I was recently asked to explain avoidant behavior (which can also be thought of as safety-seeking behavior) and want to share this with all of you!
Essentially, you can think of avoidant/safety behavior as a term that encapsulates the following concept: “If I am scared and I do something, then I will survive”.
It’s a way to cope.
Definition of Safety Behaviors and Their Consequences
Safety behaviors are defined as deliberate actions or mental acts aimed at reducing anxiety or feared outcomes (Salkovskis, 1996). As such, safety behaviors include any actions that are performed to reduce anxiety or prevent feared outcomes from materializing.
A behavior is either helpful or harmful, based on the intention behind it (cf. approach vs avoidance). All things being equal, approaching something facilitates learning and induces a sense of courage. By contrast, avoidance hinders learning and maintains fear and anxiety over time. This is the problem with engaging in safety behaviors: Performing them prevents learning.
By performing safety behaviors, we are inadvertently telling ourselves that they are helpful… that we would not be able to cope without them. However, most uncertainty-provoking situations turn out to be fine and by performing safety behaviors, we don’t learn that they can cope with those situations. We don’t learn that we are capable of sitting with uncertainty for some time; and we don’t learn that uncertainty is normal, tolerable, and manageable… even sometimes enjoyable.
Instead, we learn that in order to prevent a feared outcome or to reduce anxiety, safety behaviors are essential. But that just simply isn’t the case! This can readily be understood when we look at the short-term versus the long-term consequences of performing safety behaviors.
Engaging in safety behaviors in the short-term reduces anxiety and perceived prevention of feared outcomes (e.g., “I didn’t get lost and arrived on time because I drove the route earlier and checked for parking lost close by”).
Engaging in safety behaviors in the long-term maintains fear and anxiety—it reinforces perceived threats without concrete evidence since we behave as if the situation is dangerous, even when there’s no data to support this (e.g., “Would I have arrived late if I didn’t practice driving the route beforehand?”).
Taken together, safety behaviors ensure that perceived threats remain threatening and that performing them is necessary each and every time we encounter uncertainty, anxiety, or fear of a specific outcome.
Safety behaviors ensure that perceived threats remain threatening
Examples of Safety Behaviors
Imagine that you’re an ancient caveman who one day has an encounter with a lion. And on that particular day, you happen to have a stone in your pocket… You’ve been told by the leader of your tribe that this stone has magical properties and that it can hide your smell if you encounter a dangerous animal.
So anyway, you encounter this lion and get scared, right? … As you should be!
You hide in a bush you notice that’s right next to the trail you are walking on… Some time passes by, the lion goes away, and you run like mad back to your cave.
Thank God you had the stone, right?
Not right!
We “logical” 21st-century humans realize that there are no stones that hide your smell from a lion. But if you believe that the stone has these properties, and it appeared to work – I mean, the lion didn’t eat you, right?
You probably won’t ever leave your cave without the stone again… Understandably. You think it saves your life.
Let’s put this in context. In the caveman example, you attribute the fact that you are still alive and remain uneaten by lions to live another day to the fact that you were carrying the magical stone. But assuming that this is just a regular old stone, the stone itself has nothing to do with the fact that you’re alive! These are what we call avoidance behaviors or safety behaviors.
One of the things we want to help people realize in therapy is that they don’t need to perform these avoidant safety behaviors to survive their day.
Fear of Blushing
Let’s think of another, less abstract, example.
Imagine a person who has a fear of blushing. One of the things this person might do to prevail through their day is to put on a specific type of makeup to hide any instances of blushing. However, this becomes a problem when you start to cope with your day by putting on this makeup… you just can’t have your day without it and you certainly can’t socially interact without this makeup.
If you have a fear of blushing and believe that this makeup is responsible for your ability to interact socially, then it makes total sense that you put it on!
It’s a logical but unhelpful behavior!
Summary
Safety behaviors can take many forms. They can include avoidance of novel and unpredictable (spontaneous) situations, procrastination, impulsive decision-making, reassurance-seeking, putting on specific makeup, over-preparing or planning, and perfectionistic standards. Note that this list is not exhaustive but is rather intended to provide a sample of common safety behaviors.
Interestingly, both approach-motivated behavior and avoidance-motivated behavior can be safety behaviors, as long as the behavioral intention is to reduce anxiety or prevent a feared outcome.
Safety behaviors are logical in the context they are performed, but unfortunately, they are unhelpful. One of the goals of psychotherapy is to help people seeking treatment realize that they don’t need to perform avoidant safety behaviors to survive their day.
The good news is that if you are currently dealing with anxiety, there are a myriad of effective treatments available. Psychotherapy is the first-line treatment for anxiety disorders and its efficacy is high in various formats. For instance, you can talk to your psychologist in a one-on-one session, sign up for group treatment, or even leverage internet-based interventions from the comfort of your own home!
References
Salkovskis, P. M. (1996). The cognitive approach to anxiety: Threat beliefs, safety seeking behaviour, and the special case of health anxiety and obsessions. In Frontiers of cognitive therapy (pp. 48–74). The Guilford Press.
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