Imagine you are a night watchman, and nobody has ever told you the shift ends. The building has been locked for hours. You still walk the corridors, trying handles, listening at doors. Then one evening somebody switches the lights off, hands you a cup of tea and says, “Sit down, you’re off duty.” You sit. Your shoulders climb towards your ears, your chest tightens, and the old rounds start up in your head. You wanted rest. What arrived was the watchman.
Perhaps that was you last Sunday at ten past nine. The children asleep, the telly off, the tea going cold on the arm of the sofa, and for the first time in days nobody needed a thing from you. This was the moment you had been promising yourself. And your body treated it as a warning.
You may have decided there was something wrong with you: that you are ungrateful, or broken, or simply bad at relaxing. You are probably none of those things. This piece is about why, what the research says, and what you can do the next time quiet turns on you.
You might be reading this while you wait for an assessment, or in the first weeks after a diagnosis, or with a letter from school in your hand and a child you are worried about. Any of those makes quiet harder to trust. Nothing here asks you to be calm before you start.
The oldest finding nobody talks about
In 1983, the psychologists Heide and Borkovec published a paper in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology with a title that sounds like a contradiction: “Relaxation-induced anxiety: Paradoxical anxiety enhancement due to relaxation training.” They taught adults with general tension two methods. One was progressive relaxation, where you tense and release each muscle group in turn. The other was focused relaxation, a mantra-style practice where you rest your attention on a repeated word. They expected calmer people. Many got that. Some did not.
The study was very small. After progressive relaxation, 30.8 per cent reported more tension than before. After focused relaxation, 53.8 per cent did. Five showed what the authors called clinical anxiety reactions during their early practice. Progressive relaxation did better overall, with bigger reductions in both reported and physical measures of tension, and less of this paradoxical reaction.
For some anxious people, “just relax” is not a neutral instruction. It can be the trigger. That does not make you difficult. It makes you a person with a nervous system, and the research has known about people like you for over forty years.
What your body may be doing when the quiet arrives
Does this sound familiar? You sit down, you close your eyes, you try the breathing exercise, and within a minute you are more aware of your heartbeat than before you started. Your mind, no longer busy with the day, turns round and looks at you.
Several explanations are commonly offered for why this happens, though they are proposals rather than findings from this study, and each one points to something you can try. The first is attention. When you stop doing and start noticing, your attention turns inwards, and an anxious system is quick to find things to alarm itself with: a flutter, a tightness, a skipped beat. The second is the feeling of letting go. The heaviness and loosening of deep relaxation can feel uncomfortably like losing control. The third is that quiet takes away your usual distraction, and whatever you have been outrunning catches up.
There is a fourth, and it matters most if your nervous system learned its habits somewhere hard.
When calm has never meant safe
Your nervous system does not learn what it is told. It learns what it lives through. If the quiet in the house you grew up in came just before something went wrong, or you have spent years in work or caring roles where the moment you stopped was the moment the next demand arrived, your body drew a sensible conclusion. Stillness is when you get caught off guard.
Clinicians call this hypervigilance: a constant scanning for danger that carries on when nothing is wrong. A Psychology Today article from October 2025, “The Paradox of Calm Is When Safety Feels Unsafe”, draws on Yoon (2018) on neural hypervigilance in trauma-exposed women, and on Boyd, Lanius and McKinnon (2018) on mindfulness-based treatments for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Its argument is that a brain trained to detect danger can keep doing it in quiet moments, so safety itself starts to feel unsafe. It is a synthesis of existing research and not a new trial, so take it as an explanation and not a proof.
The word for what your body is doing is not weakness. Call it threat mode: a state in which your system has been trained to read quiet as the gap before trouble. In that state, calm feels like being off duty in a place where being off duty has cost you before.
That is not a flaw. It is a lesson learned well.
Why the evenings may feel louder now
Think about your day. The news murmuring in the background, the phone face-up beside the kettle, one small dose of alarm after another since breakfast. When you finally put everything down, there is nothing left to absorb it. The alarm does not switch off because you have sat on a sofa. It has nowhere to go.
I should be plain that the studies above did not test news or the cost of living, and nobody can say headlines cause relaxation-induced anxiety. The claim is narrower. A system already running hot has a harder time coming down, and evenings are where the heat shows.
One small change is worth trying before you reach for any technique. Put the phone in another room an hour before you want to rest, and notice what the first ten minutes feel like without it. You may find the unease is loudest right then, as the last of the day’s input drains away. That is useful to know. It tells you the quiet is not the problem; the sudden stop is, and a gentler landing can help.
