Dare: The New Way to End Anxiety and Stop Panic Attacks Fast

This is a practical book about ending anxiety by changing your relationship to it.

McDonagh’s central insight is simple and counterintuitive: it’s not the anxiety that’s the problem, it’s your fear of the anxiety. Stop fearing it, and the cycle breaks.

Fear of fear

The whole book comes back to one idea: anxiety disorders are powered by the fear of anxious sensations, not the sensations themselves.
Your heart pounds. You notice it. You think “what if something is wrong?”
That thought triggers more adrenaline. Your heart pounds harder. You think something is definitely wrong. You spiral.

McDonagh calls this the “fear of fear” cycle. What keeps you trapped isn’t the pounding heart or the tight chest, it’s your resistance to those feelings.
Like quicksand: the more you struggle, the deeper you sink.

What we resist persists, and what we accept, we can transform.

Recovery isn’t about the absence of sensations. It’s reaching the point where they show up and you don’t care.
The anxiety isn’t in the sensations. It’s in your resistance to them.

The DARE response

DARE is a four-step framework:

1. Defuse — Answer “what if” thoughts with “so what” or “whatever.” Cut off the spiral before it starts.
2. Allow — Accept the anxiety. Let it be present without fighting it. Repeat: “I accept and allow this anxious feeling.”
3. Run toward — If it’s still threatening, reframe: “I’m excited by this feeling.” Move toward the discomfort instead of away from it.
4. Engage — Get absorbed in an activity. Don’t sit idle and check in on how you’re feeling every few seconds.

Defuse: “so what”

In anxious moments, your brain fires off “what if” questions. What if my heart doesn’t stop pounding? What if I faint? What if I lose control?

Each one feeds the spiral. McDonagh’s answer is to shut them down fast with “so what,” or “whatever,” or something more colorful if that fits you better.
The specific words don’t matter. What matters is the dismissive attitude. You’re refusing to take the bait.

Allow: get comfortable with discomfort

Instead of trying to force calm or push the feelings away, you let them be there. The anxiety can make your throat feel tight, your heart pound, your mind race. And you let it. You stop fighting.

McDonagh uses the image of a wave. If you fight it, you get pulled under. If you allow it, you move up and over the top. Allowing stops the mental friction and gives your nervous system the space to wind down on its own.

Acceptance can be reluctant. You can grit your teeth and “accept” something while hating every second of it. That’s still resistance.
Allowing means genuinely letting the feelings exist without begrudging them. More like meditation than willpower.

As the anxiety shifts, it may morph into different sensations. Your stomach loosens but now your hands are tingling. Your mind quiets but your chest tightens. The move is to treat each one the same way: “That’s interesting that you’re now giving me this new sensation. Whatever. You’re allowed.”

Trying to force calm is itself a form of resistance. It implies “I really don’t want this.”
The goal isn’t to feel calm. It’s to feel the sensations without getting scared by them.

Instead of waking up and asking “Will I feel okay today?”, ask “What level of anxious discomfort am I willing to embrace today in order to heal?”
It reframes the whole day. You’re not hoping anxiety won’t show up. You’re deciding in advance how much of it you’re willing to sit with.

Run toward: excitement, not fear

McDonagh frames step three as optional. Defuse and allow are the primary drivers, and often they’re enough. But if the anxiety still feels like a harmful threat hanging over you, you need to shatter that illusion.

Anxiety is just a wave of energy flowing through your body. It can’t hurt you. The problem is entirely in your interpretation of that energy.
Anxiety and excitement produce the same physical sensations: pounding heart, heightened alertness, energy coursing through you. The difference is the label you put on it.

So you relabel. Tell yourself you’re excited by the feeling. Say it out loud if you can. Bounce on your toes like an athlete before a race. “I’m excited by this feeling.” Repeat it several times until you feel the perception shift. You’re moving toward the discomfort instead of away from it, which makes you less intimidated by it.

Engage: don’t be idle

After you’ve defused, allowed, and (if needed) run toward the anxiety, you need to keep your mind occupied. Not to distract yourself, but to engage with life.
The anxiety can be there. You’re just not going to stop what you’re doing because of it.

