Carson Daly shares in new detail his very first panic attack experience, which ultimately led him to become the mental health advocate he is known today.
The TODAY co-host, 50, who was diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder, said in an Oct. 10 speech at the Healthy Minds Project’s inaugural gala that his life changed one day when he hosted MTV’s “Total Request Live,” a teen talk show. from the 90s featuring musicians, actors and other celebrities. At the time, he was managing a variety of projects and living with a lot of stress, but he didn’t realize how these challenges could manifest physically and mentally.
“One day in September, I thought I was going to die,” Carson, who was also the host of the inaugural gala, told the audience. “I was in my dressing room and I could feel all the normal buzz of the show before it started. I could hear the crowd outside. I could hear the horns, the normal chaos of ‘Total Request,’ very usual.”
“Then something very unusual happened to me,” he continued. “Out of nowhere in my dressing room, I felt what I can only describe as a clicking sound in my brain.”
“My heart started racing and fear coursed through my body. It felt like someone had cracked one of those cold packs at a Little League game and put it on my neck .I could see my producer talking to me in the doorway, with a completely normal expression on his face, probably saying something about Hanson. I couldn’t hear it. It sounded like he was speaking in slow motion. I was literally leaving reality. I thought, God, I’m having a stroke in front of Hanson. It happened in 30 seconds, but it felt like 30 minutes.”
“Somehow I managed to get through it. I did the show on autopilot,” Carson recalls. “But all the time, beneath the surface, I was absolutely terrified that what had just happened to me could happen again at any moment.”
After this experience, Carson went to the doctor, who did some tests and told him that he was physically healthy but had suffered a panic attack, a shock to the young television personality, who was convinced it was cancer or something similar.
“I’ve never heard of a panic attack, let alone thought about it,” Carson explained. “What was the trigger for this panic attack?…I don’t know. It turned out that the panic attack was a symptom. Stress and anxiety were the cause. I needed to slow down. I needed to make my unmanageable life manageable.”
But despite her attempts to slow down, Carson continued to struggle with panic attacks, regardless of her efforts to eliminate the triggers.
“If you’ve never had an intense fight-or-flight response, the urge to drop everything and run is like an out-of-body experience,” he said. “We call it derealization. Sometimes I can even see myself from above. … It wasn’t an ideal way to live.”
Ultimately, he decided to take what he called “the most important step in my mental health journey” by talking with a friend.
This allowed Carson to begin seeing a therapist, which then led him to learn tools to manage his anxiety, such as meditation, breath work, and medication.
“That doesn’t mean I’ll never have a panic attack again. The body can still trick the mind,” he said, recalling the one he had while hosting The Voice in front of 12 million people watching. But he got through it. And he’s now using his platform to help others realize they can too.
“Mental health is no longer the scarlet A on our chest. It’s the bright red S on our chest. We were superheroes,” he said. “We were the avengers of a galaxy, jocks and misfits, all with their own problems, coming together to help people and, who knows, maybe even save the world.”
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