Safety behavior tracker

Safety behaviours thrive on automaticity. The client doesn’t notice they’re doing them, the behaviour delivers a quick relief, the cycle repeats. The first intervention with most safety behaviours isn’t to drop them. It’s to make them visible. Self-monitoring alone, without any explicit attempt to change the behaviour, reduces the frequency by a meaningful amount in most clients. Once the client has to log each instance, they catch themselves more often, which interrupts the automaticity.

This worksheet is the self-monitoring tool that sits between identifying safety behaviours and dropping them. It runs as a log of each instance, with the situation, the specific safety behaviour used, and what happened as a result. Run it for a week before any experimental work to drop behaviours. The data from this log makes the experiment more targeted later, and the act of logging is its own intervention.

Use it any time you’ve worked with the client to identify their safety behaviours and you’re preparing the protocol that will eventually drop them. Anxiety, OCD, social anxiety, panic, agoraphobia, health anxiety. The list of relevant cases is wide.

The clinical pattern to read. The result column is the lever. Most clients fill it in expecting to write “felt better” or “got through the situation.” What they often end up writing is “the relief lasted ten minutes,” “made me more anxious later,” “felt fine but then I avoided the same thing again the next day.” That’s the data that breaks the protective belief about the safety behaviour. The client’s own week is generating evidence that the behaviour isn’t doing the work they thought it was. When you see that pattern in the log, bring it directly into session. Don’t summarise it. Read the entries together and let the client see what their own data shows.

A second pattern: clients whose result column is consistently positive (“felt better, calmer afterwards”). Worth two interpretations. Either the behaviour is genuinely working short-term and the client hasn’t yet noticed the long-term cost, in which case the conversation focuses on the long-term cost. Or the result is being filled in to look successful, which points at a different conversation about what they’re worried you’ll think.

In my-cbt, the worksheet is one of the bundled system templates. Assign it from the case file with a personal message asking the client to log entries close to the moment rather than retrospectively. Submissions save with timestamps so you can see whether the data is being captured in real time.