Coward cover art

Coward

Why We Get Anxious & What We Can Do About It

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Coward

By: Tim Clare
Narrated by: Tim Clare
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About this listen

Tim Clare has suffered from extreme anxiety and panic attacks for a decade. At their worst, his attacks would see him curled on the floor, screaming at his wife for help. This was something the couple just got used to and were able to manage, until they became parents. With the arrival of Tim's daughter came a new wave of extreme anxiety, triggered by the knowledge that his own mental ill-health could be negatively impacting his child.

It was at this point that Tim made a promise to himself—that he would try everything he could to get better, every method and medicine. In Coward, Tim explores all the possible treatments for anxiety, from SRIs to hypnosis, from running to extreme diets. He interviews experts in each field and becomes a guinea pig, testing their methods on himself. By the end of the audiobook, Tim will know what helps him and what doesn't, and what might help others, but most of all, he'll come to rethink anxiety and ask all of us to do the same.

©2022 Tim Clare (P)2022 Canongate Books Anxiety Disorders Mental Health Personal Development Psychology Psychology & Mental Health Inspiring

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All stars
Most relevant  

I’ve never left a review for any audiobook or physical book before, but Coward by Tim Clare genuinely felt too important not to. I live with multiple complex mental health and physical conditions, and I’ve spent years trying to understand why the usual advice never seems to help. This book did more to make sense of my fear, my phobias, and my lived experience than anything I’ve ever encountered — and I include therapy, academic reading, and even other excellent mental health books in that comparison.

Tim doesn’t just describe anxiety — he dissects it, with warmth, honesty, and a critical eye that never drifts into toxic positivity or over-simplification. His interviews, personal stories, and deep dive into research are balanced, ethical, and grounded in real-world complexity. He never talks down to the listener or assumes a one-size-fits-all solution — which meant I never once felt dismissed or “too complicated” to be helped.

It’s also incredible value: weeks of thoughtful, well-paced listening rather than the all-too-common 4-hour summary books. And you can tell he cares about the listener’s wellbeing. That matters. A lot.

This is easily a 10/5 stars for me. If you live with anxiety or fear in any form — especially if you’ve ever felt excluded by mainstream advice — please listen. This book is something truly rare.

The most helpful book I’ve ever listened to — honest, thorough, and life-changing

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Thoroughly enjoyed this book, it was above all relatable and the humor with which it is delivered helped me laugh and cry my way through it. A refreshing change from the self help books I usually read, I was impressed with the level of research and alternative ideas and approaches tried and tested.

Funny, relatable and thoroughly well researched

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I love Tim’s writing and his performance of his own work was excellent.

The subject has been brilliantly researched and presented in a narrative non-fiction form which I found engaging and educational.

Thank you, Tim for this great piece of work.
Easily the best written and researched book on the subject. BR

Brilliant, vulnerable and insightful

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I love this for being personal but still so thorough and honest. It’s not a coffee table self help book with meaningless cliches it’s relatable, funny and helpful. For anyone that has a mental illness or for those like me, who loves someone that does, I highly recommend this book. The best audiobook on anxiety I’ve listened to.

Funny, relatable and personal

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In a world awash with skewed pop-science and dodgy self-help works around mental illness, this really stands out. Tim shows a brutal and heart-wrenching honesty in describing the weight of chronic severe anxiety and it's effect on the people around him, reminiscent of how Amanda Palmer's the Art of Asking looked unflinchingly at vulnerability. This is mixed in with investigation of different fields of treatment from the mainstream to the borderline quackish, where he lays out some pretty knotted neuroscience in an accessible way. But it's the autobiography that carries it, and as a fellow anxiety sufferer I was often in tears of empathy and catharsis. I've been a Clare Stan for a while, but I think you'll root for our flawed hero as much as I did.

Important

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Really interesting and useful views. Made a difficult topic easy to understand and listen to, with laugh out loud moments! Relatable and balanced.

Really interesting

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The author writes from the heart whilst at the same time referring to mountains of data. A raw tale which will be fascinating to anyone with or interested in anxiety. The perfect millennial book. It's read beautifully and with obvious passion.

Deeply personal, universally applicable

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Funny, very interesting, informative and beautifully human! A narration that continued to entertain. Highly recommended for those that live with anxiety.

Brilliant!

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This is an absolutely cracking book. It's not your conventional self-help book - rather, it's a personal investigation into current and past therapeutic interventions for anxiety sufferers, their potential, and their pitfalls. It's interesting, informative, clear, concise, and sprinkled with enough personal anecdotes to keep it personal. Also, I have a background in genetics, and the explanation about the real meaning of "inheritable conditions" is the best I've ever seen in a work for laypeople.

If you want a self-help book, this isn't it. If you want a book about what help is out there, however, I don't think you can do better.

Informative, engaging, and helpful

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Rambling, self-indulgent, boring. One or two mildly interesting points buried in there but it doesn’t really say anything.

Waste of a credit

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