’ve made a lot of progress and done a lot of things, but I don’t know if I’m ever going to be that person. I hope to be one day, who’s got that “I’m OK-ness” in the back of the head. What I can say about the drill sergeant is that I do feel forgiveness. If I make a mistake, I’m OK saying it’s OK with it afterwards. But it’s not the sort of preemptive thing, the preemptive gentleness; it’s the aftermath which is a lot better.
TS: Do you have a vision, like an aspiration, or a vision of what that unconditional OK-ness might be like?
MG: I think you just implanted it in me. Yeah. It’s to have, one day, that overwhelming sense that it’s OK and it’s going to be OK. I have more of that, but it’s not that very—it’s not the super comforting thing yet. There’s been a transformation, but I’m not like—it’s very hard to completely rewire the way we think. That takes many, many years of practice.
TS: One of my favorite lines in your book was “Wellness is work,” and I think I appreciated hearing that from you, and I want you to comment on it because I think sometimes people think, “Oh, you’re gallivanting around and exploring altered states, or you’re doing this or that,” or “People who are involved in inner work aren’t doing the real work our society needs,” something like that. And yet it’s clear that the experiences you went through were hugely demanding. So I wonder if you can just share a little bit about that notion, “wellness is work.”
MG: You know, I think everybody needs to find or to harness their strengths to find their path to wellness. And mine is being very intensely into something—to throw myself into the deep end. That’s the way I’ve reported, and that’s the way I reported this book. “OK, I have a problem, I’m now going to address it, and I’m going to address it in the most absolutely intense way that I can because that’s what I know how to do.” But you can’t do that forever.
And so the “wellness is work” is about maintenance. It’s about still going to the breathwork class. It’s about doing psilocybin once in a while, taking a journey. It’s about really practicing meditation and mindfulness. My parents took me to do transcendental meditation when I was 12, so I’ve had that in the back of my head for many years. I have this practice that I do. I’m much more able to be mindful.
And one of the things about psychedelics, just to go back to it for a sec, the beautiful message that you can receive from them is more easily accessed during meditation. So I find that my meditation helps me access this treasure trove of images that give me strength, and that’s something that I really enjoy. And we can do that anywhere. I do that when I put my son to sleep. And I purposely breathe loudly in my meditation—I have a couple different techniques—so that he hears it and he starts breathing with me. And I think about stuff and I access the memories that I want to go to. I do mindfulness brushing my teeth and washing the dishes and walking the dogs, walking meditation basically.
So there are all sorts of ways we could do it while remaining productive members of society. But again, it’s constant work and it never ends. And once you stop doing it, you can lapse back into the troubled state you were in before. And nobody wants to hear this, but it’s true. We constantly have to upkeep and maintain the gains that we’ve made in mental health.
TS: Can you share with me something from your treasure trove that you pull out when you need that kind of resource?
MG: So from my last ketamine experience, I found myself, my avatar, flying over—I guess it was the Amazon rainforest. And I’ve been to the Amazon I think five, six times, so I have these vivid memories. But anyway, so I’m flying over it and I’m just surveying the land below, and it’s lush and rich and the green is so vibrant, and I end up flying up to this very high clifftop—again, surveying all that’s below, and it’s gorgeous and I feel whole. And then for some reason, my avatar decides to take a nosedive into the earth, just careening face-first into the ground. Not flapping, not flying, just crashing. But the earth, the rainforest, rises up to meet me, and catches me.
And I love that imagery. It’s like the ultimate trust fall. That I took this nosedive and the earth met me. It sounds very woo-woo, but I felt comforted by it. It was the sense—what did we say there? The OK-ness. That was the OK-ness, Tami. I just connected the two things, but yes, I can access it. It’s not always there, but I can find it, and it’s, “It’s OK. You’re going to be caught. You’re going to be safe. It’s going to be all right.” And so that’s my favorite one that I go back to a lot.
