Identify safety behaviours that maintain anxiety, understand their costs, and plan experiments to gradually drop them.
Safety behaviours are things you do to prevent a feared outcome or manage anxiety in the moment. While they feel helpful, they actually maintain anxiety by preventing you from learning that you can cope without them. Use this worksheet to identify your safety behaviours, understand what they cost you, and plan how to test dropping them.
Use when safety behaviours are preventing the client from fully engaging with corrective experiences. In depression, safety behaviours might include avoiding eye contact, rehearsing what to say, checking others' reactions, or doing tasks to an excessive standard. Identifying and gradually dropping these behaviours enhances the effectiveness of exposure and behavioural experiments.
Explain the paradox: 'Sometimes the things we do to feel safe actually keep the problem going, because they prevent us from learning that we can cope without them. Let's identify what you're doing to protect yourself and plan how to gradually drop those strategies so you can fully test your predictions.'
For clients who are anxious about dropping safety behaviours, use a gradual approach: reduce the frequency or intensity before eliminating entirely. For those who cannot identify their safety behaviours, use in-session observation and gentle feedback. Frame as an experiment rather than a demand.
Ensure what is being dropped is genuinely a safety behaviour rather than an adaptive coping strategy. Not all self-protective behaviours are problematic; distinguish between those that maintain the problem and those that serve genuine welfare. Avoid pushing for too many drops simultaneously.
Safety behaviour identification often requires careful collaborative work, as clients may not recognise their own protective strategies. Use the formulation to identify likely candidates. Test the impact of dropping safety behaviours through behavioural experiments, comparing outcomes with and without the behaviour. This provides empirical evidence for the client.
Suitable for clients working with safety behaviours, cbt, anxiety maintenance, behavioural experiments, avoidance. This tool can be used as a standalone worksheet or as part of a structured homework plan.
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