Coward

Tim Clare

Description

Tim Clare has suffered from anxiety and panic attacks for over a decade. At their worst, his attacks would see him curled on the floor, screaming to his wife for help. When they became more than he and his family could manage, Tim made a promise to himself - he would try everything he could to get better, every method and medicine. In Coward, Tim Clare explores all the possible treatments for anxiety, from anti-depressants to hypnosis, running to extreme diets. He interviews experts and becomes a guinea pig, testing their methods on himself. At the end of a year of many ups and downs, Tim discovers what helps him (and what doesn't), and what might help others. Most of all, he comes to rethink anxiety and encourages all of us to do the same.

Sujets

• Self-help
• Memoir

Informations

• Publié par: Canongate Books
• Date de parution: 05 mai 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781838853112
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Also by Tim Clare
Fiction
The Honours
The Ice House
Non-fiction
We Can’t All Be Astronauts

First published in Great Britain, the USA and Canada in 2022 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH 1 1 TE
Distributed in the USA by Publishers Group West and in Canada by Publishers Group Canada
canongate.co.uk
This digital edition published in 2022 by Canongate Books
Copyright © Tim Clare, 2022
The right of Tim Clare to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologises for any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.
For permission credits please see p. 396
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 83885 310 5 e ISBN 978 1 83885 311 2
For Suki
CONTENTS
How to Read This Book
  1. Tail: How I became anxious
  2. Shift Happens: The moment I realised I couldn’t go on like this
  3. The Exercist: Exercise; the fight, flight or freeze response; and neurotransmitters
  4. Eat Shit and Diet: The gut–brain connection, microbiota and inflammation
  5. Terrifying Abnormal Dreams: Antidepressants, tranquillisers, side effects and withdrawal symptoms
  6. Modern Life Is Rubbish: The anxiety of modern life and the history of stress
  7. This Is Fine: Social media and our addiction to doomscrolling
  8. The Anxiety Gene: The genetic roots of anxiety
  9. And It Feels Like Home: Childhood trauma, brain development and the power of nostalgia
10. Piece of Mind: The neuroscience of anxiety
11. Brain Storm: Stimulating parts of the brain with electricity and magnets, and taming our ‘threat circuit’
12. Paranoid Android: What robots and AI are teaching us about anxiety
13. Safety: How we perpetuate our fear, and the extreme exposure therapies that conquer it
14. Psychedelics: LSD, magic mushrooms, MDMA, and the growth of psychedelic therapy
15. The Water Cure: Cold-water immersion and wild swimming
16. Breathing: Pulmonary biology and the science of panic attacks
17. Hypnosis: Hypnotherapy and placebos
18. Religion: Seeking certainty in gods, scriptures and meditation
19. In These Uncertain Times: Anxiety disorders and global catastrophe
20. The Magic of Uncertainty: The power of stories, and learning to be comfortable when life is out of our control
Appendix
Acknowledgements
Notes
HOW TO READ THIS BOOK
T his is not a self-help book.
I’m barely qualified to dress myself, let alone coach someone I’ve never met through overcoming the most widespread mental illness in the world. It’d be like asking a goat to operate a lathe.
This is not a polemic.
It’s not an urgent broadside against a pervasive scourge, an exploding of widespread myths, nor a profound meditation on the malady of our modern age.
This is not a manifesto. It’s not a call-to-arms. It is not a spirited cri de coeur . I’ve done my best to present the strongest arguments of everyone I consulted – even if, ultimately, I disagreed with them.
This is not science. It includes science, and many scientists, but more than anything else it’s a story. And the lab monkey is the author. Hi.
In this book, I’m going to act as a kind of medical skeleton of cowardice. I’m here with all my bones on display.
If you’re skilled at avoiding things that make you uncomfortable, you might never consider yourself anxious. I didn’t for years. Many adults unconsciously construct their lives around never putting themselves in a situation where they feel out of place, afraid, or like a beginner. They have a slew of rationalisations – I’m too busy, it looks boring, ugh, I can’t think of anything worse – but the motivating prod is anxiety. They don’t feel afraid, but fear controls their lives.
I am a coward.
You are too.
This is a book about learning to face that.
—
My grandmother was a member of the Hitler Youth. One Boxing Day, our family was slumped in a post-turkey stupor when my dad asked why she and the people she knew hadn’t done anything to stop the Holocaust.
Sat in her rocking chair, she paused to consider. ‘We didn’t know.’
But, my dad said, people must have had suspicions.
She recalled passing Auschwitz on a school trip. She said people used to ask: ‘Why are there so many empty prams on Auschwitz station?’ She remembered the policeman who lived at the end of her street, who had gone to work in the camp, and when he came back his hair had turned white. He locked himself in an attic room and shot himself.
