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

The DARE Response

Anxiety is not a monster out to get you. I know it feels like that most of the time, but it isn't. I also know you fear it might kill you or drive you insane, but it won't.

You're safe. You have to trust that.

Your anxiety is not an attacker. It's an internal tug-of-war you're having with yourself. No monster is chasing you. Instead, this is your body's own misguided way of trying to protect you. It's trying to do what it thinks is best for you.

The tools you've been using up until now haven't been working, so you have to drop your old coping strategies and adopt a new approach. The DARE Response teaches you to have a radically new relationship with your anxiety. It teaches you to stop seeing your anxiety as an oppressive force but rather a neutral energy that can be channeled to your benefit.

It entails learning a new response to anxiety in order to become free of it. There are four simple steps:

Defuse

Allow

Run Toward

Engage

Step 1. Defuse

Anxiety is nothing more than nervous energy in your body. This energy rises and falls just like waves on the ocean. Think of it as if you're bobbing around in the ocean and every now and then a wave rises up in front of you. These are the waves of nervous energy. When you resist the wave, it tosses you around and scares you, but when you move with it, you ride up and over it and eventually lose your fear of the waves.

The waves of anxiety rise up, peak, and then fall back down. They always peak and then subside away. Up and down they go. They become a problem (a disorder) only if you respond to them in the wrong way.

The first step of The DARE Response retrains how you immediately respond to anxiety. It's your first point of contact with the anxiety, and it's a very quick and easy step to implement.

Anxiety often comes from out of nowhere and then escalates really fast. As we saw in the previous chapter, anxiety's initial trigger can be caused by several different things (e.g., exhaustion, stress, poor diet), but it's rapidly escalating because you're going against the grain of your nervous arousal. You're responding to it the wrong way.

The biggest mistake most people make when anxiety strikes is to get caught up in "what if" thoughts.

What if my heart doesn't stop pounding?

What if I have a panic attack here in the car?

What if this constant anxiety doesn't go away?

What if I faint? Who will help me?

What if my mind never stops obsessing with these thoughts?

Since prehistoric times our minds have been wired to seek out potential threats and to then avoid them. The world we lived in then was often a life-or-death environment, and "what ifs" were a useful cognitive process that developed to keep us out of immediate danger.

What if that shadow behind that bush is a predator? Best to back away.

Today, however, it's rare (fortunately!) to encounter a life-or-death moment, so our minds turn inwards instead, looking for those same life-threatening situations that are almost always imagined or exaggerated.

What if that pounding heart means I'm about to have a heart attack?

What if I lose my job and can't feed myself or my family?

Notice that these "what ifs" almost never revolve around good things potentially happening, like:

What if someone surprises me with good news today?