Safety Behaviors and Avoidance: Cogs in the Wheel of Anxiety Recovery
Anxiety can feel overwhelming, showing up in the most inconvenient situations—like experiencing panic while standing in a grocery line. Naturally, we want to escape these uncomfortable feelings, often resorting to safety behaviors or avoidance. While these actions provide temporary relief, they ultimately reinforce anxiety, trapping us in a cycle that limits our experiences and opportunities.
Safety behaviors, such as avoiding triggering situations or constantly seeking reassurance, prevent us from fully confronting our fears. Over time, this hinders our ability to habituate and build resilience, leading to an even more restricted life. Avoidance, in particular, keeps anxiety alive by making our world smaller and reinforcing the belief that these situations are dangerous.
Breaking this cycle involves pushing through avoidance and engaging in exposure therapy—a process where individuals gradually face their fears. By confronting anxiety head-on, without safety behaviors, we can retrain our brains to recognize that our fears are often exaggerated or that we can tolerate the discomfort. With time, we reduce the intensity of our fears and start building the confidence to handle challenging situations, allowing us to live a fuller, more joyful life.
Anxiety can be a debilitating experience for many people. Anxiety does not discriminate, and oftentimes shows itself in less than convenient scenarios (panic while waiting in the grocery line, anyone?). So, let’s be real. Being in the thick of severe anxiety really sucks. This is not the place for a long dive into the fight or flight response (another time!), but just know it’s a literal instinct to want to extricate yourself from whatever situation is conjuring up said anxiety. We will often mitigate our behavior to make this anxiety go away. This is a very understandable reaction to an uncomfortable (or downright terrifying) feeling.
For folks who experience anxiety, it can be common to engage in avoidance and safety behaviors. You may not realize this is what you are doing. These behaviors can offer relief in the short term but in the long term can contribute to worsening anxiety and secondary consequences. These consequences can take the form of missing out on experiences, relationships, job promotions, and so many other sacrifices. I’m sure if you’re reading this blog and you deal with anxiety, you can conjure up things you have missed out on throughout your life in your dealings with this pesky emotion.
Understanding the role of safety behaviors and avoidance, how they perpetuate anxiety, and the importance of facing anxiety head on is essential for achieving meaningful progress in managing anxiety disorders. And here, we are all about meaningful progress while managing anxiety!
What Are Safety Behaviors?
Safety behaviors are actions people with anxiety engage in to prevent feared outcomes or to reduce distress. While they can provide short-term relief, they ultimately reinforce anxiety. Common examples of safety behaviors include:
• Avoiding people, places or things that may trigger anxious feelings.
• Constantly checking for reassurance, such as searching for symptoms of illness on the internet.
• Carrying items like water bottles or phones to feel more secure in triggering situations.
• Relying on others to manage anxiety-provoking tasks, like always having someone accompany you in public.
At their core, safety behaviors are about feeling like you’re in control—people engage in them to avoid perceived threats, even if those threats are unlikely or irrational. For example, someone who fears crowds may schedule an appointment at a time where the commute is less busy. This may seem like an innocuous behavior, but for people who develop significant anxiety, these actions are counterproductive over time. Unfortunately, while these behaviors they may reduce anxiety in the moment, they prevent individuals from experiencing the reality that their fears are often unfounded, or that they can tolerate the distress they may feel.
How Safety Behaviors Maintain Anxiety
The problem with safety behaviors is that they never allow the person to fully face their fear or anxiety. Without going into a long tangent about evolution and physiology, it’s important to understand how our bodies are built. Our body (and in it, our fight or flight response) is made to habituate to, well, everything. The good, the bad, and the ugly. Over time, we get used to things. Consider any scenario where you felt scared at first, but over time were able to acclimate and get used to it, and maybe even enjoy it. That you’re your body and mind habituating to that situation. Safety behaviors and avoidance interrupt that process. They do not allow for habituation to take place, or they prolong the process. Further, over time we can develop maladaptive thought patterns that say to us, this thing, that situation, the world at large are all dangerous and to be avoided. We can know that logically, being in the same room as a non-venomous snake is not dangerous but try telling yourself that if you are someone who has habitually avoided snakes due to their extreme fear of them, and now find yourself having to share space.
