No Time to Panic

In the unforgiving world of television journalism, where millions of viewers scrutinize every word and gesture, few would suspect that one of the most recognizable correspondents battles an invisible enemy. Matt Gutman, ABC News Chief National Correspondent, has spent two decades reporting from the world's most dangerous places—war zones, natural disasters, and breaking news scenes—yet his greatest fear wasn't bullets or hurricanes, but the thirty seconds of live television that could reduce him to a stammering, sweating mess.

This deeply personal account reveals the hidden struggle of a man who built his career on appearing unflappable while secretly fighting panic attacks that threatened to destroy everything he had worked for. Through Gutman's courageous journey, readers will discover the surprising evolutionary purpose behind our deepest fears, explore unconventional healing methods that challenge traditional medicine, and witness the transformative power of vulnerability. His story illuminates not just one man's battle with mental health, but a universal truth about human resilience and the courage required to seek help in a world that often mistakes struggling for weakness.

For Matt Gutman, the irony was both cruel and profound. The man who could calmly report from Syrian battlefields and hurricane-ravaged coastlines found himself paralyzed by the simple act of speaking into a television camera during routine live shots. While his colleagues saw a seasoned professional who thrived under pressure, Gutman was secretly drowning in a twenty-year battle with panic disorder that began during his college years and intensified as his career flourished.

The attacks followed a predictable pattern that made them all the more terrifying. Standing before the camera, usually in the final moments before going live, Gutman would feel his heart begin to race uncontrollably. His vision would narrow to a pinhole, his mouth would go desert-dry, and his carefully rehearsed words would scatter like leaves in a windstorm. Most cruelly, these episodes struck not during genuinely dangerous assignments, but during the most mundane reporting tasks—simple updates from courthouse steps or community events where the stakes seemed impossibly low.

Gutman developed an elaborate arsenal of coping mechanisms that bordered on superstition. He relied on "lucky" underwear purchased during a Paris assignment, performed pre-broadcast push-ups disguised as stretching, and practiced controlled breathing techniques while pretending to nap. He became a master of deception, hiding his vulnerability behind a facade of casual confidence while secretly planning escape routes from every live shot location.

The weight of maintaining this double life grew heavier with each promotion and accolade. As he ascended to the position of Chief National Correspondent, the pressure to appear infallible intensified. Each successful broadcast felt like a temporary reprieve rather than a victory, and Gutman lived in constant fear that the next live shot would be the one where his carefully constructed professional persona would crumble before millions of viewers. The very skills that made him an exceptional journalist—his empathy, his ability to connect with people in crisis—seemed to amplify his own internal turmoil.

Gutman's journey toward healing began with a startling revelation: his panic attacks weren't a malfunction of his mind, but rather an ancient survival system working exactly as designed. Through conversations with evolutionary psychiatrists and researchers, he discovered that panic attacks represent the ultimate expression of our species' most fundamental fear—social rejection and exile from the group. For our ancestors, being cast out from the tribe meant almost certain death, making social anxiety not a character flaw, but a deeply ingrained survival mechanism.

The physiological symphony of panic that Gutman experienced—racing heart, sweating, tunnel vision, and cognitive fog—mirrored the same response that helped early humans escape predators on the African savanna. The amygdala, our brain's ancient alarm system, couldn't distinguish between a charging lion and the perceived threat of professional humiliation. Both triggered the same cascade of stress hormones designed to prepare the body for fight, flight, or freeze. Dr. Randy Nesse's groundbreaking insight that our brains would rather sound a thousand false alarms than miss a single real threat provided Gutman with a new framework for understanding his condition.

This evolutionary perspective transformed Gutman's relationship with his panic from one of shame and self-loathing to one of scientific curiosity and even admiration. He began to see his hypervigilance not as weakness, but as the product of millions of years of natural selection favoring those who were acutely sensitive to social cues and potential rejection. The same genetic inheritance that made him an exceptional journalist—his ability to read people, anticipate their needs, and connect with them emotionally—also made him susceptible to panic when those social connections felt threatened.

Robert Sapolsky's research on baboon societies further illuminated the modern predicament. Like humans in industrialized societies, baboons with too much free time and too few genuine threats often turned their stress response systems against themselves and each other. Gutman realized that his panic attacks were, in a sense, the price of success—a primitive alarm system activated by abstract, future-focused fears rather than immediate physical dangers.

The first crack in Gutman's armor of secrecy came during a chance encounter on a Southwest Airlines flight. Sitting next to a stranger named Cat, he found himself unburdening his deepest fears to someone who, it turned out, was intimately familiar with panic through her own family's struggles. This moment of spontaneous vulnerability marked the beginning of a transformation that would prove as crucial to his healing as any medical intervention.

Emboldened by Cat's compassionate response, Gutman began cautiously revealing his condition to colleagues, friends, and family members. Each disclosure chipped away at the shame that had accumulated over two decades of secrecy. To his surprise, rather than judgment or career consequences, he encountered understanding and often shared experiences. The producer who matter-of-factly mentioned her sister's panic attacks, the senior vice president who responded with sympathy rather than concern about his professional competence—each interaction helped normalize what Gutman had long considered his shameful secret.

