Why Feeling Safer Can Sometimes Make Anxiety Worse

One of the most important questions I ask people struggling with anxiety is surprisingly simple:

Do you want to be safe, or do you want to be free?

Anxiety and the Posture of Fear

At first, the question can feel confusing. After all, who wouldn’t want to be safe? But for many people living with anxiety, the constant pursuit of safety becomes the very thing that keeps anxiety alive.

When we are anxious, so much of our time and energy is spent on avoiding risks and dangers. We often get caught up in the mindset that if we try hard enough, we can reduce our risks and thereby avoid our fears, but ultimately we end up feeling more afraid as we reinforce the concept that there is something to be afraid of.

It’s a common, vicious cycle. We see this frequently when we work to lessen anxiety.

Think of it as a “posture of fear.” The more you “posture” that you are afraid, the more you feel afraid. It’s a bizarre contradiction: The more you try to make yourself safe, the more you actually feed the fear and anxiety.

For instance, when someone with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) repeatedly checks their stove to ensure it is off, they still have some doubt that their mind tricked them.

When Safety Becomes the Problem

It may be true that some of our anxiety behavior does lead to less risk. However, in many cases it leads to more emotional fear and hypervigilance, where you’re constantly on guard, highly alert to your surroundings.

This stance might keep you “safer” in some ways, but how does it make you feel? Often people who are hypervigilant report feeling more tense, on edge, worried, and sometimes even panicky. Besides those feelings, being on guard requires a ton of energy and can lead to physical and emotional fatigue.

Being on guard also teaches us that we’re only safe because we’re on guard. As a result, we often mistakenly believe that it’s our vigilance (or what we call “safety behaviors”) that is keeping us out of harm’s way.

This further reinforces the idea that life is very dangerous, that we must always be cautious to avoid bad things happening. In reality, much of the time we would have been safe regardless of our actions. In many cases, we make a superstitious connection between our hypervigilance and our safety.

For example, people who have high-level anxiety often have incredible distress around uncertainty and get caught up in these types of superstitious beliefs about what will keep them safe. These attempts to reduce uncertainty not only fail miserably, they cause other damage in the meantime.

Learning to Live With Uncertainty

When our focus is on staying safe, we tend to avoid perceived dangers. We become so protective that we begin to believe there is no way we could handle whatever it is we fear. Take social embarrassment, for example.

Many of us fear being embarrassed, and we avoid situations that may lead to embarrassment. We may spend countless hours worrying about how to act or how we will be perceived, all to protect ourselves from embarrassment. There’s even a common expression about this fear: “I died from embarrassment!”

In reality, embarrassment is, well, embarrassing, but typically it is short-lived. In my experience both professionally and personally, we remember these incidents much more than anyone else does. AND the actual embarrassing moments we open ourselves up to are nowhere near as bad as we envisioned.

Hence, the guarded behavior and the fear of being embarrassed is where 90% of the pain and anxiety lies. It is in the perception, not the actual outcome.

The trouble is, when we’re so intent on avoiding embarrassment, or whatever it is that we’re afraid of, we’re really limiting ourselves. We may hang back from trying new things or experiencing things we might really enjoy, and we never get to learn that we are resilient and have the ability to tolerate difficult outcomes.

We never find out how well we would do if we were to face danger, and we don’t get to gain confidence in our ability to cope with whatever comes our way.

The truth is, we often cope much better than we think we will!

Three Ways to Start Choosing Freedom

1. Notice where you’re trying to eliminate uncertainty.
2. Take one small step toward what you’ve been avoiding.
3. Pay attention to what actually happens instead of what anxiety predicts.

How Therapy Can Help

Breaking free from anxiety isn’t about learning how to eliminate uncertainty. It’s about changing your relationship with it.

At Palo Alto Therapy, our clinicians use evidence-based approaches such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and, when appropriate, Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) to help people better understand anxiety and respond to it in new ways.

CBT helps identify the patterns of thinking and behavior that keep anxiety going, while ERP helps people gradually face feared situations instead of avoiding them.

Over time, this process builds confidence, reduces anxiety, and helps people regain the freedom to live according to their values rather than their fears.

If anxiety has begun limiting your life, we’re here to help.

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