Stress and anxiety are wildly different.
I instantly know someone doesn’t struggle with general anxiety when they point to the ‘stresses of their life’. Anxiety that has no specific event or events that can be traced back to (at least immediately) is what I call general anxiety. It’s the form of anxiety that you have no idea why you’re having. There hasn’t been a specific event in your life to provoke it. Maybe there’s the combination of many events that you can trace back to but in general, it’s difficult to point at any singular event (or set of events). This, in my view, is the worst type of anxiety.
The immense difficulty in dealing with it is due to the fact that you can’t justify that a specific event in your life will turn out to be okay in the end. For example, if you get in a car accident and are therefore anxious post-accident, you can control your emotions much better because you can logic through the fact that the result of this accident is likely not a big deal, insurance will payout, you’re not deeply injured, and it will be all okay. However, when you have general anxiety and are not sure what to point to, the control of that anxiety becomes much more difficult.
Oftentimes, controlling general anxiety comes down to convincing yourself that it is quite irrational to be anxious at this given moment. It also helps if you’re able to avoid the positive feedback loop of being scared of your anxiety (thinking it might be a health problem), getting more anxiety as a result and repeating this loop.
My anxiety began in high school when I would come to my room after school exhausted from trying to control it just to appear normal during recess, lunch, and classes. I would instantly go take a nap so that my nerves would calm down. Every event I would go to, the anxiety would spike. I then was able to control it pretty well during my time at UC Berkeley, I don’t recall any deeply painful moments of anxiety. It then got worse & to its absolute peak when I visited India.
In India, there was one day where I was in ‘panic attack’ mode for a few hours. This resulted from the positive feedback loop I had put myself in: being scared that I’m having some health issue (for ex, potential heart attack) which then resulted in me being scared of my anxiety and that, of course, resulted in more anxiety. This is called a positive feedback loop. In engineering, positive feedback loops explode to ‘infinity’ because the input results in an increase in output which then increases the input. In this case, the input is anxiety, the output is being scared of anxiety which then increases the input (anxiety) and so on. You can imagine how quickly this explodes to ‘infinity’. The infinity here has a limit of course and that limit is a ‘panic attack’. After India, I knew I had to tackle this issue to avoid being in a constant state of panic. I started researching therapy, books, and more.
Before deciding on the potential solution, I had planned another trip; this time, to San Francisco. I had a feeling this trip will not be joyful given the current levels of anxiety; however, I decided to go anyway. During this trip, I had reached another peak of anxiety with another panic attack. During the trip, with the anxiety levels I reached, I completely regretted my decision of going on the trip. In retrospect, going on the trip was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.
The intense levels of panic I reached resulted in me looking for an immediate solution right after the trip, there was simply no other option. I once again considered therapy, podcasts, and books. I finally decided on a book called ‘The Dare Response’ by Barry Mcdonagh. This book had immediately changed my life. Within the first 30-40 pages, I found out that the immense anxiety I would get during haircuts, in line at starbucks, or any other normal daily activity was totally normal and common. This had immediately reduced the pressure I would put on myself and almost completely eliminated the ‘am I the only one that gets anxiety during a simple haircut’ thinking. I then learned about the DARE response itself. It is incredible and completely resolved my anxiety.
To summarize, the ‘D’ stands for defuse: this means to stop questioning the ‘what ifs’ (what if it’s a heart attack coming, what if something is wrong with my brain, etc) and understand that it’s simply anxiety. Another common ‘what if’ is ‘what if i faint’ and the response to that is ‘SO WHAT’. So what i faint, there’s people that will help me get up and i’ll be okay after a few minutes. Even if there’s no one around, I’ll faint and get up and it’ll be a good story.
The ‘A’ stands for allow. I like to think of the ‘A’ as ‘Accept’ because it means to accept the anxiety and be okay with it. First understand that it’s anxiety, accept it, and just let it be. I’m feeling a bit anxious as I write this and my anxiety levels instantly drop by simply accepting it.
The ‘R’ stands for ‘run towards’ or ‘reframe’. I like to think of it as ‘Run towards’. After going through defuse and acceptance, I run toward the anxiety by asking for more: ‘you want to make my heart beat fast but that’s all you got? GIVE ME MORE’. It’s a little bit silly but it works well. You are not fighting anxiety and you’re not scared of it, you’re asking for more because you know it’s just a little bitch that doesn’t have much to give, just a bit of an increase in heart rate and maybe a tingle or two.
The last step is ‘E’ which stands for ‘Engage’. This is where you engage in another activity (talk to someone, read, or get back to work). Before doing ‘E’, it’s important to repeat DAR multiple times (as much as you see fit). Once you move on to ‘E’, it’s important to not expect anxiety to be gone, you should expect the opposite, you just asked for more so expect more! If you’re on step ‘E’ and you expect anxiety to be gone, you need to repeat DAR a couple more times.
Once you complete the DARE response, you will have not eliminated anxiety but you’ve avoided the positive feedback loop that results in a panic attack. Once you get very good at the DARE response, knowing that you have the tool in your pocket will basically completely eliminate anxiety from your life.
Of course everyone will experience the DARE response differently: for some, it will completely ‘eliminate’ anxiety fairly quickly, for others, it will take much longer. For me, it has eliminated panic attacks and significantly reduced anxiety. Every time I feel a bit of anxiety coming, I just run through the DARE response and move on with my day. THANK YOU Mr. Barry McDonagh, you’re a fucking legend <3
❤️ Ali A.