What are Safety Behaviors?

Locking the door at night and wearing a seatbelt are among the many things we do every day to keep ourselves safe. And yet, some of the things we do to protect ourselves can also make us a little more fearful, leading us to check more often, take more precautions, and seek reassurance that everything is okay.

Understanding safety behaviors

Safety behaviors, or maladaptive safety behaviors, are unnecessary strategies and behaviors we use to manage our fear and anxiety.

When safety behaviors are proportionate to the threat, such as wearing a seatbelt or locking the door at night, they are considered adaptive. When safety behaviors are unnecessary actions taken to prevent or reduce the severity of a perceived threat, or are disproportionate to the perceived threat, they are considered maladaptive. Importantly, what makes this second group of safety behaviors maladaptive is that they often increase and maintain uncomfortable feelings and stress, including fear, anxiety, or obsessive feelings and thoughts, instead of actually helping or supporting us.

We may notice that we are engaging in safety behaviors that are not always helpful when we are going through mental health challenges such as anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder. We may also notice that these behaviors can occur alongside other difficult patterns, such as overestimating threats, excessive worry, intolerance of uncertainty, perfectionism, obsessive thoughts, and more. Together, these patterns can sometimes leave us feeling disempowered and can affect our quality of life and relationships.

Similarly, safety behaviors can also expand and accumulate over time. For example, someone who has a fear of having a panic attack may first stop drinking energy drinks, thinking they are related to their panic attacks. Over time, this may generalize to other drinks, such as coffee, and the person may then also stop exercising, even though their doctor has suggested that all of these are harmless for them. One reason this generalization and increase in safety behaviors can occur is that these behaviors do not actually make a person’s fear and anxiety go away. In fact, in certain situations, they might even maintain these feelings.

Types of safety behaviors

Safety behaviors can be maladaptive or adaptive depending on a few factors. Understanding the content, function, format, and context of these behaviors can help us better understand the nature of our challenges and develop more appropriate and flexible alternatives.

Content of behaviors: Safety behaviors tend to mirror the theme of our specific fear or anxiety and can be quite personal in this way. That is, we often engage in safety behaviors that we perceive as linked to preventing or eliminating our personally feared object or event. For example, if we are experiencing a level of social anxiety around others, our safety behaviors may look like not leaving the apartment, going to places when they are not crowded, or mentally rehearsing what to say to others before talking to them.

Role of behaviors: Safety behaviors may have a distinct role or function, such as being preventive or restorative, and can happen before, during, or after the perceived threat or associated events.

• Preventive: These are safety behaviors that aim to prevent the threat from happening or reduce its severity if it does happen. For example, this may include scanning an environment when we enter it to make sure there are no insects if we worry excessively about insects, or carrying certain medications with us at all times if we tend to overestimate a health concern.
• Restorative: These types of safety behaviors or strategies aim to bring us back to a feeling of safety or restore a sense of calm after we have been exposed to something we fear. For example, this might look like having a drink or a certain meal after every social encounter, in the case of excessive social anxiety, to emotionally regulate and bring back a sense of calm. It may also include washing our hands excessively after touching something, in the case of excessive worries about contamination.

Format of behavior: While the word “behavior” often includes certain actions, not all safety strategies in the context of fear and anxiety are necessarily external or observable to others. For example, some safety strategies can be more cognitive or emotional than action-based, such as mentally rehearsing or revisiting conversations as a way to manage impressions of others due to social fear and anxiety felt.

Context of the behavior: Some examples in this sketch can look a lot like routines we genuinely enjoy, emotional regulation tools we already have, or even logical safety behaviors we should engage in. When understanding maladaptive safety behaviors, what matters is not the behavior at face value, but the context in which it occurs and its impact on the individual. In the context of maladaptive safety behaviors, these behaviors are often excessive or intense, and instead of regulating or supporting an individual, they can reinforce the original, and often disproportionate, fear and anxiety. They may maintain these feelings even when the actual threat goes away or never happens, keeping us in a constant state of fear and alertness.

