He’s cheerful and confident presenting the local weather report live on the evening news bulletin. Nothing seems out of the ordinary.

But behind the calm, under the bright studio lights, the map lit up behind him, 7News Queensland meteorologist Tony Auden can barely breathe.

His heart is racing, his chest tightens, he’s sweating, everything feels numb and his mind is overwhelmed by fear and doubt.

Auden is in the middle of a storm he could never have predicted.

This is how his career ends, he tells himself, what will everyone think, will he ever come back from this?

Struggling against the urge to run off-camera and throw up, he steadies himself with a small cough, one that to him feels like the roaring sound of his world unravelling.

Yet to those in the room, and the half a million people watching at home, it barely registers. Everything seems fine as Auden, 42, carries on, calm, precise and smiling.

Meanwhile, however, Auden is experiencing a panic attack live on air.

“It came out of nowhere,” says Auden, recalling theattack that struck during 7News Queensland’s 6pm bulletin in October last year.

“It was scary and I was freaking out on air internally.

“As I stood in front of the camera and they threw to me, I’m thinking ‘Oh, I am battling here’, I was 80 per cent ready to throw up.

“I did something between a cough and a swallow near the end, which is probably the only thing that some people noticed. It was absolutely an out-of-body experience.”

Auden has lived with anxiety for years and experienced a panic attack a long time ago but never has it struck so publicly, or so cruelly.

He questioned if he would have to walk away from the job he loves.

“It started in the stomach and then I just felt adrenaline release and felt my heart rate go up, head get fuzzy, sweats and a little bit out of body just trying to keep it going,” he says.

“As soon as I got off air, it was immediate relief, but then this ongoing anxiety of, ‘Can I do this again? Can I open up to people?’”

Auden has been on a long journey to recovery after experiencing one of the most terrifying moments of his life.

But as he reflects on the past six months, talking on the back deck at his home in Brisbane’s northern suburbs, he’s grateful to finally be here, calm and ready to relive the moment his world came undone.

It was Tuesday, October 22, 2024 and Auden’sday starts like most do – early.

Surprisingly early for a man who works evenings but Auden jokes, “I’m a morning person working an evening job.”

He’s up at 4.30am to go to the gym with his wife, Alicia, 40, before coming home and walking their pugs, Petey and Pip.

He looks over weather modelling to get across any major updates then drives Alicia, a lawyer, to work in the city, and heads home to spend the next hours analysing more weather systems.

He has a brief power nap to see him through, then goes to work about 2pm.

It’s time to create on-screen graphics, models, prepare more notes and get camera-ready for his reports on the 4pm and 6pm news bulletins.

Auden had been feeling uneasy for a little while but put it down to general stress of a high-profile job and pushed it to the side.

But now, looking back, he can see the quiet pressures that had been building in the background. The Seven network had been through a tumultuous time after recent public axings, redundancies and staff upheavals.

Meanwhile, physically, Auden hadn’t felt himself and was recovering from treatment to help a longstanding, and painful, injury to his shoulder.

Back in the studio, throughout the evening, more things started to happen.

Auden ate an early dinner, homemade spicy Korean chicken, and felt his stomach starting to react but again, ignored it.

The recent staff changes meant he had an extra weather bulletin for the Gold Coast to present, adding time pressure.

Then, in the studio, a side monitor he relies on to see the map wasn’t working properly.

“I’ve got all these little things that are off,” he says. “So all of that had happened, little background things to make me anxious but I didn’t think too much of it.”

Minutes before he was due on air, his stomach got worse, and it was enough to push him into a spiral. “I had a reaction to the sauce, I don’t think it was food poisoning, but I think it was just enough to go, ‘Oh my stomach’s not quite right’,” he recalls.

“That just happened to hit me at 6.57pm, right in the ad break before weather and I’m like, OK, I’m really not feeling well here.

“I was 80 per cent ready to throw up and the whole time I’m on autopilot … that extra stress on top of the background anxiety meant, bang, halfway through, I had a massive adrenaline release and panic attack.”

Auden didn’t think he had time to reach for a lifeline and pushed through, but slowly his body shut down.

“I got a fuzzy head, sweats, my heart rate was sky high, I had a screechy voice, deep breaths.

“I forced my way through, took little pauses where I could to get my breath so it was a laboured pause to try and keep calm amongst all the things happening.

“I’ve done it for 11 years so thankfully I had a script and didn’t have to think too much except just get to the end. I threw back to the guys on the desk and went, okay, I’m through it.”

