CREDIT: Rodney Ho/rho@ajc.com

Like many early morning TV broadcasters, Robin Meade is chipper, almost too chipper when she utters “Morning Sunshine!” to HLN viewers.

In fact, her colleagues say her energetic on-air persona is absolutely genuine. She doesn’t even need caffeine, save for a single can of Vanilla Coke Zero nursed over four hours each weekday. To keep her energy up, she has music playing during commercial breaks. (I heard Rob Thomas’ “Her Diamonds” the day I visited last week.)

But Meade, in a self-help book that comes out next Tuesday called “Morning Sunshine,” reveals that in her earlier days, her sunny exterior once covered up a cauldron of underlying anxiety.

A decade ago, she was about to open a newscast in Chicago when her stomach clenched. Her heart started palpitating. Her breathing felt jagged. Her hands shook. Words barely came out of her mouth.

The problem lasted only a few seconds. But she figured out later it was a panic attack.
“It was horrifying,” she said in an interview last week. “It wasn’t just about anxiety or panic. It was the root problem. It was about self esteem. Or my lack of it at the time.”
The book revolves around how she went about solving that problem.

Meade, who came to Atlanta-based HLN in 2001, had a successful broadcast career before that first anxiety attack. But she realized in retrospect that she had worked so hard to please others up to that point, she had subsumed her own being.

Instead, she felt she had become that stereotypically robotic cookie-cutter broadcaster. She also worked too much to the detriment of her marriage to her husband Tim. She was deeply unhappy.

Tim introduced her to his chiropractor Amelia Case — and not for back problems.
Case also grapples with people’s life issues. She helped Meade understand she didn’t have to be a sweetheart all the time, that she could embrace her “inner bitch” once in awhile. She figured out that focusing on the present made her appreciate the world more than obsessing over the past or the future.

Meade also learned that not everybody has to find you engaging and delightful. (She was a Dale Carnegie acolyte from middle school days.)

“When I was younger,” she said, “it would kill me if someone didn’t like me.”

Today, Meade can read negative emails or blogs about her without wincing. She can challenge her colleagues if she doesn’t feel something is right. And she feels secure enough that she doesn’t feel pressured to say yes to everything people ask her to do.
Steve Rosenberg, her executive producer, said he found the book eye opening because he had no clue about her past problems given her personality.

“One of the biggest things about Robin is that people tell me that when they meet her in person. she’s the same person she’s on camera and off,” he said.

Meade, whose morning show has seen steadily improving ratings the past two years, said the coolest endorsement she got from the book so far is from Indian philosopher Deepak Chopra. He wrote in a blurb for the book that self confidence comes not from the way people see you but from how you feel about yourself.

“I really do feel my self esteem is now coming from within,” she said.