How do maladaptive safety behaviors increase our fear and anxiety further?

While safety behaviors can bring temporary relief and create a sense of control, they can also keep us from confronting or emotionally processing the feared event or object and from developing ways to cope with or manage it. In the long term, this can keep our unhelpful and disproportionate fear and anxiety alive and maintained.

Cognitive models of fear and anxiety often suggest that healthy doses of exposure to a perceived threat may help our fear and anxiety gradually decrease over time. However, safety behaviors may also prevent this type of balanced exposure, therefore maintaining the original fear and anxiety.

Safety behaviors can also become reinforced and increase in number through mechanisms such as “misattribution of safety,” where we mistakenly perceive that what keeps us safe or prevents a threat from happening is our safety behavior, even though the probability of the thing we fear occurring may actually be random. In this way, safety behaviors can become a bit rigid and inflexible, complicating our relationship with fear and anxiety.

How can therapy help?

Different therapeutic approaches try to understand the nature of our safety behaviors, as well as the unhelpful patterns of fear and anxiety that have developed within the context of our unique stories. Sometimes, simply gaining insight into why we do certain things can bring a sense of relief or alleviate some of our discomfort. At other times, however, insight alone may not be enough. We may need new experiential and emotional experiences, along with opportunities to build new skills, so we can gradually develop more empowered and compassionate ways of relating to ourselves, others, and the difficulties we encounter.

Approaches such as exposure therapy, Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) protocols, and cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), often draw on principles of “habituation,” “inhibitory learning,” and exposure to support the natural reduction and attenuation of anxiety and fear through systematic and gradual confrontation with feared stimuli or related information. This process involves approaching feared experiences safely, without relying on safety behaviors, while also developing alternative ways of processing and relating to the information, as well as a greater capacity to tolerate distress and uncertainty.

However, with therapeutic approaches that involve exposure to feared events or experiences, remaining trauma-informed is also an important consideration. Pace, predictability, and thoughtful adaptation of exposure protocols so they do not undermine a person’s sense of self, safety, or overall wellbeing can be especially important. This also means taking care not to inadvertently retraumatize an individual by exposing them to threats that exceed their current capacity, while carefully assessing and developing the support, coping, and safety resources that can coexist with and help sustain the exposure process.

Takeaways:

• Safety behaviors are actions we take to protect ourselves, often against a perceived threat. They can be adaptive when proportionate to a threat, but when they become unnecessary or excessive, they can increase and maintain fear, anxiety, and stress and become maladaptive.
• Safety behaviors can be personal and take many forms (preventive, restorative, cognitive, or emotional), and it is their context and impact, rather than the behavior at face value, that can help us better understand the nature of distress.
• Although safety behaviors can bring temporary relief and a sense of control, they may prevent us from confronting and processing what we fear, developing new coping skills, and tolerating uncertainty.
• Through processes such as “misattribution of safety,” safety behaviors can expand, accumulate, and become more rigid and inflexible over time.
• Therapy can help us understand these patterns and gradually develop more empowered and compassionate ways of relating to fear, anxiety, uncertainty, and difficult experiences, while keeping exposure safe, supportive, and trauma-informed.

References & further reading

• Abramowitz, J. S., & Blakey, S. M. (Eds.). (2020). Clinical handbook of fear and anxiety: Maintenance processes and treatment mechanisms. American Psychological Association. https://doi.org/10.1037/0000150-000
• Goetz, A. R., Davine, T. P., Siwiec, S. G., & Lee, H. (2015). The functional value of preventive and restorative safety behaviors: A systematic review of the literature. Clinical Psychology Review, 44, 112–124. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2015.12.005
• Telch, M. J., & Zaizar, E. D. (2020). Safety behaviors. In J. S. Abramowitz & S. M. Blakey (Eds.), Clinical handbook of fear and anxiety: Maintenance processes and treatment mechanisms (pp. 27–44). American Psychological Association. https://doi.org/10.1037/0000150-002

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