Two things can be true at once
You can be grateful for the quiet evening and frightened by it. You can love the people asleep upstairs and still feel your chest tighten the moment they stop needing you. These are not contradictions you have to resolve before you are allowed to feel better. They are two true things sitting in the same room, and the second one does not cancel the first.
It matters because the story you tell about the reaction shapes what you do next. If you decide the tightness means you are ungrateful, you will push through it, or avoid quiet altogether by filling every gap with the phone, the washing-up, the second episode. Both are understandable. Both also teach your system the same lesson: that quiet really is something to escape. The research on relaxation-induced anxiety points the other way. It suggests the reaction is information about how your system is set, not a verdict on your character.
What this research cannot tell you
These limits are here to protect you, so you do not carry a headline into the GP’s surgery or a talk with a friend and expect it to bear more weight than it can.
It cannot tell you relaxation is bad for you, because for most people in most studies it helps. It cannot tell you how common the reaction is. The 1983 figures come from a very small group of adults, so read them as a sign the effect is real and worth taking seriously, not as a rate to apply to yourself. It cannot tell you that you have a trauma history, because plenty of people feel uneasy in stillness for ordinary reasons: tiredness, caffeine, a deadline. And it cannot diagnose you.
If quiet moments regularly bring panic, flashbacks or a racing heart you cannot settle, take that to your GP or to NHS Talking Therapies, which in England you can usually refer yourself to. If you ever find yourself thinking of harming yourself, call Samaritans free on 116 123, at any hour.
None of this makes what you feel less real. It stops you reading a forty-year-old paper as a verdict.
Telling threat mode from plain tiredness
Not every restless evening is threat mode, and it helps to be able to tell the difference without making a project of it. Ask yourself three small questions the next time it happens. Did the unease arrive when the quiet did, or was it already there at four o’clock? Does it ease when you give your hands something to do, or when you are around another person? And does it fade within a few minutes of moving, or does it build?
If it arrives with the quiet, eases with activity or company, and fades once you move, that fits the pattern described above. If it was there all day, or it builds however you move, that is worth mentioning to a professional. Neither answer is a diagnosis. Both are useful things to be able to say clearly when you do speak to someone, because “it gets worse when I try to relax” is a sentence a clinician can work with.
Keep a note on your phone if it helps: the time, what you were doing, how long it lasted. Three or four entries across a fortnight tell you more than any single bad night can.
What to do on the evening it happens
The practical message is the opposite of “try harder”. Make calm smaller, slower and easier to leave. Here is how that can look on an ordinary Tuesday.
Shrink the dose. Skip the twenty minutes of silence and try two. Set a timer and let yourself stop when it rings, even if it went well. Keep your eyes open. Closing them takes away what your system uses to check the room, so rest your gaze softly on a spot across the room instead.
Give your hands a job. Wash a mug slowly, fold a towel, sort a drawer. Gentle, repetitive tasks can be easier than stillness because your attention has somewhere to rest that is not your own chest. Try the tense-and-release version. In Heide and Borkovec’s study, progressive relaxation brought fewer paradoxical reactions than the mantra method. Tensing a muscle on purpose and then letting go gives you something definite to do, rather than something vague to allow.
Name what is happening. Say it quietly: “This is threat mode, not danger.” Naming it does not remove it, but it moves you from inside the alarm to beside it. Then look for five things you can see, four you can touch and three you can hear. That one has no study behind it in this piece, so treat it as something to try and not a cure.
Build up slowly. Stay one minute longer than last time, once or twice a week. You are teaching your body, through repetition, that quiet and safety can turn up together. Treat it like a muscle that has been clenched for years. You do not force it open. You loosen it a little at a time.
The watchman is not your enemy
It is easy to hear “threat mode” as a criticism. It is not. Your system learned to watch because at some point watching paid off. It has been loyal to you, and loud, and a little out of date.
You are not asking it to stand down for good. You are asking it, in two-minute stretches, to notice that tonight the building is quiet because it is quiet.
The next time you reach the sofa and feel your shoulders rise, you can read it as proof you cannot rest. Or you can read it as a body that has been on watch for a very long time, waiting to be told it may stop. Tell it gently. Tell it briefly. Tell it again tomorrow, and the quiet will get easier to find.
Source: Heide, F. J., & Borkovec, T. D. (1983). Relaxation-induced anxiety: Paradoxical anxiety enhancement due to relaxation training. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology. Supporting discussion: “The Paradox of Calm Is When Safety Feels Unsafe”, Psychology Today, October 2025. For help in England, see NHS Talking Therapies or speak to your GP. This article is for general information and is not a substitute for advice from your GP or a qualified clinician.
Leave a comment