Distraction says “I need to not think about this.”
Engagement says “thanks for the interruption, but I was doing something. You can stay, but I’m shifting my focus back.”

The anxiety will keep intruding. McDonagh is upfront about that.
You’ll engage with something, feel better, and then get pulled back in. That’s normal and expected.
The move is to gently place your attention back on what you were doing, without getting frustrated that the anxiety is still there. Each time you do that, you’re training the right response, even if it doesn’t feel like it in the moment.

However, engagement only works if you’ve defused and allowed first. Otherwise it’s avoidance, and avoidance feeds the cycle.

Idleness is the enemy. When you’re idle, you ruminate and “check in,” scanning your body every few seconds to see if the anxiety is still there. That keeps the cycle going.
Being absorbed in a task (flow) naturally reduces how often you check in.

Panic attacks: demand more

Panic attacks are anxiety at an 8 or 9 out of 10. At that intensity, gentle self-soothing (“don’t worry, everything’s fine”) gets drowned out. Logic and reason can’t compete with the alarm your body is sounding.
Telling yourself everything is okay while you’re visibly trembling and your heart is pounding doesn’t land.

It’s the wrong approach.

“The job of your stress system is to keep you safe and alive not to kill you. The symptoms of anxiety are uncomfortable but they are not dangerous. You have my word as a doctor – this adrenaline rush will not kill you.”
— Dr. Harry Barry

So when panic hits, you demand more. You talk to your anxiety directly. Your heart’s pounding fast, so you say: “Okay anxiety, that’s good, but can you make my heart pound even faster?”
You feel like you can’t catch your breath: “Show me what it feels like if my throat and chest feel even tighter.”
You notice fearful thoughts circling: “Can you make them more intense? Aren’t there any scarier ones? I’ve heard all these before.”

You can get angry with it too. “Give me the strongest panic attack ever because I’ve totally had it with these false alarms ruining my life. My life and the people in it are more important to me than any of these sensations, so do your worst.”

It sounds crazy. But demanding more is a request anxiety can’t deliver. The fuel that powers a panic attack is the fear of it, and you can’t be afraid of something you’re actively requesting. Your fear subsides because you’ve cut off the supply.

It’s like a Chinese finger trap. Pulling harder makes you more stuck. Push in to get out.

After a panic attack, expect 20–30 minutes before you feel normal. The stress hormones need time to clear.
If your body wants to shake, let it. Most people assume shaking means the anxiety is getting worse. It’s actually the opposite.
Shaking is what happens when the fight-or-flight response is winding down. It’s how your body discharges nervous energy. If you suppress the shaking, the energy stays trapped. If you let it happen (tap your feet, bounce your knees, shake your hands and arms), you flush the stress hormones faster.

Flash fear vs. response fear

There are two layers to any anxiety spike.
Flash fear is the initial hit: a sudden pounding heart, a knot in the stomach, a jolt of dizziness. It happens fast and you can’t control it.

Response fear is what you do next. The “what if” thoughts. The catastrophizing. This is where you have agency. Flash fear is the bait. Response fear is falling for it hook, line, and sinker.

McDonagh acknowledges that the correct response won’t come naturally at first. It’s habit that needs training. But as long as you correct the wrong response quickly, you prevent the spiral.

Physical sensations: they’re not dangerous

A lot of anxiety is about not understanding why your body is doing what it’s doing. If your heart pounds after a run, you don’t worry. You know why.
If it pounds while you’re sitting in a car, your brain scans for threats and assumes the worst.

Scratch your scalp and listen to the sound. Now imagine you don’t know what’s causing it. You’d start worrying something was wrong with your head.
That’s how anxiety works with every unexplained sensation, and the higher your baseline anxiety, the bigger the overreaction.

Missed heartbeats (extrasystoles) are usually just an extra beat between two normal ones, followed by a pause that makes the next beat feel like a jolt. Harmless. Your heart isn’t a clock that has to keep perfect time.
Don’t retreat home every time you feel one. That reinforces the idea that home is the only safe place.

