Behavioral Experiment

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Safety behaviors

4 minute read

A safety behavior is anything you do to prevent a feared outcome, or to make it feel less likely, while you are in the situation you fear. Holding the shopping cart tightly so you will not collapse. Rehearsing every sentence before you say it so you will not sound stupid. Keeping your eyes on the floor so nobody can see you blush. Checking your pulse so you will catch the heart attack in time.

Why they feel helpful

Safety behaviors are sensible responses to a danger you believe in. If you really were going to faint, holding on would be wise. The problem is what happens afterwards. You did not faint, and you have a ready explanation: it was because you held on. The belief survives untouched, and the safety behavior gets the credit.

Salkovskis pointed this out in 1991, and it changed how anxiety is treated. Beyond failing to help, safety behaviors prevent disconfirmation. Every time you use one, you lose a chance to find out the truth.

They can make things worse

Some safety behaviors produce the very thing they are meant to prevent. Gripping the table to hide a tremor makes your hands shake more. Rehearsing lines in your head makes you miss what the other person said, so the conversation goes flat. Controlling your breathing to avoid suffocating leads to over-breathing, which brings on dizziness and tingling. Scanning your body for symptoms finds them, because every body has sensations if you look hard enough.

In social anxiety, self-focused attention is itself a safety behavior. Turning inward to check how you come across gives you a vivid picture, built largely from how you feel. That picture then gets treated as what other people see.

The evidence

An experiment by Salkovskis and colleagues asked people with panic disorder to enter a feared situation twice: once using their usual safety behaviors, once deliberately dropping them. Dropping them produced a bigger fall in catastrophic beliefs, even though the situation was the same. Wells and colleagues found the same in social anxiety. Reviews since then broadly agree that safety behaviors interfere with the learning that exposure and experiments are meant to produce, and that dropping them, rather than merely tolerating the fear, is what shifts belief.

There is a live debate about whether small, temporary safety aids can help people get started. The short answer is that they may make the first step easier, and that they need to be phased out for the learning to happen.

Spotting yours

Ask: what am I doing, in this situation, that I would not do if I were not afraid? What would I stop doing if I knew for certain the feared thing could not happen? Common ones include:

Warnock-Parkes and colleagues use a story about a bricklayer's apprentice tricked into holding up a wall that was never going to fall. Taking your hands off the wall is the whole point. Otherwise it is short-term pain with limited gain.

References

Helpful links

Educational content, not medical advice or a substitute for professional care. Ready to try it? Open the online worksheet or get the app.