Anxiety · Skills
Safety Behavior Audit
The coping that keeps the fear alive
Safety behaviors — checking, over-preparing, keeping a phone in hand, needing a companion, sitting near an exit — feel like coping. They're actually the mechanism keeping the anxiety alive. Naming them is step one.
My safety behaviors
Situation
Safety behavior
What I fear would happen without it
Drop-one experiment
One safety behavior I'll drop this week — and what I predict will happen
Safety behaviors keep the fear alive
Every time you do the safety behavior and nothing bad happens, your brain credits the behavior — not reality. Dropping it teaches the brain the situation itself was safe.