Drop a safety behavior

There's an old joke therapists like to tell. A man on a train keeps tearing up bits of paper and throwing them out of the window. "Why are you doing that?" asks the woman opposite. "It keeps the elephants away." "But there aren't any elephants here." "Exactly. It works."

In 1991, the Oxford psychologist Paul Salkovskis gave this a name: safety behaviors. Someone afraid of fainting during panic grips a rail or sits down, and never finds out they wouldn't have fainted anyway. The behavior gets the credit, and the fear survives.

Safety behaviors are often small and easy to miss. A few common ones:

• Rehearsing every sentence before you speak
• Avoiding eye contact, or keeping your hands busy
• Sitting near the exit, or always having someone with you
• Checking your phone, your pulse, or the route, again and again
• Carrying things "just in case" that you never actually use

They can even backfire. In David Clark and Adrian Wells's work on social anxiety, someone who stays quiet and avoids eye contact so as not to seem awkward can come across as distant, which is the very thing they feared.

The same action can be a safety behavior or an ordinary choice. What decides it is why you do it: to head off a feared outcome, or for its own sake.

Every Monday, Ben gives a two-minute update to his team. He's terrified his mind will go blank. So he writes out every word and reads it from his phone, keeps his eyes down, holds a pen so no one sees his hands shake, and leaves the call the moment he's done. It always goes fine, and he dreads it just as much every week.