Barry McDonagh

Anxiety causes you to become stuck in a stagnant state of fear. Learning how to skillfully move with the anxious discomfort that you feel removes you from that state of fear. Moving with anxiety places you back into a state of flow, which eventually frees you from an anxious state. The DARE Response teaches you that simple movement.
The unusual thing about The DARE Response is that it’s not designed to get rid of your anxiety; it’s designed to get rid of your fear of the anxiety. It’s your resistance to and struggle with anxiety that keeps you trapped. A bit like quicksand, the more you struggle, the deeper you sink. When you employ The DARE Response, your anxious mind is taken out of the way, allowing your nervous system to desensitize.

THE ANXIETY LOOP

It’s at this point in time where people get split into those that develop an anxiety disorder and those that don’t. The real deciding factor is whether a person gets caught in the “anxiety loop” or not. The anxiety loop is a mental trap, a vicious cycle of fearing fear. Instead of ignoring anxious thoughts or bodily sensations, the person becomes acutely aware and paranoid of them.

For this group of people, the catalyst for the anxiety disorder to manifest is usually a trigger like extreme exhaustion (mental/emotional/physical) or sudden upheavals like a bereavement, illness, trauma, or the end of a relationship (separation). Sometimes anxiety doesn’t spring from one particular life event. For these people, it originates because they haven’t been looking after themselves properly (e.g., not eating right, not getting enough sleep, or consuming too much caffeine and alcohol). Poor diet and not getting the right amounts of key nutrients is a real trigger for many.

This trap is akin to quicksand. Our immediate response is to struggle hard to free ourselves, but it’s the wrong response. The more we struggle, the deeper we sink.

Anxiety is such a simple but costly trap to fall into. All your additional worry and stress make the problem worse, fueling more anxiety and creating a vicious cycle or loop. It’s like spilling gasoline onto a bonfire: the more you fear the bodily sensations, the more intense they feel. I’ve seen so many carefree people go from feeling fine one day to becoming fearful of everyday situations simply because they had one bad panic attack and then got stuck in this anxious loop of fearing fear. But there is great hope.
As strange as it sounds, the greatest obstacle to healing your anxiety is you

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

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,

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

Now that you’ve started to respond to anxiety in the right way, it’s crucial you keep going by releasing all resistance so that any anxiety that’s still present can dissipate even faster. You do this by accepting the anxiety that you feel and allowing it to manifest in whatever way it wishes

Allow it to be present, and then come to accept it for what it is—nervous arousal and nothing more. This wave of nervous arousal is happening. You may never find out why it’s manifesting, but for right now that’s not important. What is important is how you respond to it.
What we resist persists, and what we accept, we can transform. When we fully accept our anxiety by allowing it to be, without begrudging it, it then goes through a subtle transformation. As Lama Govinda said, “We are transformed by what we accept.”

The secret to recovery, however, is that once you reach a point where you really allow and accept it, it begins to fall away and discharge naturally. It’s the paradox that is central to healing anxiety.
So from now on, I want you to stop asking yourself:
Will I feel okay today?
Instead, ask yourself:
What level of anxious discomfort am I willing to embrace today in order to heal