What are safety behaviours and when are they a problem?
When you experience anxiety and worry, your protector, the amygdala, takes over and directs you towards all kinds of fight or flight driven actions. While these actions may be helpful, even critical to survival, in times of real danger, they are unhelpful in response to a perceived threat or a worry thought. When you respond to a perceived threat as though it were real, you may find yourself engaging in ‘safety behaviours’.
Safety behaviours only serve one purpose - to steer you away from fear and worry. These coping strategies in times of perceived threat or in response to worry thoughts undermine your capacity to build resilience. To learn and develop confidence that you can cope with a given situation, you must allow yourself to sit with the discomfort and uncertainty it brings rather than avoid it. Safety behaviours keep us locked within our comfort zone where things are predictable.
The result is that you don’t end up living your life in alignment with what’s important to you. Not only are these behaviours unhelpful, but they keep you trapped in your fears and usually make your anxiety worse rather than better.
A great analogy for safety behaviours is to think of them as ‘struggling in quicksand’. People struggle because they think it will help them escape the quick sand. But what actually happens when you struggle in quicksand? You sink deeper and end up in a worse situation rather than better.
The fight or flight response is similar to quicksand, where we react to a perceived threat rather than real threat we make things harder for ourselves. Safety behaviours keep us from learning that nothing bad was actually going to happen, or that, even if things didn’t go as planned, it was not a complete catastrophe and we were able to cope.
When we allow ourselves to demonstrate that worry was wrong, we can break out of our comfort zone and begin to truly live our lives the way we want to. Safety behaviours lead us to believe we were only okay because we engaged in them.
Safety behaviours can be both mental and physical actions and tend to cluster around three core areas:
The ‘fight’
The ‘flight’
Certainty and control
1. Fight Safety Behaviours
Attack, defend, finger-point, blame
Anger, agitation and frustration are representations of the hijacking amygdala – and part of our physiological reaction to a perceived threat. Behavioural representations might be overt acts of aggression, such as attacking others or, being defensive, or they may be more subtle representations, such as finger-pointing, blaming, bullying or gossiping. These emotions and associated behavioural representations can be manifestations of masked anxiety.
2. Flight Safety Behaviours
Avoidance
The most common unhelpful safety behaviour we engage in when going down the flight pathway is avoidance. This is where we listen to the worry voice and decide to avoid the bad thing the worry is telling us will happen.
Escape
At other times, you may already be in a situation and worry is urging you to escape. We might be wanting to escape the sensations of the fight or flight response, or the situation itself.
Passivity and People-Pleasing
Another coping strategy is being passive or submissive. These behaviours include apologising unnecessarily, not standing up for yourself or engaging in people-pleasing actions for the sole purpose of avoiding negative judgement from others.
Procrastination
Another common safety behaviour is procrastination, where you are well aware of what you have to do, when you have to do it and you may even want to do it - but you just can’t seem to stop yourself from procrastinating. This is actually another way to avoid or escape the unpleasant feelings of worry and anxiety.
Blocking Your Thoughts
Other safety behaviours include actions to block negative or worry thoughts. As hard as you may try to block worry thoughts, these attempts actually tend to amplify them instead.
Distraction
Distraction is along the same lines as blocking out worry thoughts and tend to be just as unhelpful. These behaviours simply distract you from the perceived threat and help you avoid unpleasant thoughts.
Self-Destructive Behaviours
Another cluster of safety behaviours includes attempts to numb big emotions. This can lead to unhelpful safety behaviours that are self-destructive such as:
Recreational drug use
Alcohol consumption
Gambling
Gaming
Indiscriminate sexual behaviours
Binge eating
Self harm
And the ultimate unhelpful coping strategy: suicide.
3. Certainty and Control
In general, people don’t like uncertainty. Thus, it is no surprise that there is a cluster of safety behaviours associated with gaining a sense of certainty and control. These include:
Worry
Worrying is the primary way we try to gain certainty and control over a given situation, whether it is real or imagined. The problem with worry is that it usually leaves you feeling worse instead of better.
Rumination
Worry and rumination tend to go hand in hand. Rumination is the tendency to think about past experiences in order to gain a sense of certainty and control over future ones.
Mind Reading
This is another destructive safety behaviour that involves attempting to work out what someone else is thinking about you. The problem with this is that you’ll never truly know what the other person is thinking, so it is futile and will always leave you struggling with uncertainty and anxiety.
Over-checking and Reassurance Seeking
Other attempts to achieve certainty and control include constantly seeking reassurance and repeatedly checking. While these behaviours may help momentarily, the relief tends to wear off which leads to you seeking reassurance or checking again.
Perfectionism
While this safety behaviour can seem goal driven on the surface, it is actually rooted in anxiety and worry. In reality, the pursuit of perfection results in unachievable and unsustainable standards. This leads to low self esteem and can leave you in a permanent state of stress.
Watch Out For Safety Behaviours
Now that you’re aware of different types of safety behaviours, reflect on what actions you perform to cope with stress and anxiety in the short term. When was the last time you felt anxious? What triggered it? What was worry telling you to do in those situations and did you listen?
Accepting Uncertainty
The truth is that there is no way to gain 100% certainty and control in life. Struggling to do so will only keep you trapped in a state of anxiety. Instead, develop a tolerance for uncertainty and accept that there are things beyond your control. Learn to sit with the discomfort of uncertainty rather than engaging in safety behaviours and avoiding it. In the long run, this will help free you from anxiety so you can live a life aligned with your values and achieve your goals rather than being bullied by worry thoughts and anxiety.
To learn more about safety behaviours and how to overcome stress and anxiety, get your copy of The Mind Strength Method: Four Steps to Curb Anxiety, Conquer Worry and Build Resilience on Booktopia.
