Gutman had been suffering panic attacks in secret for 20 years: gut-wrenching episodes that left his vision constricted, his body damp, his nerves shot. Despite the affliction, he had managed to carve out a formidable career for himself, reporting from war zones and natural disasters before millions of viewers.

He would go on to talk to the world’s foremost scholars on panic and anxiety—consulting therapists and shamans, trying everything from group treatment and CBT to ayahuasca and psilocybin. And he took a hard look at the way the trauma of his youth—including his father’s death in a plane crash at 42—still reverberated inside him.