He knew what was happening. He had a panic attack out of the blue years ago while dealing with a difficult customer while working in a London pub and experienced anxiety in a previous job but this time, the stakes were much higher.

He wasn’t thinking about the hellish nightmare he just survived but how he was going to be in front of a camera again. How could he make sure this wouldn’t happen again?

Auden told his colleagues what had happened over the next few days, and would later speak to a counsellor and doctor.

The next night in front of the camera, he was shaken and felt the same symptoms, but he says he got through it and it was the confidence he needed.

“I thought I need to get back on the horse but I need to look after myself while I do that,” he says.

“As I’ve had with any kind of trauma in life I thought well if you can think about it or expose yourself to it again soon, it’s there, but you’re not scared of looking at it.”

Auden is one of many high-profile presentersin the industry who have spoken out about having panic attacks on air including his colleague, newsreader Katrina Blowers, and ABC News Breakfast’s meteorologist Nate Byrne.

Byrne, who Auden has met over the years, has been open about his struggles since his on-air panic attack in 2022 but he made global headlines last year when he cut his weather report short and asked his co-host Lisa Millar to take over, explaining he was midway through another attack. Byrne’s courage and vulnerability in that moment stayed with Auden who immediately sent Byrne a text following his own attack asking for advice.

Byrne’s reassurance, and the openness of Blowers, who was on air with Auden on the night of his attack, would become his strength.

“I was lucky that Katrina Blowers had done a podcast a few years ago called Claiming your Confidence, and talked about her having a panic attack on air. And so I realised what was happening as it happened,” says Auden.

“I’ve had a panic attack before but listening to Katrina’s podcast, I felt so much better prepared because she’d shared it with me.

“It meant that I wasn’t panicking not knowing, I was panicking because of everything else but I knew what it was.”

Yet even Blowers, who experienced her panic attack on air in 2020, was shocked to learn of Auden’s hidden struggles as she recalls that night.

“The only thing that made me wonder whether there was something a little bit different about Tony’s performance that night was that he seemed a little short of breath,” she says. “He started to speak a little more quickly than he normally does. Tony speaks normally without notes at all, he’s quite extraordinary in that what you see him present to camera is barely ever scripted.”

“He is normally just so comfortable being on camera that apart from looking at the forecast, I’m usually just sitting there looking ahead at my notes.”

She put it down to a technical error. It never crossed her mind it was a panic attack.

“I remember being, first of all, surprised because Tony is a really chilled-out dude in life, in real life and in the way he presents on air,” Blowers says.

“He’s so competent and self-assured and calm, like really calm. It surprised me to learn that he’d experienced that level of anxiety.”

Viewers see a man on their televisionwho is in control, confident and composed. They see the Instagram posts from the positive bloke who surfs and keeps fit. And while he’s all of those things, he’s also human.

About 40 per cent of Australians have a panic attack once or twice in their lives, according to Beyond Blue, and if you have one, it doesn’t mean you have a panic disorder.

Beyond Blue say they can last for up to half an hour, the worst of it in the first 10 minutes, and if you do have a panic disorder, they can happen several times a day. The signs and symptoms include: “A sense of overwhelming panic or fear; the thought that you are dying, choking, losing control or going mad, increased heart rate, difficulty breathing, feeling choked, excessive sweating and dizziness, light-headedness or feeling faint.”

It’s common and impacts more people than you think, says Blowers, who is grateful for Auden’s honesty to break down barriers.

“Lots of guys don’t open up to the extent that Tony has with us,” she says.

“It made me admire him even more, to be honest, that he would be so vulnerable to share something that really was something I never expected him to share or even experience.

“I really am in awe of his honesty and his vulnerability.”

She, too, has spoken openly of her own experience and of her on-air attack prompted by the stress of a divorce.

“I couldn’t breathe, it was like I had run a marathon and then sat down and was trying to read off the autocue and it just happened all of a sudden.”

It took her years to regain her confidence, and credits Auden for helping set a precedent in their newsroom, and beyond. “He says to me things like, ‘I’m feeling a bit wobbly today’, ‘I’m feeling nervous today’, or ‘I don’t know why but I’ve got that feeling back like I might be about to have another one’,” she says.

“Instead of feeling embarrassed or ashamed of it, you should feel like a freaking legend for overcoming something that could be so crippling that you might even want to walk away from your job.”

Auden has worked hard to find calming techniques that work for him when he feels an attack coming. Simple things, he says, like asking himself a series of questions to distract his mind. What is one thing he can taste? One thing he can hear? One thing he can smell?