TS: The ultimate trust fall. OK, one other question. When you had your panic attacks, did they sneak up on you? I’m trying to understand, for people who have panic attacks, is there an on-ramp and you can go, “OK, wait, this could be coming. I have a few moments, I can change my breathing. I can modulate this and stave this off,” or is it more like a switch and that’s that?
MG: Oh, that’s a great question. The first time it felt like I was shot out of a cannon because I just had no idea, I was not prepared for it. The symptoms do come on quickly, within seconds. It’s your body assessing threat, and we are designed to assess threat quickly because if we don’t do it, we’re dead. So a lion comes, you have to quickly ascertain whether that lion is heading for you, if it’s hungry, and if it looks like it’s going to bite you. So this has to be done in a split second. And in that split second, adrenaline is surging through you. But after having many hundreds of them, you begin to learn the telltale signs and it can begin up to two hours earlier. So sometimes you can notice the difference in your pulse and your heart rate and your breathing, and it might be faint at first, but you do notice it.
The problem is, if you try to stop it, it’s like a charging bull. It can’t be stopped. So you have to welcome it. Essentially, if you try to stop it’s going to send your brain the signal that it’s a threat, and so it’ll amplify the panic. So there’s a very jujitsu way of doing it in which you have to welcome the anxiety or the panic, see it, and then let it go. It’s a welcome guest, but even welcome guests get to leave at some point, or have to leave. But once it starts, it’s pretty hard to stave off.
The other option is, if people are curious about it, is just to know that you’re going to be OK. And honestly, if anybody listening comes away with two things, I would want them to be this. One, panic is very pervasive. Maybe three: panic is pervasive, it’s normal, and it passes. Within 15 to 60 seconds, it’s over. And I promise you, you can survive it. You can make it through. And after that 60 seconds, maybe 70, it’s anxiety. And all of us live with anxiety, every day, we can do it. So it’s not the end of the world, we can make it through. That’s my—
TS: You know, Matt, I realized in the beginning when I said, “Wow, talking to you makes me anxious,” I think it’s because I’m a very suggestible person. So even just the notion of having a conversation about panic attacks makes me think I’m going to have one, even though I never have in my whole life. And anyway, so I became aware of that about 15 minutes into our conversation, and I thought, “Wow, just the thought of talking about it puts you, Tami, on some kind of strange edge.” And yet you think, you’re talking to here, Sounds True, we’re the meditation company. This is this place of—it is a place of welcome OK-ness, so you’re breathing deep and relaxing, and here we are meeting at the end of our conversation.
MG: But you know what, Tami? You’ve inoculated yourself against it, because you just shared. You confided in me.
TS: I did.
MG: And by making yourself vulnerable in such a way, you protected yourself. That’s the beauty of sharing and being vulnerable and being open. And that’s one of the great medicines of my book was just like, spilling my guts, and now I don’t have anything to hide, so it helps me a lot. And so for you, I deeply appreciate you expressing that vulnerability. It shows what an intellect you are, but also how self-attuned you are and to the people around you. So I deeply appreciate it, I’m sure the audience does too. You sound so calm and in control, and to hear you say you’re vulnerable makes you even more human and approachable.
TS: Great connecting with you! Matt Gutman, the author of the new book, No Time to Panic: How I Curbed My Anxiety and Conquered a Lifetime of Panic Attacks. It is a really fun page-turner, and so educational, informative, and supportive. Matt, you’re a friend. I think you’re a friend to people who are on this journey with you. Thanks everyone. Sounds True: waking up the world.
MG: Thanks, Tami.TS: And if you’d like to watch Insights at the Edge on video and participate in the after-show Q&A session with our guests, come join us on Sounds True One, a new membership community featuring award-winning original shows, live classes, community learning, guided meditations, and more, with the leading wisdom teachers of our time. Use promo code PODCAST to get your first month free. You can learn more at join.soundstrue.com. Sounds True: waking up the world.
