In his new book, No Time To Panic: How I Curbed My Anxiety and Conquered a Lifetime of Panic Attacks, ABC Chief National Correspondent Matt Gutman walks us through the science and treatment of one of the most under-diagnosed of anxiety disorders. His personal healing process—from traditional anti-anxiety medication and cognitive behavioral therapy to magic mushrooms and meditation—is as rigorously researched as it is unorthodox.
The healer told me to pull up my pants leg, baring the inside of my ankle. Her name was Brandy. On the floor of her closet-sized office, she offered a short invocation for our journey, then lit a stick of incense, blowing until it glowed red. Carefully, she pressed the incense into my skin, sizzling a row of four equally spaced blisters. The blisters rose like tiny biscuits. With a penknife, she then scraped off the tops of the blisters and place tiny patties of frog poison into these so-called “gateways,” to cook into my exposed epidermis. The patties comprised the toxic secretions of the giant monkey frog, which indigenous peoples in South America call kambo and have been using as a cure-all for dozens of generations.
You may have heard of a toad you smoke, whose venom, when dried and inhaled, rockets you through the cosmos aboard a velvet spaceship. Kambo is derived from a different amphibian, whose secretions keep you closer to earth—your face rarely travels more than a few inches from your puke bucket. The violent purges it induces are believed to heal everything from addiction to Alzheimer’s. It’s popular enough these days to keep multiple kambo studios in Los Angeles in steady business, including this one in Beverly Hills.
With my “gateways” open and the frog slime seeping into my system, Brandy and I waited. At this point, the discomfort felt tolerable, like the second day of a stomach bug. But moments later, she flipped the little frog patties to flush fresh poison into my system. Almost instantly, shock waves of nausea hit me. My skull felt like it was being inflated with a bicycle pump, my heart raced, sweat sprang from my pores, and the walls of Brandy’s shoebox office crept closer.
Kambo typically takes you from feeling fine to fluey in seconds, and pumps enough fluid into your face to mimic botched plastic surgery. (The initiated call it “frog face.”) As I rocked back and forth with a blanket over my head, praying my body would finally begin purging this poison inside me, disappointment crept in: I had hoped to feel sicker.
That’s because kambo had re-created a suite of symptoms I had actually experienced on hundreds of previous occasions. I know this feeling, I said to myself. This is what a panic attack feels like. And maybe because it didn’t hit me with the full barrage of panic symptoms—which also includes tunnel vision, foggy brain, shortness of breath, the inability to swallow, and an impending sense of death—kambo didn’t seem so bad.
To get me to purge the three quarts of water she had had me drink before the ceremony, and to kick-start the healing that kambo advertised, Brandy pulled out a V-shaped blowgun. She packed one end of the blowgun with a pulverized South American tobacco called mapacho, then carefully inserted the business end in one of my nostrils. She put her mouth on the other end and blew, shotgunning the wad of snuff into my sinuses. It’s the nicotine equivalent of smoking a pack of cigarettes in the space of a few seconds, while inhaling smelling salts for good measure. She packed the blowgun again, drew a breath, and shot another wad into the other nostril. My brain felt like it had been plugged into a socket, a spigot turned on in my nose, and the nausea peaked. I was finally able to eject some, but not all, of the contents of my stomach.
Minutes later, Brandy half carried me—still clutching my bucket—to an adjacent room and helped me onto a heated massage table. The session was over. Having purified my system, I was now supposed to rest. I was supposed to feel mildly euphoric now that the suffering was over. But suffering and bile were still very much in me, and resting comfortably was not an option.
On the massage table, I posted myself up on all fours. Head over the bucket, throat raw, tissue dingleberries on my stubble, I wondered: Was it worth the agony?
Given the alternative, it was.
In the nearly two decades of working for ABC News, I’ve cultivated the image of a reporter who emerges from the wreckage of a disaster with the story, and casually flicks off the dust. That public person of jovial fearlessness has obscured a secret, 20-plus-year battle with panic disorder.
The irony is, when inserted into real-world chaos and peril, I soar. When expected to perform in the calm of a live shot, I crash. A TV reporter whose biggest fear is presenting a live report is like a free solo climber afraid of heights. So I obsessively covered up my Achilles heel from friends and colleagues. I even kept it from myself.
