Social anxiety is a fear of negative evaluation. For example, being worried that other people thinking that I’m “stupid, boring, or worthless.”
This fear of social situations goes from being just shy to social anxiety disorder when it starts affecting our lives. For example, avoiding an interview that might have landed you a job that you wanted or never going out to make friends.
As you can see, folks with anxiety tend to avoid. Some avoidance is more obvious (like never using their phone to make an appointment). On the other hand, there are some other avoidance strategies that are a bit more subtle. These are called safety behaviours.
What are safety behaviours?
Safety behaviours are ways that we sneakily do to avoid our feared outcome in different situations. For example, in insomnia when we can’t sleep, our safety behaviour might be to go to bed super early to make sure that we get enough hours. In panic disorder, we might take an anti-anxiety medication before going outside so we don’t end up with a panic attack.
Safety behaviours can also be approach or avoid behaviours.
Approach behaviours can be things we do to actively reduce how scary a situation might be. For example, reassurance seeking and asking other people if what you are doing is correct or double checking to make sure you did not write anything wrong on your paper.
Avoidance behaviours can be things we do to get away from the scary situation. For example, procrastinating, leaving early, or straight up just not doing something that you are afraid of.
The problem with avoidance is that it keeps the anxiety alive. These sneaky safety behaviours make us feel a little better in the moment, but we never get a chance to learn that we can cope (or if the feared outcome even happens).
Safety behaviours in social anxiety
In social anxiety, we use safety behaviours to avoid possible negative evaluation. Examples of negative evaluation might be somebody looking at you with a frown, yawning, or being seemingly bored of you.
Therefore, safety behaviours for social anxiety might be:
- Not making eye contact
- Ending a conversation early
- Only talking about the person and never sharing anything about yourself
- Only using topics you know the other person is interested in
Safety behaviours can also be used to reduce anxiety when talking to folks. This can be using alcohol so that you are less anxious or bringing your best friend to a party so you always have someone to talk to.
Function is key in identifying safety behaviours
The same behaviours depending on why we do them (i.e., their function) may or may not be a safety behaviour.
For example, using alcohol at a party because you want to let hang and have fun with your friends is not a safety behaviour. However, using alcohol at a party because you feel too anxious meeting unfamiliar people and need something to take the edge off is a safety behaviour.
Therefore, consider why you are doing something. Are you skipping a presentation because you don’t care about the course or your grades? Or are you skipping a presentation because you fear people watching and judging you?
Function is key.
How to deal with safety behaviours
Again, the problem with safety behaviours is that they keep our anxiety alive.
When we end a conversation early, we are essentially saying “I don’t trust myself to be able to know what to say next.” When we don’t make eye contact, we are thinking “they believe I am boring and probably are not interested.”
Besides implicitly confirming our fears, these safety behaviours also make it hard to fully face our fears in exposure practice. Exposures are key to reducing anxiety.
Next time, try your best to notice when you are engaging in a safety behaviour. Be curious about how you perform even without the behaviour. Look the person in the eye. Resist the urge to end the conversation. You might just surprise yourself.
Best wishes,
P
Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash
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