I Stopped Fighting My Anxiety. Here’s What Happened

I’ve read a lot of books about anxiety. To pass the time during the worst of it. To look for answers. To feel less alone by reading other people’s stories.

Some of them, like Barry McDonagh’s DARE, gave me tools that actually helped push the beast back and slowly loosen its grip.

DARE is an acronym: Defuse, Allow, Run Toward, Engage. It’s also a verb. To challenge. To brave. To confront. That’s not a coincidence.

The book is aimed mostly at people who have panic attacks. That wasn’t really my situation. My problem was chronic anxiety, that background tension that never quite lets go, that settles in and slowly grinds you down. I tried the method anyway. Tested it. Kept what helped.

McDonagh opens with a simple idea that changes everything: it’s not anxiety that destroys you. It’s your fear of anxiety. It’s the attitude you bring to those excessive, destabilizing emotions.

He calls it the anxiety loop. You feel a sensation, heart racing, dizziness, an intrusive thought, and you react with fear. That fear produces more adrenaline. More adrenaline produces more sensations. More sensations produce more fear. And so on, indefinitely.

In my case, I didn’t understand where my anxiety was coming from. I was afraid I had a serious illness, afraid I was losing my mind, which only amplified everything. And during the rare moments of relief, usually in the evenings, I’d lie down dreading the next morning. Convinced the anxiety would be there when I woke up. Which, of course, it always was.

The loop doesn’t spin because you’re fragile or broken. It spins because you’re responding the wrong way to something that, in itself, isn’t dangerous. It’s a fire alarm going off in an empty building. The problem isn’t the alarm. It’s that you keep searching for smoke when there isn’t any.

The first response when anxiety shows up.

When an anxious thought arrives, the instinct is to take it seriously. To believe it. To find an answer. To reassure yourself. To solve the problem.

McDonagh says: don’t do any of that. Just respond with something close to boredom.

“So what. Whatever.”

Not a logical argument. Not an attempt to convince yourself everything is fine. Just a mental shrug. The point is to strip the thought of its urgency before it snowballs.

This was the most immediately useful step for me. Feeling anxious without interruption is exhausting. At some point, that exhaustion becomes a resource. I’d find myself so tired of my own anxious thoughts that I no longer had the energy to take them seriously. That’s where the so what made sense, not as a technique applied with discipline, but as genuine exasperation. I’d already been doing it without realizing. Reading the book, I started doing it on purpose, from the moment I woke up.

You again. So what.

Something would release. Not completely, not permanently, but the pressure would drop a notch. I’d found a small lever I could pull to quiet the noise.

The most counterintuitive step in the book. And probably the most important.

Everything in you wants to resist anxiety. Run from it. Suppress it. Force it to leave. McDonagh argues that’s exactly what keeps it alive. What you resist persists. What you flee pursues you with even more determination.

The move is to do the opposite: invite anxiety to stay.

“I accept you. Sit down. I don’t like you, but you can stay as long as you need.”

This isn’t resignation. It’s a deliberate decision to stop creating friction against a nervous energy that, left alone, will naturally dissipate. Anxiety is a wave. It rises, peaks, and falls. Resistance holds the wave at its crest. Acceptance lets it complete its arc.

The essential distinction: you’re not trying to make anxiety leave. You’re trying to stop being afraid that it’s there. Those are not the same thing.

For me, this was the natural extension of defusing. Once you stop fighting, you can start welcoming. I eventually stopped resisting. I came to accept anxiety as a traveling companion, something sitting on my shoulder, present, not always comfortable, but there.

The book talks about sock puppets, ridiculous little figures whispering scary things in your ear. I had my own version. I’d picture the small creature from Star Wars, Salacious B. Crumb, Jabba the Hutt’s sidekick, speaking with a ridiculous cartoon voice. This grotesque little thing murmuring catastrophes in a voice that was impossible to take seriously.

