When someone keeps facing an anxious situation but anxiety still stays high, this sheet helps identify the subtle safety behaviours and precautions that may be keeping the fear cycle going. It is particularly relevant for adults working on health anxiety, social anxiety or worry-driven avoidance, and for practitioners using CBT-style psychoeducation in sessions.
This Safety Behaviours in Health Anxiety PDF information sheet is a practical handout for understanding the subtle precautions people use to feel safer when anxiety is triggered. It can be printed for CBT sessions, used as therapy homework, or kept as a personal reflection worksheet when someone is trying to recognise patterns that keep fear going.
The sheet explains what safety behaviours are, why the intention behind a behaviour matters, and how to notice whether an action is reducing short-term distress while maintaining anxiety in the longer term. It encourages readers to ask how anxious they would feel if they could not use a particular precaution, making it useful for adults exploring health anxiety, social anxiety, panic-related worry, contamination fears or worry-driven avoidance.
Examples include staying quiet in social situations, avoiding touching objects in public, carrying a water bottle everywhere, and wearing headphones on public transport. The information sheet also outlines common ways safety behaviours can maintain anxiety, such as preventing direct testing of fears, increasing reliance on precautions, raising self-focused attention, and sometimes creating self-fulfilling prophecies.
Practitioners may use it to introduce exposure work, support psychoeducation, guide discussion in counselling or psychology sessions, and help clients plan small behavioural experiments. It is also suitable for home learning or revision between appointments. View, download or print the sheet to support clearer conversations about anxiety, avoidance and safer ways to test anxious predictions. Produced by the Centre for Clinical Interventions.
