I’ve written before about the importance of Activity Planning in reducing stress and worry, but my passion for sharing knowledge with all of you has not come to an end quite yet. Another important lesson that the Resilience Peer Network (RPN) has taught me through being in their program is something that affects our lives in a negative way, rather than a positive way: Safety Behaviors. What exactly are Safety Behaviors? How do they negatively affect us? What can we do to stop them? Don’t be frightened by these questions, I’m going to guide you through all of them. At the end of this article, you should be able to identify your safety behaviors and be more cognizant of trying to stop them when you notice yourself using one.
1. What are Safety Behaviors?
“Safety behaviors (also known as safety-seeking behaviors) are coping behaviors used to reduce anxiety and fear when the user feels threatened.” Wiki gives a pretty good description of what Safety Behaviors are, even if you can’t cite them in your papers. If you want a different description, these behaviors are the actions we take in order to not feel uncomfortable in a situation.
2. What do Safety Behaviors look like?
Here are some examples of Safety Behaviors that most of us probably use on a day-to-day basis: getting on your cellphone when you’re alone in a crowded area because you feel uncomfortable, listening to music while walking to class because you feel anxious if you don’t, always going to places with a friend/group of friends instead of by yourself because doing it alone would make you feel nervous, eating with at least one other person because eating alone makes you feel uncomfortable, drinking a bit before a party because you’re worried that you’ll be awkward once you get there, the use of excuses to escape a potentially uncomfortable situation, etc., etc., etc.
These are only a few examples that came to my mind, and most of them are pretty popular. Keep your eyes open from now on and see if you can identify anything that is a Safety Behavior for yourself or your friends. I should probably mention that something that is a safety behavior for one person may not be a safety behavior for another person. A certain behavior is only considered a Safety Behavior if that person using that behavior is doing so to cope with anxiety or discomfort. That means that if you walk to class with headphones in just because you love music, and not because you feel uncomfortable, this behavior may not be a Safety Behavior for you.
3. How do Safety Behaviors negatively affect us?
When we use a Safety Behavior to avoid or cope with a situation that makes us feel uncomfortable, then it reinforces the idea that we cannot cope with that situation alone. It makes us dependent on that certain behavior, and not on ourselves nor our own abilities to cope. It’s a restricting cycle of actions: we experience a situation that makes us feel uncomfortable, so we enact our Safety Behavior, the situation no longer feels uncomfortable for us, and so the next time we are in that situation or a similar one we are more than likely to act in the same behavior again. Each time we do this, it further reinforces the use of the Safety Behavior, and prevents us from confronting the situation.
4. How Can We Stop Using These Behaviors?
Stopping the use of Safety Behaviors is challenging because it’s not something that we necessarily want to do. It’s hard to purposefully make ourselves feel uncomfortable or anxious in any situation. That’s exactly why we have been using these types of behaviors all along, right? But, by pushing ourselves out of our comfort zones, we can stop relying on our Safety Behaviors. With small, buildable steps, we can discover how to rely on ourselves to cope, rather than avoiding it. The next time you are in a situation that would usually cause you to use a Safety Behavior, try your hardest to refrain from using it. Stay in the uncomfortable situation for as long as you can, and see how it feels to face it and rely on yourself for comfort. The longer you practice this, the better you will understand your own abilities to handle a situation, and the less you will need to use Safety Behaviors.