His search for community led him into the sparse landscape of panic disorder support groups, where he discovered the profound isolation that characterizes this condition. Unlike alcoholism, with its thousands of AA meetings worldwide, panic disorder sufferers had virtually no organized support network. The few online communities he found were more like digital emergency rooms—places where people posted desperate pleas for help during acute episodes, rather than spaces for ongoing healing and connection.

Eventually, Gutman found his tribe in a Brooklyn-based therapy group that had moved online during the pandemic. Meeting weekly with fellow panic sufferers from across the country, he encountered stories that both humbled and inspired him. There was the stage actor who could perform before hundreds but panicked at supermarket checkouts, the successful businessman whose fear of driving had nearly cost him his marriage, and the young mother who saw her own courage reflected in her daily battles with agoraphobia. These connections provided something that no medication or therapy session could offer: the profound relief of being truly understood by people who had walked the same terrifying path.

When traditional approaches—antidepressants, benzodiazepines, and conventional therapy—failed to provide lasting relief, Gutman embarked on a more radical healing journey. His exploration of alternative treatments began with breathwork, where controlled hyperventilation produced intense physical sensations and emotional releases that helped him access and process buried trauma. These sessions, though physically uncomfortable, offered glimpses of the deeper healing that might be possible.

This led him to the emerging world of psychedelic therapy, beginning with psilocybin mushrooms under the guidance of an underground practitioner named Farah. Despite requiring heroic doses to overcome his apparent resistance to the medicine, Gutman experienced profound shifts in perspective during his journey. The mushrooms showed him visions of strength and permanence—images of granite mountains and thousand-year-old oak trees that seemed to speak to his need for stability and rootedness in the face of anxiety.

His most challenging experience came during an ayahuasca retreat in Peru's Sacred Valley, where he joined a group of fellow seekers, each carrying their own traumas and seeking healing through indigenous plant medicines. Though the ayahuasca itself remained largely elusive to him, the combination of purging, community, and the powerful 5-MeO-DMT ceremony cracked open reservoirs of grief he didn't know he carried. The violent emotional purging that followed—sobbing, screaming, and physical release—felt like decades of compressed sorrow finally finding expression.

Perhaps most surprisingly, Gutman found profound healing through ketamine therapy conducted in the luxury setting of an Ojai resort. Under the guidance of Dr. Mark Braunstein and psychologist Dan Gil, he experienced ego dissolution and rebirth that felt like a reset of his entire nervous system. The controlled setting and professional oversight allowed him to explore the deepest recesses of his psyche while maintaining a safety net that had been absent from his other psychedelic experiences. These sessions provided him with lasting images of protection and support—metaphors his mind could return to during moments of fear.

The true measure of Gutman's transformation came not during peak psychedelic experiences, but in the quiet integration work that followed. He learned to sit with difficult emotions rather than immediately seeking distraction or escape, developing a new relationship with grief and vulnerability that honored rather than suppressed these fundamental human experiences. Regular crying sessions became a form of "free therapy," releasing accumulated stress and trauma in the way our bodies were designed to do.

His meditation practice, enhanced by the insights gained through psychedelics, became a daily anchor rather than a chore. The treasure box of images from his journeys—the granite mountain, the earth rising to catch him, the protective presence of guides—provided accessible sources of comfort during anxious moments. He began to see panic not as an enemy to be defeated, but as information to be processed and integrated into a fuller understanding of his emotional landscape.

Perhaps most importantly, Gutman developed self-compassion, replacing his internal drill sergeant with a more nurturing inner voice. He learned to extend to himself the same empathy he so readily offered to interview subjects and strangers in crisis. This shift from self-criticism to self-acceptance created space for healing that no external intervention could provide alone.

The ultimate test of his transformation came during coverage of the Uvalde school shooting, a story that combined every element that had previously triggered panic—trauma, urgency, live reporting under pressure, and deeply personal stakes. Yet he found himself able to do the work without the familiar cascade of anxiety symptoms. While he still experienced normal nervousness, the paralyzing fear that had defined his career for two decades had largely dissolved. The panic attacks that once seemed inevitable had become a distant memory, replaced by a more nuanced understanding of fear as information rather than threat.

Matt Gutman's journey reveals that healing from panic disorder requires more than just managing symptoms—it demands a fundamental shift in how we relate to fear, vulnerability, and our own humanity. His story demonstrates that the very traits that make us susceptible to anxiety—sensitivity, empathy, and social awareness—are also our greatest strengths when properly understood and channeled.

The most profound lesson from Gutman's experience is that true courage isn't the absence of fear, but the willingness to be vulnerable in the face of it. By breaking the silence around mental health struggles, especially in high-pressure professional environments, we create space for others to seek help and find healing. His journey offers hope to anyone trapped by their own mind's protective mechanisms, showing that with patience, community, and the right combination of treatments, even the most entrenched patterns can be transformed into sources of wisdom and connection.