Every entrepreneur has a version of this. The pitch over-rehearsed until it sounds robotic. The email checked fifteen times before sending. The meeting entered with a prepared script rather than a genuine presence. The grip on a glass tighter than necessary. These feel like coping strategies. The research shows they are maintenance mechanisms — the things that prevent anxiety from reducing on its own.

What safety behaviours are and why they backfire structurally

Salkovskis introduced the formal construct of safety-seeking behaviour in 1991. Safety behaviours are actions taken in response to perceived threat, motivated by the belief that they are preventing an anticipated catastrophic outcome. They may be visible — holding a surface to prevent fainting, avoiding eye contact to appear less anxious — or internal — mentally rehearsing what to say, monitoring breathing to ensure it continues. Their defining feature is the perceived preventative function: the person believes that without the safety behaviour, the feared outcome would occur.

The maintenance mechanism is logically elegant and structurally trapped. The person who grips a surface during a panic attack, believing it will prevent collapse, does not collapse. The safety behaviour then takes credit for the non-event: the gripping must have worked. The threat belief — that collapse was imminent — is not disconfirmed, because the safety behaviour has been assigned causality for the safe outcome. The threat belief and the safety behaviour mutually reinforce each other. The loop is immune to naturally occurring disconfirmatory experience, because any evidence of safety is attributed to the behaviour rather than to the absence of real danger.

The experimental proof: dropping safety behaviours works better than using them

Salkovskis, Clark, Hackmann, Wells and Gelder’s 1999 controlled experiment provided the definitive test. Panic disorder patients with agoraphobia were assigned to either maintain their usual safety behaviours during a behavioural exposure test or drop them entirely. Both groups faced the same feared situation. When retested within two days, participants who had dropped their safety behaviours showed significantly greater decreases in both catastrophic beliefs and anxiety than those who had maintained them.

The finding is counterintuitive and practically important: the group who exposed themselves to the feared situation while using the strategies they believed were protecting them improved less than the group who exposed themselves without those strategies. Safety behaviours were not neutral — they were actively impairing the benefit of confronting the feared situation by preventing the corrective learning that dropping them enabled.

How social anxiety safety behaviours produce the outcome they are designed to prevent

The social anxiety research reveals a third mechanism beyond disconfirmatory experience prevention. In social contexts, safety behaviours include gripping a glass to hide trembling, holding a rigid posture to appear composed, over-preparing sentences to avoid stumbling, and focusing internally on how one appears rather than on the conversation itself.

These behaviours not only prevent corrective learning — they actively produce the feared outcome. The person who grips their glass tightly to prevent visible shaking makes their hand more rigid and draws attention to it. The person who monitors their own appearance during a conversation loses the attentional engagement with the other person that produces natural, connected interaction. The person who mentally rehearses every sentence produces stilted, disconnected speech rather than fluent conversation. An experimental study confirmed this directly: participants instructed to use safety behaviours during a social interaction were rated as more anxious and less likeable by observers than those instructed to drop them. The safety behaviour, designed to manage the social impression, degraded it.

The entrepreneurial forms of safety behaviour

Safety behaviours in entrepreneurial contexts do not always look like clinical anxiety management. Over-preparation for a pitch that produces a robotic delivery rather than genuine engagement. Excessive checking of work before sharing it. Monopolising conversations in networking contexts to avoid the vulnerability of listening. Deferring decisions until more information is available — not because more information is needed but because the uncertainty of deciding is uncomfortable. Asking for reassurance from investors, advisors, or co-founders when the reassurance provides temporary relief but increases the need for further reassurance rather than building independent confidence.

Reassurance-seeking is the clearest self-perpetuating safety behaviour. Research confirmed that reassurance temporarily reduces anxiety but increases it over the longer term — because the reassurance episode attributes safety to the information received rather than to the absence of actual danger, and the need for certainty is progressively sensitised rather than extinguished by repeated satisfaction.

What the safety behaviour taxonomy reveals

Thwaites and Freeston’s functional taxonomy identified three levels at which safety behaviours operate: overt visible actions, covert internal strategies, and subtle avoidance that partially approaches the feared situation while systematically limiting exposure. Arriving early to a networking event to control the greeting. Sitting at the edge of a room to reduce the chance of being called on. Keeping conversations professional and surface-level to avoid the vulnerability of genuine disclosure.

The maintenance function is identical across all three levels. Whether the safety behaviour is gripping a surface, mentally rehearsing a script, or choosing a seat near the exit, the mechanism is the same: the person attributes safety to the behaviour rather than to the absent danger, and the threat belief is preserved intact.

Book worth reading on this

Overcoming Social Anxiety and Shyness by Gillian Butler is the most accessible clinical guide to the self-focus and safety behaviour mechanisms that Wells and McManus established in their foundational research. Butler’s treatment of how safety behaviours maintain social anxiety by preventing the corrective experience that would reduce it is the most practically structured account available for anyone who recognises these patterns in professional social contexts — networking events, pitches, team leadership, client relationships. She writes with the clarity of someone who has helped many people through precisely these patterns, and the book is grounded firmly in the cognitive model rather than generic confidence advice.

If the dynamics described here are significantly affecting your wellbeing, speaking with a psychologist is the right next step. UK: Samaritans (116 123, free, 24/7). Mind (0300 123 3393). BACP: bacp.co.uk/search/Therapists. Crisis Text Line — text HOME to 741741 (US, UK, Canada, Ireland). International: internationaltherapistdirectory.com.

This article is for educational and informational purposes only. Sources: Salkovskis, P.M. (1991), The Importance of Behaviour in the Maintenance of Anxiety and Panic, Behavioural Psychotherapy, 19, 6–19. Salkovskis, P.M., Clark, D.M., Hackmann, A., Wells, A. & Gelder, M.G. (1999), An Experimental Investigation of the Role of Safety-Seeking Behaviours in the Maintenance of Panic Disorder with Agoraphobia, Behaviour Research and Therapy, 37(6), 559–574. Wells, A., Clark, D.M., Salkovskis, P.M., Ludgate, J., Hackmann, A. & Gelder, M. (1995), Social Phobia: The Role of In-Situation Safety Behaviours, Behavior Therapy, 26(1), 153–161. McManus, F., Clark, D.M. & Hackmann, A. (2000), Specificity of Cognitive Biases in Social Phobia, Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapy, 28(3), 201–209. Thwaites, R. & Freeston, M.H. (2005), Safety-Seeking Behaviours: Fact or Function?, Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapy, 33(2), 177–188. Warwick, H.M.C. & Salkovskis, P.M. (1990), Hypochondriasis, Behaviour Research and Therapy, 28(2), 105–117. Powers, M.B., Smits, J.A.J. & Telch, M.J. (2004), Disentangling the Effects of Safety-Behavior Utilization, Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 72(3), 448–454. Butler, G. (1999), Overcoming Social Anxiety and Shyness, Constable & Robinson. Willson, R. & Veale, D. (2009), Overcoming Health Anxiety, Constable & Robinson. Clark, D.A. & Beck, A.T. (2010), Cognitive Therapy of Anxiety Disorders, Guilford Press.