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Matt Gutman is an ABC Chief National Correspondent and the author of No Time to Panic: How I Curbed My Anxiety and Conquered a Lifetime of Panic Attacks. Matt is a new friend, and I’ve loved getting to know him and his deeply feeling heart, as well as the way he so perfectly captures this idea of being a “courageous coward.” He’s not afraid to step into a war zone, and yet he’s felt incapacitated by anxiety—taken out at the knees by panic—which makes him the perfect encapsulation of the binary of modern masculinity. Quite simply, the world is too much for any of us to confidently swashbuckle our way through. I commend Matt for saying it. He wrote this book because he suffered a panic attack on air during a heightened moment of news—one of those moments where all of our eyes were turned toward our TVs—and he ended up being put on a temporary leave. It was in that moment that he recognized he needed help and healing, as this panic attack—though public—was not a solitary event. It was happening to him all the time. In No Time to Panic he explains how hard he went to work at healing, at uncovering what was at the heart of his anxiety, which is at the center of our conversation today.
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TRANSCRIPT:
(Edited slightly for clarity.)
ELISE LOEHNEN: It's funny, thinking about my own book, your book to me was the perfect end cap, it’s an extension of the final chapter, which is about sadness and men, and what happens when men are severed from their feelings, disconnected, disallowed, and as you seem to find the only cure for sadness is grief, but it can be inaccessible, right. So take us back to, not the inciting event, but this idea that you're enduring panic attacks, which started, was it in your twenties?