The Quiet That Makes You Panic
What’s really happening when your body rejects rest
Friday night, I decided to do something rare for me.
Last week had been heavy with early mornings, numerous calls, and endless tinkering with systems and to-do lists. I’d been moving from one task to the next without pause, like a wheel that can’t remember how to stop turning. I could feel it in my body, the heaviness that comes from constant motion.
I told myself I would unplug. Not in the usual way where you still scroll, still answer messages, still let the outside world tug at your sleeve. I mean, truly stop.
So I downloaded a cozy game on my Nintendo Switch.
I don’t usually let myself play. Hours disappear when I do, and the old voice in my head calls that wasted time. But this weekend, I decided to give myself permission to sink into it.
Saturday morning, I made coffee, curled into the couch, and disappeared into that bright, pixelated little world. The hum in my chest quieted. For a while, I felt at ease.
By early afternoon, I set the game down to do a bit of cleaning. All was fine. But later, when I sat in front of the TV, something shifted. A pinch in my chest. The thought, Is this normal?
The tightening came fast.
One thought became another.
Is this new? Is it getting worse? What if this really is a heart attack?
Before I knew it, I was spiraling, trapped in a full-bodied anxiety attack that lasted for hours.
I took a pill, prayed to the light for sleep, and told myself Sunday would be better.
It wasn’t.
Sunday morning, coffee in hand again, I returned to my game. And within minutes, the symptoms vanished. My breath loosened. My mind settled. The pain disappeared.
But the moment I set it down for breakfast, the anxiety roared back, as if it had been waiting at the edges.
That’s when I finally saw the pattern (I am a pattern-seeker). It wasn’t about the game.
It was about my brain.
When my mind wasn’t fully engaged, stillness gave my anxiety room to speak. And it spoke in freakin alarms.
When Stillness Feels Like Exposure
For some of us, stillness isn’t peace. It’s exposure.
If you’ve lived years in fight-or-flight, your nervous system doesn’t always know the difference between calm and threat. You can be safe in every literal sense, yet your body reacts as if danger is close.
It’s like an alarm system that never got the memo that the fire was put out. The sirens still sound. The lights still flash. The adrenaline still surges.
When the world goes quiet, the only thing left is the hum of that alarm. If you’ve been running from it for a long time, the quiet can feel worse than the chaos.
The Role of Productivity Culture
Productivity culture makes this even harder. Many of us learned early that worth comes from output, performance, and how much we can endure without breaking.
Even rest gets rebranded as a tool for doing more later. Meditate to improve focus. Rest so you can work harder tomorrow.
For people with trauma, the wiring runs even deeper.
If you grew up in chaos, quiet may have been the moment before something bad happened. If you learned to keep moving to avoid judgment or punishment, stillness can feel like an invitation for trouble.
Trauma and the Restless Brain
Trauma lives in the nervous system.
Years of hypervigilance teach the brain to stay on alert. It’s not a conscious choice. It’s a survival strategy. Over time, that becomes your default state, always scanning, always ready.
Stillness interrupts that state, yet not in a soothing way. Without something external to focus on, the brain searches for a problem. That’s why I could lose hours in a game without a single symptom, but the moment I stopped, my body latched onto a sensation or fear.
The danger wasn’t real. But my body reacted as if it were.
Why Distraction Feels Safer
Distraction isn’t always the enemy. For some of us, it’s what keeps the spiral from taking over. Focusing on something outside ourselves can deactivate the alarm system’s switch.
The problem is that distraction isn’t regulation. It’s a pause button. And when you release it, the alarm is still blaring.
Why Meditation Can Feel Impossible
This is also why meditation can feel unbearable if you live with severe anxiety or trauma.
Meditation asks you to sit in stillness and turn inward. Yet if your inner world is full of alarms, sitting still with them can make the sirens louder. What’s meant to be peace can feel like being locked in a room with your own panic.
It’s not that meditation is wrong. It’s that your nervous system may need other forms of safety first. A walk outside. A tactile hobby. Rhythmic movement. Something that invites the body to loosen without demanding it.
When the body believes stillness is dangerous, jumping straight into deep meditation can feel like trying to sleep in a burning building.
Learning to Make Stillness Safe
If stillness feels unsafe for you, it doesn’t mean you're doomed to never rest. It just means that your body is protecting you in the way it learned.
But you can teach it something new.
Start with small moments. Thirty seconds. One slow breath. Let your system taste stillness without drowning in it.
Pair it with grounding. Something textured in your hand. Your feet against the floor. A candle flame to watch. A grounding crystal.
Create a container for rest. A blanket. A playlist. A closed door. A ritual that says, “This is safe.”
Consider activities that are restful yet keep your mind engaged. This weekend, I was playing a video game. Sometimes it looks like taking care of my plants. Other times, it is reading or writing my book. Sometimes activities that look like work to others are engaging rest for us.
Reframe rest as repair. In a culture that prizes doing, pausing is not wasted time. It’s restoration.
Release the idea of perfect calm. Stillness doesn’t require an empty mind. You can be unsettled and resting at the same time.
The Long Work of Relearning
This is slow work. Some days, you’ll find stillness easily. Other days, you’ll want to run from it. That is the unwinding of years of survival mode.
Safety isn’t always found. Sometimes it’s built. And building it begins in moments small enough that your body doesn’t fight you.
Stillness is not the enemy. It is a place you can return to.
Even if right now, it feels dangerous.
Love today,
Heather 🌸
If you struggle with being still, I want to know. Hit reply or comment down below. And if you have found tools or activities that work for you, we definitely want to hear about them. You could help someone else who is struggling.
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