Depersonalization/derealization is feeling disconnected from reality, as if separated from the outside world by a fog or pane of glass.
You might be having a conversation with someone and suddenly feel alarmingly isolated and removed from the situation. Objects and familiar places seem strange, foreign.
Once it hits, it can stick with you for days, and the worry about its return keeps popping up. Many people who experience this become convinced something is permanently wrong with their brain.

The sensation is caused by delayed perception under stress. The buildup of stress chemicals slows the response between neurotransmitter sites, creating a slight delay between experience and thought. That gap is what produces the feeling of unreality.
One theory is it’s a protection mechanism: your brain applying a kind of psychological anesthetic to shield you from the emotional impact of intense anxiety. The same mechanism that triggers during high-intensity traumatic events. Deeply unsettling, but it’s a symptom of high anxiety, not brain damage.

Exercise as training ground

If panic attacks scare you, the gym is a great place to build your confidence back.
Exercise recreates the exact sensations (pounding heart, heavy breathing, hot flashes) in a context where you know they’re safe.

Many people with panic attacks develop a phobia around exercise because it produces the same bodily sensations that terrify them. McDonagh flips this into a training ground.
Go in with the sole intention of getting comfortable with aroused bodily sensations. Feel your heart pound and practice the DARE response on it. Each workout where you stay with the discomfort instead of bailing is evidence that these sensations are safe, and that evidence accumulates.

Exercise is also just a straight-up mood booster. Dopamine, serotonin, norepinephrine, all the neurotransmitters that regulate mood and behavior.

If there was a drug that provided all the positive benefits of exercise, the whole world would be taking it!
— Dr. Robert Butler

Safe zones are self-imposed prisons

Every anxious person has a safe zone. Home, familiar routes, being with a certain person.
The problem is that anxiety encroaches. The safe zone shrinks. Eventually, the four walls of your house become the only place you feel okay. That’s agoraphobia.

Push outside your comfort zone daily. Plan something the night before and then get up and go for it.
Reading a book isn’t enough. You have to experience it.

Self-love as practice

McDonagh borrows an exercise from Kamal Ravikant’s book Love Yourself. The practice is simple: repeat “I love myself” throughout the day. Many times. Make it a ritual.

The reasoning is that anxious people tend to be hard on themselves. The constant internal monitoring, the frustration when anxiety shows up again, the shame of not being able to do things other people do without a second thought. All of it compounds.

McDonagh’s framing is that if every decision you make comes from a place of genuinely valuing yourself, you stop punishing yourself for being anxious and start treating recovery as something you deserve.

Give up your crutches

Crutches are anything you rely on to feel safe: always having your phone, keeping a Xanax in your pocket, never going out alone, calling someone every time anxiety hits.
They’re a sign you still don’t fully trust that you’re safe. They maintain the dependency on external reassurance.

Lifestyle

A few practical changes reduce the baseline anxiety level so there’s less nervous energy to deal with in the first place.

• Cut caffeine. For anxious people, the cost is too high.
• Avoid excess sugar. Blood sugar swings trigger adrenaline.
• Supplement with magnesium citrate (250 mg) and calcium (500 mg) daily with the evening meal. Double after a week.
• Exercise. The closest thing to a magic pill for mood and anxiety.
• Laugh. Go to a comedy show. Laughter is contagious and it helps.

The lineage

None of this is new. Viktor Frankl and Claire Weekes were saying the same things in the 1950s and 60s: stop managing anxiety, stop medicating it away, and learn to move through it. They advocated for acceptance as the only approach that actually works.

The problem was that the dominant thinking at the time treated anxiety as a permanent condition. Something you had, not something you could change your relationship to. So their ideas got buried for decades while the field defaulted to medication and coping strategies.

Now MBCT (mindfulness-based cognitive therapy) and ACT (acceptance and commitment therapy) are catching up to what Frankl and Weekes knew 70 years ago. DARE sits in this lineage.

“Recovery lies in the midst of all the sensations you dread the most.”
— Dr. Claire Weekes