It’s also plenty of exercise and minimal caffeine and sugar. But the most impactful strategy, he says, is doing something tactile for a few seconds.

“I might be rolling my shoulders and breathing deeply before heading downstairs (to the studio). We’ve got a little putting mat in the lunch room and just the simple thing of hitting two putts takes my brain away from it for 30 seconds.”

All of it is what got him through one of the busiest work periods of his career when Tropical Cyclone Alfred wreaked havoc earlier this year.

Auden’s profile skyrocketed as one of the go-to experts for updates and advice. His Facebook following doubled throughout the five-day event and he was the face of the station through their rolling coverage. If ever there was a time to feel the pressure, it was then, but Auden put his strategies into place.

“I asked for things, asked for help that would help me get through,” he says.

“I didn’t get my hair wet, we had our journalists and cameramen and others out in the wet and the wild but I was safe enough at Mt Coot-tha and close enough that I could get home most of the time.

“Then every five or six hours, I asked for 45 minutes off to reset, and then I’m good for another six hours, that’s all I needed.”

Blowers, who worked closely with Auden during that period, is filled with a deep pride for her colleague, marvelling at his resilience.

“Tony, during Cyclone Alfred, just went to another level of expertise in my mind and if he had been so shaken up by his panic attacks that he decided he needed to go on stress leave and couldn’t do that coverage, that would’ve been a huge loss for all the viewers,” she says.

“I’m really happy that it hasn’t defeated him.”

As Auden reflects on that time, he’s gratefulfor the things that kept him grounded. That always keep him grounded: Alicia, their dogs and basking in the outdoors under the skies he’s made sense of for years.

Auden is a weatherman and a true scientist. He thinks clearly, methodically and with purpose, he always has. He grew up on acreage in Melbourne on the Mornington Peninsula and remembers watching big storms roll in. He quickly turned from being scared to being fascinated.

As a young boy though, he had brief dreams of being a Hollywood star but the part of him that thrived on science had a stronghold.

He went on to study a Bachelor of Science with majors in mathematics and atmospheric science at Monash University followed by a postgraduate diploma at the Bureau of Meteorology when he was posted to Brisbane at the end of 2004 and has been here ever since.

He worked with the bureau for the next decade with jobs in public weather and aviation and later as a specialist in severe weather.

He was often the bureau meteorologist called upon to do crosses to the TV stations in weather events and made an impact. He was approached to become a full-time television meteorologist and joined Seven in 2014.

He laughs, cringing at his early TV days.

“For quite a few years, I was not getting to the stage where I could get up on air and I had a crisis of confidence getting into it,” he says.

“I was very stiff, I’m still the guy in the suit that’s straight down the line but I was very, very, stiff and nervous at the start.”

Auden also remembers being impacted by anxiety almost 20 years ago while working at the bureau through a particularly rough wet season with storm after storm in around 2008.

But the lowest he felt, he says, was following the major flooding event in NSW and Queensland in 2022.

“I was a physical and emotional wreck for six weeks afterwards,” he says.

“Having said that, I learnt how to try and progress through things as well. ”

While mental health struggles have long played a role in Auden’s life so, too, has the burden of physical injuries been quietly wearing him down, adding to his anxiety.

For years, Auden says his jaw would dislocate when he talked and ate, sometimes while presenting the weather, and led to a ruptured jaw ligament. As the pain worsened, it deepened his anxiety. “I was dislocating my jaw hundreds if not thousands of times a day, I’d dislocate it, talk on air, then slide it in at the end,” he says.

“By the end of the ’22 floods, I was really achy, it was contributing to all of that anxiety and I didn’t know if I’d be able to fix it and if I’d be able to do this job for too much longer if I get arthritis – I talk for a living,” says Auden, who finally found a helpful specialist and has seen huge improvements.

In more blows to his body Auden has dislocated both shoulders while surfing, one 20 years ago and the other two years ago. Both would leave lasting impacts including osteoarthritis in one shoulder.

As Auden describes the knocks and the setbacks, it’s clear he’s a fighter and no matter how hard the landing, he will find a way back.

He wants others to feel this too.

He hopes to be the reminder that when it all seems to be falling apart – there is hope; that you can find strength in something that was once terrifying and when you feel like you’re alone, you’re far from it.

And he has one piece of advice.

“My simple thing is, if you’ve got something going on, especially for blokes that don’t tend to open up as much, my one word would be just talk,” he says. “If you can just talk, a problem shared is a problem halved.”

beyondblue.org.au