Another example is when someone with social anxiety might avoid public speaking. While this prevents the immediate discomfort, it also reinforces the idea that public speaking is terrifying and should be avoided. The result? Their anxiety grows stronger, as they miss opportunities to confront and disprove the fear. They are unable to habituate.
The Role of Avoidance, a Special and Insidious Safety Behavior
Avoidance is a form of safety behavior that can be particularly harmful. As stated, it offers immediate relief from anxiety but keeps individuals stuck in the cycle of fear. Whether it’s avoiding social events, career opportunities, or daily activities, avoidance narrows life experiences and can contribute to feelings of isolation, hopelessness, and depression. It gets in the way of living a life in line with your values. It robs you of your full joy and experience. It is no bueno.
Over time, avoidance creates more anxiety. When individuals continually avoid what they fear, their world becomes smaller and more restricted. The fear grows stronger as the brain learns to associate avoidance with safety. However, this makes daily life more challenging, as more situations start to trigger anxiety, and fewer feel safe. It can feel like anxiety is contagious.
Pushing Through Avoidance: Exposure Therapy
So, what do we do about these safety behaviors, avoidance, and joy-robbing? Pushing through avoidance is a cornerstone of effective anxiety treatment, particularly in cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT). Now, CBT can be VERY problematic (a topic for another blog post) but the role of exposure in CBT is extremely important. You cannot recover from anxiety without exposure. It is just not possible. The concept of exposure therapy encourages individuals to gradually face their fears in a controlled and structured way. By repeatedly exposing themselves to anxiety-provoking situations, without engaging in safety behaviors, they learn that their fears are often exaggerated or irrational. OR they learn that maybe some stuff did go down, but they were able to tolerate their feelings.
Here’s why pushing through avoidance is crucial:
• Desensitization: Repeated exposure to feared situations reduces their intensity over time. The brain (and body) learns that the situation is not as dangerous as previously believed.
• Building resilience: Facing anxiety without using safety behaviors helps individuals develop confidence in their ability to cope with discomfort, leading to reduced anxiety in the future. A byproduct of doing the damn thing is that you can build your belief in yourself and your ability to do hard things.
• Breaking the cycle: Every time avoidance is challenged, individuals disrupt the cycle of anxiety and fear, preventing it from growing stronger.
For example, someone with a fear of flying might start by imagining themselves on a plane, then visiting an airport, and eventually taking short flights. This is being presented in a very simplified way (this is a blog, not a therapy session). By gradually facing these situations, they can learn that their anxiety will peak and then decrease, and that they can handle the discomfort.
Practical Tips for Pushing Through Avoidance
Start small: Don’t try to face your biggest fear right away. Break it down into smaller, manageable steps and gradually build up to more challenging situations.
2. Track progress: Keep a written account of your experiences, noting when and how you faced anxiety-provoking situations and how your anxiety changed over time. This helps reinforce the progress you’re making.
3. Practice self-compassion: Understand that setbacks are part of the process. Progress is not linear. Pushing through avoidance takes time, and it’s okay to feel anxious or uncomfortable. What matters is that you continue to move forward and TRY.
4. Be aware of your thoughts: Anxiety often distorts thinking, leading to worst-case scenario beliefs. Practice recognizing these thoughts as unhelpful (you don’t need to debate them) and re-engage in whatever you were doing before these thoughts decided to barge in and rain on your parade.
5. Seek support: Whether it’s through therapy (highly recommend!), support groups, or trusted friends, having a support system can help you stay accountable and provide encouragement as you work through your fears. This is hard work, and it can be helpful to know you aren’t alone.
Takeaways:
While safety behaviors and avoidance can provide short-term relief, they are major contributors to the long-term maintenance of anxiety. Learning to recognize and challenge these behaviors, and gradually facing feared situations, is crucial for overcoming anxiety. With time and persistence, pushing through avoidance can lead to reduced anxiety, increased resilience, and enjoying a LIFE WORTH LIVING!
Tyne McCreadie, LCSW-R.