DARE -The New Way to End Anxiety and Stop Panic Attacks

You're the cure

The very first thing to be aware of as we set off on this journey is that it's okay not to feel okay. That's the launching point. All the months or years that anxiety has been with you can really take their toll. It may have been a very long time since you really felt like yourself.

A person who experiences frequent panic attacks or general anxiety is constantly bombarded with a cocktail of stress hormones. This bombardment not only makes your nervous system highly sensitized to stress, but it also leaves you feeling eerily cut off from the world. Reality may have gone a bit weird, but that's okay. Now that you know the anxiety you feel is simply due to your body's stress response, you can begin to feel more and more comfortable about it.

I assure you that the anxiety you feel is not that different from the anxiety experienced by all the other people who have successfully used this approach. Over the years I have come across such a wide range of anxiety issues that nothing surprises me anymore. Panic disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, social anxiety, OCD, Pure O: behind all the different manifestations is the same thing-anxiety.

I don't like to subcategorize anxiety into individual labels or even call it a "disorder." I mentioned those terms above only so that you're clear that what I'm talking about is what you've heard. Labels are useful only for defining an experience a person is going through right at that time in life. They should not be understood as something that now makes up a person's personality or as something they will have forever.

People tend to overidentify with clinical labels once they have been given one by their doctor or mental health professional. Yet an anxiety disorder is simply an experience that a person moves through, just like a period of grief or sadness. Would we give a person with a broken heart or someone suffering from grief a label for life? No, yet people who go through a period of anxiety sometimes end up believing that this diagnosis, this label, is now a part of who they are.

"How fast will I be able to end my anxiety problem?"

The speed and manner in which each individual heals their anxiety is always different, so it's impossible to say exactly how fast and in what way it will happen for you. In general, however, it unfolds in stages for most people. Before I explain what those stages look like, I want to share an important point: The speed of your recovery is determined by your willingness to experience your anxiety in the right way. Up until now you've been experiencing anxiety in the wrong way. I'm going to teach you how to experience it in the right way, and paradoxically by doing this, you can heal it quickly. It's a bit like turning a release valve the wrong way and just closing it tighter. You need to turn it in a counterintuitive manner to cause a release.

Once you apply this new approach, you'll move through some predictable stages:

Stage 1. First of all, if panic attacks are a problem for you, they become less frequent in a very short space of time. This happens because you learn how to remove the fear of the bodily sensations that have been triggering them. Your confidence in your body's ability to handle the stress starts to return, enabling you to again visit the places you may have been avoiding.

Stage 2. Next, your level of general anxiety starts to go down from, say, an 8 out of 10 to a 4 or 5. This stage of reducing general anxiety is a slower process as you have to allow time for your nervous system to become less sensitized. This healing process is not linear; it's not like the mending of a broken bone. You'll likely move forward and then back and then leap forward again.

Stage 3. As your general anxiety decreases, anxious thoughts or worries appear less frequently. This happens because your fearful response to them has reduced. If they felt like a punch to the stomach before, now they might feel just like a mild annoyance and not something that really shocks you anymore. It's also at this stage that uncomfortable feelings like derealization (feelings of unreality) start to diminish.