Safety behaviors

What it is

Safety behaviors can include creating backup plans, contingency plans, escape routes, or protective strategies to feel less exposed to possible threats. For example, you might plan an excuse to be able to leave a party early when you’re socially anxious. Some planning is healthy and useful, especially when the risk is real. But when anxiety is driving it, planning can become endless: one backup plan creates the need for another, and then another. The pattern is less about preparation itself and more about using preparation to avoid the feeling of uncertainty, vulnerability, or lack of control.

Additional resources to explore: CBT for intolerance of uncertainty and behavioral experiments can help if planning is being used to avoid uncertainty. You can try testing predictions like, “If I don’t plan every detail, I won’t cope,” by leaving small low-risk details unplanned and observing what actually happens.

Tips / how to work on it

Safety behaviors become unhelpful when the backup plans multiply and still don’t create relief. The question isn’t “Is planning bad?” It’s “Is this plan helping me act, or is it helping me avoid feeling exposed?” Try setting a planning limit: one main plan, one backup, then stop. If your mind demands a third, fourth, or fifth contingency, that’s probably anxiety asking for certainty. At that point, the work becomes practicing tolerating the leftover uncertainty.

A useful exercise: write your plan in three lines: main plan, reasonable backup, and what I’ll do (how I can cope) if things change. Then add: “Further planning is anxiety, not preparation.” This gives your brain a stopping point.

More reading

• CCI, What are Safety Behaviours?
• CCI, Challenging Avoidance and Safety Behaviours
• APA, What Is Exposure Therapy?
• Blakey & Abramowitz, The effects of safety behaviors during exposure therapy for anxiety