Health & Wellness
The DARE Method for Panic (For People Who Tried Everything)
I had panic attacks for years before a four-step method from Barry McDonagh finally landed. Here's what actually worked, and what didn't.
I had panic attacks for years before I admitted that’s what they were.
For a long time I called them other things. “Bad mornings.” “Pitch nerves.” “Just tired.” The version where you’re in a coffee shop and the floor goes spongy and your hands stop being yours: I’d had that version maybe eight times before I said the word panic out loud. The version on launch days, the one that builds for an hour and then settles into a sick adrenaline hum I couldn’t shake? That one I just called “how I work.”
I tried the usual stuff. Breathing exercises. Cold water on the wrists. Counting backward from a hundred. A few of them helped a little. None of them broke the pattern. The next time the panic showed up, I was right back at zero.
What finally moved the needle was Barry McDonagh’s DARE method, from his book DARE. I’m going to walk through it because it’s the only approach that’s still in my toolkit two years later. If you’ve tried everything and nothing sticks, this might be why.
Why the usual advice doesn’t land
Most panic advice tells you to calm down. Slow your breath. Ground yourself. Notice five things you can see.
These work to varying degrees, but they have the same hidden message: panic is the enemy. You’re fighting it. The whole frame is get rid of this feeling. Which, if you’ve ever had panic, is exactly what panic itself is screaming. Panic wants you to stop panicking. It’s an emergency about an emergency.
So when you respond to it by trying to make it go away, you’re agreeing with it. You’re confirming, on a deep nervous-system level, that this feeling is dangerous and must be eliminated. Your body files that and gets better at producing the feeling next time, because clearly something’s at stake.
This is the part nobody told me for years.
What DARE actually says
DARE is four steps. McDonagh designed them for panic disorder, but I’ve used them on pitch days, before talks, on bad client calls, and during the kind of generalized low-grade dread that doesn’t peak but doesn’t leave.
D. Defuse. When the panic spike hits, you don’t fight it. You don’t run from it. You say, internally: “So what.” Or: “Whatever.” It sounds glib. That’s the point. You’re refusing to treat this as an emergency. You’re not pretending it isn’t happening. You’re just declining to escalate.
A. Allow. Let the sensations be there. The racing heart. The tight chest. The unreality. Don’t try to push them down or fix them. McDonagh’s line is: “I accept and allow this anxious feeling.” You’re not summoning it. You’re not enjoying it. You’re just refusing to wrestle with it.
R. Run toward. This is the move that broke my pattern. Instead of trying to lower the panic, you ask for more. You demand a bigger wave. You essentially dare the panic to show you its worst. Sounds insane. Works.
E. Engage. Once the panic has run out of momentum, and it does because you stopped feeding it, you redirect your attention to something concrete. Not as a distraction technique. As a re-entry. You start working again. You go finish the call. You write the next sentence.
Four steps. That’s the whole thing.
Why “run toward” is the part that works
Every other technique I tried was a soft version of escape. Even the good ones, breathing, grounding, implicitly told my body the feeling was bad and we needed it gone.
Running toward the panic flips the contract. You’re not asking it to leave. You’re asking it to do more. This does something the breathing didn’t: it tells your nervous system that you’re not afraid of the feeling. And the moment your nervous system gets that signal, really gets it, not just believes it intellectually, the feeling loses its reason to exist.
Panic is fundamentally about a perceived threat. The “threat” in chronic panic is usually the panic itself. Once you stop being threatened by it, there’s no fuel.
The first time I tried this, I was in the bathroom of a coworking space, gripping the sink before a 2pm pitch. I muttered come on then, give me more under my breath like an idiot. About 90 seconds later, the spike broke. I walked out and did the pitch. It wasn’t a great pitch, but I did it. That had not been my track record.
What it doesn’t do
Let me be clear about what changed and what didn’t.
DARE didn’t make my panic disappear. I still get spikes, especially around big public-facing work. What changed is the relationship. The spikes used to last forty minutes and leave me wrecked for the day. Now they last maybe four minutes, sometimes one, and I keep moving.
It also doesn’t replace actual help. I went to therapy. I’d recommend therapy. DARE is the in-the-moment technique I use; therapy is the long-term work of understanding why my system is wired the way it is. Both are real. Neither alone is enough. And if the dread is more of a constant background hum than a sharp spike, that’s a different problem. The mental models for overwhelm are the better tool for that version.
And, this matters, it doesn’t work the first time. The first few attempts feel awkward and fake. You’re essentially trying to rewire a reflex that’s been getting stronger for years. You need maybe two to four panic episodes of practice before it starts to actually land. That’s frustrating, but it’s the timeline.
What I’d tell the version of me who didn’t know
Stop trying to make the feeling go away. That’s the whole shift.
The panic isn’t a malfunction. It’s an overzealous protective system that learned the wrong cues and is now firing at the wrong times. You can’t fight it into submission. You can only stop arguing with it long enough for it to recalibrate.
I’d also tell that version of me to read the books that teach you to think clearly under pressure sooner. Most of what I was doing wasn’t a panic problem. It was a “I haven’t built any infrastructure for hard moments” problem, and panic was the symptom that finally forced me to.
And to stop treating launch days like military operations. The pressure I was loading onto myself was the same energy I’d burn through in panic. The work didn’t actually need that much voltage. I was the one supplying it.
I don’t have this figured out. Some weeks the spikes still come from nowhere. But they don’t run the day anymore. They show up, I say so what, I let them happen, I ask for more, and then I get back to work.
That’s not a cure. It’s a working relationship with my nervous system. After years of treating that system like an enemy, working with it instead has been the closest thing to a fix I’ve found.
If you’ve tried everything and nothing sticks, try the thing that sounds counterintuitive. The one where you stop trying to feel better. Sometimes that’s the door.