Herald columnist and Radio Hauraki breakfast host Matt Heath is taking on a new role as Happiness Editor for our Great Minds mental health project. He will share his own insights in his search for wellbeing as well as interviews with international experts in the field.
Successful UK novelist Tim Clare suffered terrible panic attacks for over a decade. He often ended up on the floor screaming for his wife to help him. Worried his anxiety issues would affect his toddler, Tim decided to throw everything at it. He’d try every treatment for anxiety he could until something cured him.
On the journey, he read hundreds of studies, talked to dozens of scientists, solved his panic attacks, decreased his anxiety levels and wrote the book Coward: Why We Get Anxious & What We Can Do About It.
Even if you have never suffered a panic attack, it's a helpful read. Most of us experience significant anxiety from time to time.
Coward is meticulously researched, easy to follow, funny, in-depth and balanced. I zoomed Tim at his home in Norwich and found him in a room that may or may not be a cupboard.
Q: Was there a treatment you tried that you were sceptical about but got results?
A: Cold water swimming. I just thought this is dumb and painful. You see the shots on YouTube. A drone going over like a lake. Someone doing yoga on the bank goes into the water to rising strings.
My swim wasn't in a beautiful area. It was a dirty park on a grey day at minus 2C; there was a guy watching smoking a roll-up. I didn't feel I was communing with nature.
I had spoken to a guy called Dr Mark Harper about a pilot study he'd done. The idea is that you're training your body to produce fewer stress hormones when it gets a shock. It's called cold adaptation. You're training yourself just to breathe while voluntarily facing something tricky on your own terms. You're practising getting stressed.
I used the protocols from his studies: six consecutive days, a three-minute dip in water between 10 and 16 degrees. I haven't had a panic attack since, and it's been two and a half years, and I'd been having panic attacks for over a decade - really bad ones almost every week.
I can't say that cold water definitely did it. I've been doing all this other stuff in the book, and it may be that all these things support each other. Now I enjoy cold water swimming. It's horrible when you go in, but coming out, I feel amazing.
When I started, I thought this was professionally embarrassing because I have to say that this works really well for me, when it's like a little bit of Instagram trendy. I wanted to be sceptical and debunk this stuff, but I did it, and I have peer-reviewed papers in the book that support it, and spoke to university researchers about it. So I feel like I've done my due diligence, and it worked for me.
Q: That was early on. Did that success make you less judgmental of the things you were trying?
A: I think this is a pretty important lesson for anyone. If it works for you, unless it involves hurting other people, or it's incredibly expensive, no one can say, well, the research doesn't support this. If it works for you, it works for you.
Research talks about percentages, and it might be that 75 per cent of people who tried this got better. If that happened in a study, that would be astonishing numbers.
If an antidepressant got those numbers, it would be a miracle treatment. You'd see it plastered across every frontage. Yet that would still be one in four people not getting anything out of it.
By the same token, if you have a favourite kind of pie. I can't go up to you and say; I just did a study, and two-thirds of people like something else, so your favourite is wrong. If it is your favourite, it's your favourite. And no one can take that away.
It's the same with anything to do with mental health. If it helped you, you've done some kind of study on yourself. It's a one equals one, and you feel better. It's kind of the end of the argument for your personally. Even if across a lot of people in a study, it might not pan out.
Q: We often hear we are living in anxious times. Is 2022 a particularly anxiety-inducing time to live?
A: Yeah, it's a thing you hear a lot. People bring up social media, the pandemic, work pressure, the digital age. But the honest answer is I don't know if this is a particularly anxious time. We don't have a standardised tool that we can apply.
I would ask, "when was it less stressful?" Take the 1950s. There was polio back then. You could go to public pools and come back permanently disabled. An epidemic that was specifically affecting people's children. The Cold War is kicking off. The Korean War. So who are you imagining yourself being in these less stressful 1950s? Probably on an American TV show in suburbia.
Why are you not living with rationing? Why are you not grieving the friends and family you lost during World War II? Why are you not in Eastern Germany?
Let's look more recently. Often people think of their childhood as a time when things were less stressful. But I wasn't looking at the geopolitical situation when I was 7. I didn't have a mortgage.
Our memory is not perfect. If you want me to talk about currently stressful things, I can; if you want me to talk about how stressful it was in third-century China, I can't.
So are we more anxious now than we were 30, 50, or 100 years ago? That's an almost impossible question to answer. But it seems unlikely things are more stressful now than they were during, say, World War II.
Q: After all your investigations, what would be the first thing you'd suggest someone with bad anxiety or panic attacks do?
A: I'd say speak to a doctor if you can. Start the difficult conversation. It's always worth speaking to a medical professional.
I know people have different experiences; some are lucky enough to have a helpful doctor, and others are not. If not, maybe you can sit down with somebody in your life that you trust and say, "I'm not coping", or a helpline. There is something powerful in just having that moment of admitting I'm not doing okay.
There's a fear in saying I'm not doing okay, that you might speak it into truth, and your life will go into crisis mode. But oddly, the opposite is true.
Often when we admit where we are, where we are changes almost without effort. It's like the message must be delivered before you can move on and the guard can come down.
I was always scared of saying, 'I am not coping, and I can't live this way'. But when I did, things shifted. It's hard to explain. That sounds wishy-washy, but I think it makes all the other changes far easier, all the things to try easier when you've had that conversation and been heard.
With that, Tim’s laptop camera shifted, and I realised he wasn’t sitting in a cupboard after all. He was in a lovely spacious room. It just had a shirt and coat hanger on the door handle, making it look like a wardrobe. Which sounds like a cheesy metaphor for the journey of his book - but it isn’t. That’s just what happened.
• Coward: Why We Get Anxious & What We Can Do About It was released in New Zealand yesterday RRP $39.99
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