It’s not a sophisticated technique. But it worked. Because anxiety, seen that way, immediately loses its gravity. It’s no longer an existential threat. It’s a comic character doing its best to convince you the world is ending, in a voice you’d struggle to believe. Just that shift in perception made it less terrifying. The little gremlin on my shoulder became another lever I could pull.

DARE gave me a structure. But I grafted something onto it that made it more effective for me, a principle from ACT, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy.

One of its core tools is called cognitive defusion. The idea is simple. The language we use to describe our inner states isn’t neutral. It creates reality.

When you say “I am anxious”, you fuse your identity with the state. You become the anxiety. There’s no longer any distance between you and it.

When you say “I’m having the thought that I’m anxious”, something shifts. You position yourself as an observer of the state rather than a hostage to it. The anxiety is still there, but you’re no longer inside it. You’re watching it.

This is what DARE practices through the Allow step, without always naming it that way. But having the precise formulation helps. A few concrete examples:

Instead of “I’m afraid to go outside”, think “I’m having the thought that going outside is dangerous”

Instead of “I’m going to lose control”, think “I’m having the thought that I’m going to lose control”

Instead of “I’m worthless”, think “I’m having that old thought again, the one that says I’m worthless”

In each case, the thought is no longer a fact, a truth. It’s just a mental process. An electrical signal traveling through the brain.

This isn’t semantics. Simply naming an emotion from a distance activates the prefrontal cortex, the rational part of the brain, and dials down the amygdala, the alarm center. You’re not telling yourself a story to feel better. You’re changing the circuit that processes the threat.

If anxiety still feels like a threat after the first two steps, McDonagh proposes something radical: move even further toward it.

One of the book’s central points is that fear and excitement aren’t opposing emotions. They’re two versions of the same emotion. The body produces exactly the same responses in both cases, racing heart, quickened breathing, muscle tension, heightened alertness. The only difference is the interpretation you place on those sensations. A story of threat, or a story of anticipation.

For panic attacks specifically, the move is more forceful: demand more.

“Is that all you’ve got? Give me the worst panic attack you can. I’m done being afraid of you.”

It sounds irrational. That’s exactly why it works. If you were facing a real threat, you wouldn’t ask for more of it. The emotional brain receives that incoherent signal and cuts the alarm.

In my case, this step felt unworkable for a long time. My anxiety was so constant, so pervasive, that asking for more seemed absurd. It was already too much.

But I witnessed something revealing, without having looked for it.

At the height of my anxiety, I joined a dragon boat club. On my very first time on the water, before the coach gave the signal to paddle, I felt all the familiar symptoms rise in me. Heart accelerating. Body tightening. Nerves humming.

But this time, I didn’t feel bad. I felt excited. Genuinely, positively excited. I wanted the coach to tell us to start paddling, to cut through the water on the canal. Those sensations I had feared for so long were exactly the same ones I was feeling in that moment, they just had a different name.

It’s one thing to read that anxiety and excitement are biologically identical. It’s another to feel it in your body, a paddle in your hands.

The final step is short but essential. After defusing, allowing, and running toward, the anxious mind will naturally try to pull you back into the loop. The way to prevent it: give your mind something concrete to do.

Not distract yourself. Engage. The difference matters. Distraction is fleeing anxiety by thinking about something else. Engagement is returning to life, moving forward alongside anxiety rather than waiting for it to disappear before you act.

This is where everything really shifted for me. Not engagement as an anti-anxiety technique. Engagement as a return to living.

In my case, I decided to push myself and go outside my comfort zone. As I said before, I joined a dragon boat club. I didn’t want to, it made me nervous at first, and it was mostly a way to force myself outside. It gave me three things at once: physical activity, new people to mingle with, and new skills to learn. A mind busy mastering something new doesn’t have as much room to ruminate.

I bought an indoor bike trainer for the days when going outside felt impossible. I bought an electronic keyboard to learn piano at home with an app, I still can’t really play, but the time spent learning calmed me. There’s something about the concentration that a new instrument demands that leaves little room for anxiety. I also took sign language classes, though that one worked less well. Everything was taught in silence, I struggled to follow along, my brain refused to decode the signs or make them, and I ended up judging my own inability.