It took me years to recognize that what I had long dismissed as “just nerves” were in fact symptoms of a panic disorder. It was only in recent years that I began addressing the problem in earnest with a new psychiatrist—even as I remained oblivious to the full extent of the shadow that panic cast over me. We tried everything from antidepressants to ADHD medications, from benzos like Xanax to antiseizure medication. I regularly practiced mindfulness and meditation. I ate well and exercised.
My panic vanquished them all.
When inserted into real-world chaos and peril, I soar. When expected to perform in the calm of a live shot, I panic.
Unfortunately, there is a lot of company in my misery. More than a quarter of all Americans will suffer a panic attack in their lifetime. That’s at least 85 million hyperventilating, palpitating people. The sad fact is that the rate of recovery for panic disorder is low, relapse is high, and, shockingly, the severity of disability and dysfunction is higher than that of alcohol dependence. Most of those who suffer from panic have a high baseline of anxiety. We carry around baggage, in other words. For some of us, the baggage is so heavy that the brain considers any added weight of stress a mortal threat. In such cases it pulls the body’s fire alarm: a panic attack.
There is no known “cure” for panic. While it can be treated—sometimes easily—it is also unpredictable, which both increases the torment and lulls you into the false belief of its impermanence. It begets more superstition: Maybe that last formula (Xanax + push-ups + lucky underwear + deep breathing + cigarette) did the trick. I finally beat panic!
And then, bam. It’s back.
Eventually, I would learn that my body’s stress response, though achingly disruptive, was not wrong, exactly. Evolutionary biologists and psychologists showed me the beauty of that chemical orchestra and the precision with which each body marches to its beat. They taught me that our brain is not actually designed for us to be “happy” or even content most of the time. It is designed foremost to keep use alive. In that sense, there was relief in the knowledge that my body was working just as engineered—even during a panic.
In those conversations with evolutionary psychologists, I learned why our “unreasonable” social anxiety is actually totally reasonable and how psychology has been invalidating fears that, evolutionarily, are quite valid. That knowledge helped loosen shame’s half nelson over my psyche. So I began to flirt with disclosure, first confessing my panic to a total stranger and later to friends and colleagues. After a while I found myself bringing it up in casual conversation. Removing the stain of secrecy, which afflicts so many of us, proved a comforting balm. Panic still seemed to carry the stigma that other diagnoses, like anxiety and depression, no longer did. As the chief medical officer of the American Psychological Association put it to me, even just by “coming out” publicly with panic, I could help put a dent in that stigma.
Since modern science and conventional therapy seemed unable to provide a cure, I gravitated toward the more unconventional. I became a human laboratory experiment. There was hypnosis and seismically cathartic experiences while doing breathwork. That led me to another space that scientists are studying in earnest: psychedelics. In molecules derived from Sonoran toads, Amazonian vines, and Andean cacti, I had my soul, mind, and very often guts wrench, each time recalibrating my relationship with my psyche. These were no drug-fueled joyrides. Some were pure, uncut misery. And my ride in each instance was a couch or a bed, with a facilitator or a clinical psychiatrist riding shotgun. Taken together, they allowed me to see, better than any conventional therapy I’d tried, that, for me, panic was a presenting symptom—that there were other parts of me that screamed for healing.
Eventually I found that healing. It came in the form of emotional surrender, which occasionally yielded cloudbursts of catharsis. These were marathon sobbing sessions—bigger, uglier, and more numerous than I had thought possible.
My journey was neither planned out in advance nor scientifically conducted. My path was not direct, and it was definitely not replicable. Parts of it are not particularly advisable. I made a bunch of sometimes comically wrong turns. I also hit dead ends. But I hope that my circuitous road trip toward healing helps you, or someone you care about, find your own more direct route toward a truce with your mind.
Panic is not easy to conquer or even manage. It can sometimes feel like a medieval punishment. But it doesn’t have to be a life sentence.
From No Time to Panic: How I Curbed My Anxiety and Conquered a Lifetime of Panic Attacks, by Matt Gutman. Reprinted by permission of Doubleday, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2023 by Matt Gutman.
