This paper introduces a novel safety-critical control method through the synthesis of control barrier functions (CBFs) for systems with high-relative-degree safety constraints. By extending the procedure of CBF backstepping, we propose activated backstepping—a constructive method to synthesize valid CBFs. The novelty of our method is the incorporation of an activation function into the CBF, which offers less conservative safe sets in the state space than standard CBF backstepping. We demonstrate the proposed method on an inverted pendulum example, where we explain the underlying geometric meaning in the state space and provide comparisons with existing CBF synthesis techniques. Finally, we implement our method to achieve collision-free navigation for automated vehicles using a kinematic bicycle model in simulation. © 2017 IEEE.