An Australian meteorologist named Nate Byrne and his coworkers took a moment to discuss how anxiety can impact employees in the workplace after the weatherman suffered from a panic attack while live on-air.
His panic episode happened on Tuesday around 6:30 a.m. local time during his weather forecast segment on “ABC News Breakfast,” where he suddenly stated that he needed to “stop for a second.”
“Some of you may know that I occasionally get affected by panic attacks and actually that is happening right now,” Byrne continued before asking for production to pivot back to anchor Lisa Millar. As he gathered himself off-camera, Millar brought up how Byrne just so happened to write about his history of dealing with anxiety for a previous news piece. Once Byrne was settled, the news team reunited and discussed the matter.
“Sorry if I gave anybody a bit of a scare there,” Byrne said.
Millar consoled him, saying, “Not really, because you’ve been very honest before about getting panic attacks on air, and it’s so great for people to know that it can happen to anyone.”
Byrne thanked his coworkers for helping in his moment of need, and then gave a further explanation of how he was feeling internally. His third cohost Michael Rowland joked that he was anticipating that he’d have to step in for Byrne to finish up the weather segment.
Rowland later posted a video of Byrne on Instagram and said the meteorologist was doing fine.
“You might have seen Nate experience a panic attack earlier this morning while presenting the News Breakfast weather,” Rowland wrote in a caption. “Nate’s open about his panic attacks — he’s even written about them before — and he’s doing OK! Thank you for all the supportive messages (There have been so many. What a wonderful audience we have!). As a team, we’ll always have your back, Nate.”
Byrne further opened up about the incident in an interview with BBC.
Our wonderful weather presenter @SciNate had his first ever panic attack while on-air on News Breakfast. He decided to share his experience this morning as part of the ABC's Anxiety Project. You can also read more about it here: https://t.co/18H8UdGKr9 pic.twitter.com/0cN5DYcVxk
— News Breakfast (@BreakfastNews) February 24, 2022
“When I got to the wall, I realized I was just ever so slightly out of breath. And I know that specific position in front of the wall is a trigger for me for panic attacks. And it started, it triggered one,” Byrne shared. “It’s a physiological response. My body starts tingling, I start sweating. Just everything in my body is screaming, ‘Run, go, get out.’”
He noted that he quickly decided the best move was to redirect the attention to his colleagues.
“I knew I needed to throw back to my hosts and I could see out of the corner of my eye they were doing a move in the studio. There wasn’t a clean shot. I sort of had to fill while having a panic attack,” Byrne said. “And the only thing I could think to fill with was, ‘Hey, I’m having a panic attack.’”
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