Safety behaviors
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 afterward. 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 had people with panic disorder and agoraphobia spend fifteen minutes in a feared situation. Half kept their usual safety behaviors and half deliberately dropped them. Two days later, the group that had dropped them showed a bigger fall in catastrophic beliefs and anxiety, even though the situation had been the same. Wells and colleagues had found the same a few years earlier in a small series of people with social anxiety, each of whom tried a feared situation both ways. 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 yourself what you are doing, in this situation, that you would not do if you were not afraid. What would you stop doing if you knew for certain the feared thing could not happen? Common ones include:
- Escaping early, or planning an escape route
- Staying quiet, speaking briefly, or over-preparing
- Avoiding eye contact, looking down, wearing something to hide behind
- Holding on, sitting down, leaning, staying near a wall or exit
- Carrying water, a pill just in case, or a phone as a lifeline
- Bringing someone with you
- Checking, re-reading, asking for reassurance
- Monitoring your body, controlling your breathing
- Distracting yourself, drinking beforehand
Keep taking any medicine as prescribed, and keep the medical care your doctor has advised. If you are not sure whether something counts as a safety behavior, ask them first.
References
- Salkovskis, P. M. (1991). The importance of behaviour in the maintenance of anxiety and panic: A cognitive account. Behavioural Psychotherapy, 19(1), 6–19. doi.org/10.1017/S0141347300011472
- Salkovskis, P. M., Clark, D. M., Hackmann, A., Wells, A., & Gelder, M. G. (1999). An experimental investigation of the role of safety-seeking behaviours in the maintenance of panic disorder with agoraphobia. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 37(6), 559–574. doi.org/10.1016/S0005-7967(98)00153-3
- Wells, A., Clark, D. M., Salkovskis, P., Ludgate, J., Hackmann, A., & Gelder, M. (1995). Social phobia: The role of in-situation safety behaviors in maintaining anxiety and negative beliefs. Behavior Therapy, 26(1), 153–161. doi.org/10.1016/S0005-7894(05)80088-7
- Helbig-Lang, S., & Petermann, F. (2010). Tolerate or eliminate? A systematic review on the effects of safety behavior across anxiety disorders. Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice, 17(3), 218–233. doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2850.2010.01213.x
- Blakey, S. M., & Abramowitz, J. S. (2016). The effects of safety behaviors during exposure therapy for anxiety: Critical analysis from an inhibitory learning perspective. Clinical Psychology Review, 49, 1–15. doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2016.07.002
- Rachman, S., Radomsky, A. S., & Shafran, R. (2008). Safety behaviour: A reconsideration. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 46(2), 163–173. doi.org/10.1016/j.brat.2007.11.008
- Warnock-Parkes, E., Thew, G. R., Murray, H., Grey, N., Wild, J., Kerr, A., Smith, A., Stott, R., Ehlers, A., & Clark, D. M. (2025). Driving cognitive change: A guide to behavioural experiments in cognitive therapy for anxiety disorders and PTSD. Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, 54(6), 767–793. doi.org/10.1080/16506073.2025.2518427
Helpful links
- Centre for Clinical Interventions: Stepping out of Social Anxiety, Module 5 on safety behaviors
- Psychology Tools: How to use behavioral experiments
Educational content, not medical advice or a substitute for professional care. Ready to try it? Open the online worksheet, read how an experiment works, or get the app.