‘But,’ she said, ‘you have to understand: bombs were falling from the sky. We had no reason to question. We thought we knew who our enemies were.’
—
It’s hard to remain open-minded while you’re terrified.
Anxiety submits to authority. One of the gentle theses of this book – a suggestion, that you’re free to weigh and reject – is that while anxiety makes us crave answers, a better way to live is to seek good questions. It’s hard to be brutal and callous and cruel while also being curious.
Some people don’t – can’t – see themselves as anxious. Yet they’re obsessed with immigrants swarming over the borders. With foreign or domestic powers plotting to destroy the country. With conspiracies or disturbing new trends.
They’re not anxious; the world is threatening.
When we can’t admit our anxiety and paranoia, we’re vulnerable to misinformation, and manipulation by those who promise to make us feel safe. 1 We escape our uncomfortable anxiety by turning it into righteous anger. We turn our fellow humans into the Other. We stop noticing information that doesn’t fit our model. We get locked in a single story. All we can see is the threat.
—
It’s easy to be sceptical of things that don’t fit your worldview. Most of us imagine that’s all scepticism is. It’s much harder, I’ve found, to maintain that scepticism when you’re presented with exciting, counterintuitive answers that promise to transform your life. A lot of classic psychology experiments make for cool little stories. It feels almost mean-spirited to point out their flaws.
The sociologist Murray S. Davis wrote a terrific paper in the 1970s called ‘That’s Interesting!’ in which he argued: ‘It has long been thought that a theorist is considered great because his theories are true, but this is false. A theorist is considered great, not because his theories are true, but because they are interesting .’
For a theory to be interesting, Davis argues, it must overturn our weakly held assumptions while confirming our strongly held assumptions. If it fails to do the former, we think Well, that’s obvious . If it fails to do the latter, we think Well, that’s absurd . If it does both, we experience a pleasurable jolt of surprise – a prediction error – without threatening our overall model of the world. The theory feels intuitively right – it ‘makes sense’ – but it’s also telling us something new – ‘what seems to be X is, in fact, non-X’ – and we feel smarter and better informed.
This principle applies to articles and videos we share on social media, to opinion pieces and conspiracy theories. As humans, our attention is drawn to difference, so – given huge data sets – what looks most anomalous looks most like a signal.
We see this tendency in popular science, especially in the realms of mental health and wellbeing – a desire not to let the facts get in the way of a good story. We’ve come to view the scientific method as mere pedantry, rather than an essential bulwark against human biases. TED Talks’ slogan is ‘Ideas worth spreading’, 2 but truly worthwhile ideas are worth criticising.
Where relevant, I’ve included endnotes with references to studies. If I have reservations about the study design or reasons why I think we should be cautious about the authors’ conclusions, I’ve mostly saved those for the endnotes too. Remember, in research a ‘significant’ difference isn’t necessarily a large one. Significant means ‘less than 5 per cent likely to have happened by chance’. Also, just because a study is peer-reviewed doesn’t mean it’s not shite.
Not everything I experienced is generalisable. People vary. In a couple of cases, I’ve changed people’s names to protect their privacy. I did some really dumb shit. I’m allowed to because it’s my life and I get to write my own risk assessments. Please don’t copy me. Apply wisdom.
I.
TAIL
How I became anxious
S ome years ago I grew a tail. It was about a sixth of my body length, a mix of cartilage and bone.
‘Coward’ comes from the Old French coart , meaning ‘one with a tail’. It may have been intended to evoke a dog with its tail between its legs in the instinctive gesture of submission. In old descriptions of heraldry, a ‘lion coward’ is a coat of arms depicting a lion with its tail between its legs.
There are fewer than sixty cases of humans born with tails in medical literature. Some estimates put the number as low as twenty. The difference is accounted for by a distinction between a ‘true tail’, which contains muscle, can grow as long as 18cm and can move, and a ‘pseudotail’, a growth that superficially resembles a tail, but turns out to be a projecting bone, a tumour, or, in one macabre case, ‘a thin, elongated parasitic fetus’. 1
A human with a tail feels like a contradiction in terms. Perhaps we find such births unsettling because we think of evolution as an event in our distant past, not a journey that continues. Labels like ‘human’ and ‘animal’ imply a comforting permanence.
My tail lasted about four weeks before being reabsorbed into my body. As did yours. We all grow a tail inside the womb. It peaks around week five then retreats inside us. Its column of vertebrae becomes the main su