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@anxiety_fitness

Anxiety Fitness

For a long time, I thought exposure just didn’t work. I thought that it was all about putting yourself in panic provoking situations and trying to get through it any way you can without panicking. But that’s not exposure. I realised during my exposures, I was doing behaviours that were keeping me stuck, things that I thought were helping me to ‘cope’ were actually just reinforcing my anxiety. If I was doing exposure on public transport, I would sit by the door in case I needed to make a quick escape. I would carry ice cold water with me in case I got dehydrated and fainted on the way to my local shop. I would only drive somewhere if a family member was on the phone, tracking my location, so if I had a heart attack or crashed, they’d know exactly where to send the ambulance and find me. Even when I understood what safety behaviours were, and how to do exposure properly, some behaviours were just harder to spot, like fidgeting in a certain way, sitting in a certain position, holding on to something or someone etc. They could be disguised as ‘normal’ behaviours. Only you can really know what your safety behaviours truly are, it’s not that one behaviour is something that NO one should do, but if you are doing it to ‘cope’ or ‘lessen’ the anxiety when trying to face it, then that may be a safety behaviour for you. For example, if you’re not worried about your heart rate, checking your fitness tracker to see how your exercise is going, and how high you got your heart rate etc isn’t problematic. But if you have cardiophobia and you check your heart rate constantly to make sure it’s not too high, because you can’t handle the anxiety of not monitoring, then that is a problem. Sure it’s ‘normal’ but for you, it’s a safety behaviour. What are your hidden safety behaviours?

On the profile · Mar 23, 2026