[Photo: Angie Payden / Business Insider]

When news of the Wells Fargo scandal broke in September, the crushing anxiety that Angie Payden experienced as a banker there 3 years ago came rushing back. "It was horrible," she said. "I felt like my heart was just going to break through my chest. I almost took myself to the ER because I thought, this is not normal."

As a Wells Fargo banker, Payden told Business Insider she had "impossible" sales goals to reach. As other Wells Fargo employees have shared, she said she was expected to open as many accounts as possible for customers.

In all, the company estimates its employees opened as many as 2 million accounts without customers' knowledge. Yet Payden says there were likely many more accounts that customers knew about but were pressured into opening unnecessarily.

Payden wrote about her experience in a Facebook post in September that was published by The New York Times. Business Insider followed up with her, and she told us more about how she inflicted pain on herself as a way of dealing with the stress.

As a recovering alcoholic when she started at Wells Fargo in June 2011, the pressure of having to hit sales targets was too much. The branch Payden worked for, in Hudson, WI, was a community bank in a small town, so there weren't that many new customers to yield new accounts.

"I pulled myself into that trap - sitting there doing things that I didn't agree with because I felt like I didn't have a choice. Then I started to get these panic attacks, which I never had before," she said. "When you're going through a panic attack, you don't quite know what to do. After a couple times, I just couldn't take it anymore. I looked at the hand sanitizer in the bathroom, and I thought, this has alcohol in it. This may work. And it did."