In everyday CBT practice and reflective conversations about anxiety, safety behaviours can be easier to spot when they are written down and reviewed step by step. The form supports people to notice what they do to feel safer, weigh up the short-term benefits and longer-term costs, and plan a small experiment using coping skills.
The Five steps to challenging safety behaviours PDF is a practical worksheet for noticing and testing the habits people use to feel safe when anxiety is high. It can be used to explore reassurance seeking, avoidance, checking, escape plans, over-preparing, carrying safety items, or relying on other coping rules that seem helpful in the moment but may keep fear going over time.
The form guides the user through five clear stages: identifying the safety behaviour, considering what it does in the short term, looking at possible longer-term effects, planning a manageable experiment, and reviewing the outcome. This makes it useful for CBT sessions, counselling conversations, wellbeing appointments, supported self-help, home learning, and revision of coping strategies between sessions.
Practitioners can print the worksheet for face-to-face work, share it as a downloadable resource, or use the prompts as a planning guide before exposure or behavioural experiment tasks. It may also help adults and older teenagers put anxious predictions into words, choose a realistic situation to practise in, and reflect on what they learned afterwards.
Use this resource when you want a structured, plain-English way to discuss anxiety safety behaviours and encourage small, planned steps towards change. This resource was created by MindWell Leeds.
