I had my first-ever panic attack live on TV.
It was absolutely terrifying, and completely reshaped my understanding of mental health.
As I stood there under the studio lights, talking to people having their morning coffee and wiping sleep from their eyes, my heart was racing, I was gasping for breath and sweat was pouring out of every pore as my brain screamed "RUN!".
But I was standing in one of my favourite places, doing the thing I love most.
Anxiety had never been an issue in my life before, even though high-stress situations weren't a stranger. But this time I wasn't a Naval Officer moments away from running a warship aground or standing in front of a stadium filled with 12,000 people hosting my first internationally-televised live event.
Instead, I had just jogged the 40 metres from my desk to my position at ABC News Breakfast's weather wall — I had left it a little too late and the show's control room was worried I wouldn't make it in time.
I did, and it was barely an exertion.
But it was enough to trigger an anxiety problem I still deal with to this day.
I dropped my on-air demeanour
In a way, I am lucky — my brain was obviously having a problem, but it is also incredibly curious and hungry to figure out how the world works.
As I stood there trying to make it sound like I wasn't slightly puffed (probably not a great look for breakfast TV, I thought), all of a sudden, my body started tingling, my heart rate rose and I realised I was drenched in sweat.
As soon as the camera was off me, I dropped my on-air demeanour and doubled over, trying to catch my breath, light headed and confused about what was happening.
I waved off help from our floor manager and headed back to my desk.
But 15 minutes later I had my second panic attack, and it nearly broke me.
Standing on my usual spot, completely calm and composed, I saw the words "WEATHER THROW: NATE JOINS US WITH THE WEATHER …" and the bottom dropped out of my world.
This time, it was much worse — I started shaking, my vision narrowed, my heart was pounding like I'd run a marathon, I couldn't breathe.
I needed to be anywhere else, and I had no idea why.
The team reacted quickly, slotting something else in so the show could go on uninterrupted, but my confusion and fear started growing, and my emotions raged.
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What was going on?
I'd later find out that what I was experiencing was diagnosable and manageable, but in that moment I thought that my career was over — something was taking control of me without my permission or understanding, and it was preventing me from doing what made me, me.
My place of joy and purpose was now an existential hellhole, corrupted in a quarter of an hour.
I more than cried — I sobbed as I grieved a loss I couldn't comprehend.
But another part of my brain was intrigued — what was going on, and what do we do to fix it?
I was stood down for the rest of the day — News Breakfast co-host Madeleine Morris very tactfully told the audience that "the weatherman is under the weather" — so I gathered my things and went straight to the doctor.
As I sat on the train, the other part of my brain emerged from the fog and started to look at the situation from a distance.
I knew what my experience had been, but what had actually happened?
Memories of neuroscience lectures from more than a decade ago got me thinking — neurons that fire together, wire together, so perhaps my brain was associating that spot and seeing those words as something dangerous.
I knew one thing for sure — I needed a solution, and fast; I was due to be back on the telly that night for the evening news.
When you can't remove yourself from the situation
Luckily, my doctor was all over it — we chatted through my experience, and he identified it as a classic panic attack. He prescribed a beta blocker which would help reduce my body's reactions, and maybe help me get through the stress.
That night, I made it to air with my body only heavily recommending "RUN!", rather than screaming it.
Over the next few weeks I dealt with the anxiety attacks every time I stood at the weather wall, but I learned ways to distract my brain — pressing my thumbnail into the side of my finger helped to give me something else to focus on while the meteorologist auto-pilot kicked in and I floated somewhere in-between.
Seeing a psychologist helped to confirm that there weren't any other contributing factors, and while his initial advice to remove myself from the situation wasn't exactly what I needed, we worked together to come up with alternative coping mechanisms..
The final narrative we've settled on is that the first time, I was controlling my breathing so much that my brain wasn't getting the oxygen it needed, so it did the usual things — increasing my heart rate, begging me to breathe — and I ignored it.
It never happened when I was sitting on the couch — only ever at the weather wall.
The next time I was standing there, my brain recognised the situation (I stand on the same spot at the same time every day, and the same words pop up in the autocue), and independently decided that I was about to run out of air, so the flight response kicked in hard.
The beta blockers kept that at bay, slowly re-training my brain that we were safe, and that we didn't need to panic.
We want our brain to react to danger, but it needs to get it right for that response to be useful.
I weaned myself off the beta blockers about two months later as the anxiety attacks weakened — I had mostly severed those neurological connections fairly quickly so they hadn't become hardwired.
But it turns out that those neural pathways still exist.
'He's having a stroke'
A year later, I had another major panic attack on air.
This time I had the tools to quickly recover, but I had neglected to tell our new co-host Lisa Millar about my anxiety issues — it had been so long, I assumed it was no longer an issue.
I recently asked her what she recalled, and it opened my eyes.
"I remember watching you beginning to roll into your weather spiel, something you do a dozen of times a day flawlessly. I'm not sure what made me glance up sharply, whether it was a slight hesitation, a dragging of the words.
"Sitting a few metres from you I was struck that it now felt you were wading through mud, each word seeming to need so much effort," she said.
My first thought was ‘he's having a stroke, there's something wrong'. The stillness of the studio as someone flails on air like that was something I'd not experienced before. I frantically looked to the floor manager Jo Sumic and I could see his eyes flickering as his brain ticked over ‘how do we save this?'
"It was only later I learned what had overcome you. It seemed to come out of nowhere and was gone the next day although I remember you did ask us to keep an eye on you a little more closely. It was such a lesson for me to watch that panic/anxiety attack happen in front of me. It's not often it happens for people live on air."
I learned an important lesson that day — making sure your support network knows that you sometimes need assistance, and how they can support you, is essential.
I've changed my perspective
I've had more panic attacks since then, and on News Breakfast we've seen several people dealing with their anxiety on live television — interestingly, all men — and the team is quick to jump to action to make sure the show goes on without too much fuss, and that the person is safe and cared for.
For me, it's changed my perspective on mental health — while I appreciated that things like anxiety and depression are very much real, I had no idea about the complete lack of control you can sometimes have over your brain, nor the ways in which it can take over.
It's a powerful tool, but when things go even slightly wrong it can be an incredible burden.
Watching back the videos of me having a panic attack on live television have shown me that it's not always obvious what's going on from the outside — I look far more in control than I was feeling, though I can see the telltale signs of panic that others might miss.
I still occasionally have those feelings return– in fact, as I write, even remembering my experiences have raised my hackles a bit — but talking about my anxiety and seeking treatment mean that it's something I can live with and manage.
And it means I can keep doing the thing I love.