I joined an urban gardening association, community planting in the neighborhood’s back alleys. This kind of activity is recognized as a form of social therapy. Coming together around a shared task, receiving gratitude from residents who appreciate seeing their alley transformed, it’s simple, concrete, and good for the spirit in a way that office-based therapy doesn’t easily replicate.

I forced myself to go work in cafés. Not to socialize actively, just to be around people, to observe the world moving around me, to escape isolation without the pressure of performing socially.

None of this happened overnight. It was an accumulation of small repeated gestures that slowly put distance between me and the anxiety. Not by fighting it. By reclaiming my life in spite of it.

I tried cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). It never worked for me. The idea of challenging my thoughts, replacing them with more rational ones, never landed. It might quiet things for five minutes, but the brain finds a workaround and eventually sounds the alarm from a new angle.

What spoke to me was something different. Becoming an observer rather than a victim. Moving toward action rather than waiting for anxiety to pass. Accepting without resisting. And above all, actually understanding what happens in the brain when anxiety strikes. Understanding that it’s a misfiring protection mechanism, not a sign that something is fundamentally broken. That understanding changed my relationship with anxiety more than any technique.

In general terms, relieving anxiety means doing everything it tells you not to do, and not doing what it pushes you toward. It’s a form of exposure, the same principle used to treat panic disorders, but applied more broadly.

When the brain perceives a threat, real or imagined, its goal is to put you on high alert and authorize only the thoughts and actions aimed at keeping you safe. It shuts down the pathways toward pleasure, appetite, joy, and calm, because those are distractions from survival. It wants to keep you vigilant. Or it pushes you to hide, to go still, to stop moving altogether.

To deactivate that stance, you have to do precisely what the brain is refusing you: go outside, meet people, move your body, eat, do all the things you used to love, even when it feels like a form of torture. And if the only option that seems available is lying in bed, collapsing on the couch with noise-canceling headphones, not moving, that’s exactly what you shouldn’t do.

DARE isn’t a miracle method. McDonagh is honest about that. Recovery isn’t linear. There will be setbacks. There will be days when the four steps feel impossible to apply. There will be mornings when the anxiety is back as if nothing had changed.

What matters is what you do with those moments. Whether you treat them as proof of failure, or as a normal part of the process.

The way I’ve come to see recovery is this: at some point, through therapy, books, forums, conversations with people who’ve been through it, you discover that you’re standing in front of a healing console, covered in levers and buttons. Each one represents something that can calm the nervous system, reactivate the cortex, loosen the grip a little. Walking in nature. Cardio. Quality sleep. Cutting alcohol. Working with a therapist. Exploring rTMS, CBT, ACT, DARE. Doing puzzles. Learning a new skill. Traveling. Keeping a journal. Meditating. The list is long.

Your anxious brain doesn’t want you anywhere near that console. It sees every lever as a distraction, a waste of precious energy. In survival mode, there is only one directive: conserve energy for fighting, fleeing, hiding.

Joy, pleasure, calm, connection, those are luxuries it cannot afford right now. So it steers you away from the very things that would help and makes you afraid of that console. Everything seems scary, exhausting and pointless.

None of these levers works fast. Retraining the brain takes months. They don’t need to be pulled in order, and none of them is mandatory. If one doesn’t work, you move to another. No guilt. No lost ground. Use one lever and if you feel a little better, do it again and try another one. And another one. Gradually, you feel more confortable, the grip loosens, and the console seems much less frightening. Pulling the levers gets easier and easier. Some levers eventually become automatic, you no longer pull them consciously, they simply become part of how you live.

That’s the process. Not a sudden cure. A quiet accumulation of small gestures that, one day, make a difference you never saw coming.

My first sign was a laugh. I was watching a show, and something made me laugh, really laugh. I hadn’t laughed in months. The next day was agony again. But something had shifted. The door had opened, just a crack. That was enough.

McDonagh closes the book with a simple line: