If you’ve been working to overcome social anxiety, you’ve probably heard that one of the most important steps is facing the situations that make you anxious. While avoidance feels like relief in the short term, you know that it does little to help you overcome social anxiety in the long run. When you skip the party, decline the invitation to go out with colleagues after work, or stay home on Saturday instead of exploring the local farmers market, your world gets smaller as your anxiety looms larger by the day.
But what if you did go?
What if you attended the meeting, spoke up, went on the date, or made the phone call—and your social anxiety still isn’t improving?
The reason may be that your brain is still trying to protect you. Socially anxious brains are remarkably good at coming up with strategies to prevent embarrassment, rejection, or criticism. The problem is that these protective strategies often fly under the radar. Instead of keeping you home, they tag along with you into the situations you’re trying to face. In cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), we call these safety behaviors.
What Is a Safety Behavior?
A safety behavior is anything we do to reduce anxiety or prevent a feared outcome during a social or performance situation. Some safety behaviors are obvious, such as avoiding a social gathering altogether, refusing to talk to anyone, or drinking alcohol before you feel you can start up a conversation. Other behaviors are much more subtle, yet they can quietly interfere with the progress you’re working so hard to make.
Safety behaviors make you feel better in the moment, but they come with a hidden cost. They prevent you from discovering that you are capable of handling social situations without them.
Safety Behaviors Hiding in Plain Sight
Safety behaviors often disguise themselves as helpful preparation or coping strategies. Here are a few common examples:
1. Over-Rehearsing Conversations
In my work with socially anxious clients, I often find that looking ahead a little bit can build motivation. Who are you looking forward to seeing at the party? Who do you want to get to know better? What might you ask them to get the ball rolling? However, anyone can take that too far. Memorizing your elevator pitch when you’re truly wanting to be casual, or trying to script every possible response, robs you of the opportunity to discover that you can think on your feet—which is the true exposure opportunity you’re missing out on.
2. Constantly Monitoring Yourself
- “Am I smiling?”
- “Where should I look?”
- “Do I sound nervous?”
Instead of continually monitoring yourself, try becoming an observer of the conversation. Shift your focus outward: What is the other person saying? What emotion are they expressing? What am I curious about?
3. Excessive Reassurance Seeking
If you are looping someone else into your anxiety spiral, it’s probably a sign that you are looking for reassurance. This might look like asking a friend to read over your email to see if it sounds okay, or rehashing a conversation with someone else to ensure they don’t think anyone is mad at you.
When clients engage in reassurance seeking during CBT sessions, I suggest we look directly at the worst-case scenario: What would it mean for you? How would you handle it? Staring directly at the feared outcome helps you realize that it’s either very unlikely to happen or that you have the internal resources to manage it. You are stronger than your anxious brain gives you credit for.
4. Hiding Behind Your Phone
Using your phone to look busy avoids appearing awkward. But feeling awkward is actually part of the exposure exercise! If feeling awkward feels unbearable, that’s a strong clue that you’ve found a valuable opportunity for growth. What if you started engaging with the people around you instead? Staring at a phone at a social gathering often signals to others that you are unapproachable.
5. Arriving Late or Leaving Early
This strategy allows you to get just enough exposure to say you went, but not enough to ever become comfortable in the environment.
Why Safety Behaviors Keep Anxiety Alive
Suppose someone believes: “If I pause while speaking, people will think I’m incompetent.”
To prevent this, they rehearse every sentence in their head before speaking. Nothing bad happens. Their brain concludes: “Good thing I rehearsed!” instead of: “Maybe I didn’t need to rehearse after all.”
Your brain wasn’t trying to trick you—it was trying to protect you. It concluded that the rehearsal kept you safe, when in reality, it prevented you from learning that you probably didn’t need the protection in the first place. That is how safety behaviors keep social anxiety disorder alive. They don’t teach your brain that you are safe; they teach your brain that you needed saving.
How to Work with Your Own Safety Behaviors
- Identify them: Ask yourself:
- What do I do to prevent people from judging me?
- What would make me feel exposed if I stopped doing it?
- If I forgot to do this, what am I afraid would happen?
- Run behavioral experiments: Choose one safety behavior and experiment with dropping it. Send an email without rereading it six times. Allow one awkward pause in conversation. Stop apologizing for being nervous. Put your phone away in your pocket for ten minutes.
One of the central paradoxes of recovering from social anxiety is that the things that make us feel safest today are often the very things that prevent us from becoming confident in the future. Real confidence isn’t built by eliminating every possibility of awkwardness or embarrassment; it’s developed by discovering that even when things aren’t perfect, you are going to be okay.
Your anxious brain may insist you need those protective behaviors. The only way to find out whether it’s right is to experiment without them.
References:
Salkovskis PM. (1991). Mind the gap: Cognitive therapy for panic and agoraphobia. Behavioral and Cognitive Psychotherapy, 19 (4), 307–326.
Clark DM & Wells A. (1995). A cognitive model of social phobia. In Heimberg RG, Liebowitz MR, Hope DA & Schneier FR (Eds.), Social phobia: Diagnosis, assessment, and treatment (pp. 69–93). The Guilford Press.
