When Calm Feels Wrong

By Karie Rohrlach · Counsellor & Psychotherapist · Adelaide & Online

You've left. The relationship, the job, the environment that was making you unwell. You've done the hard thing. You're out.

And now — inexplicably — you feel worse.

Not just sad, or grieving, or adjusting. Something more unsettling than that. A flatness. A restlessness you can't name. A low hum of wrongness that sits underneath everything. You find yourself scrolling endlessly, picking fights, seeking intensity. The calm that you worked so hard to reach feels — empty. Foreign. Almost threatening.

And somewhere in the back of your mind, a thought arrives:

Maybe something is wrong with me.

Nothing is wrong with you. But something very important is happening — and understanding it can change everything.

Your nervous system has been recalibrated

The human nervous system is extraordinarily adaptable. It learns. It adjusts. And one of the things it learns — when we live for long enough in high-stress, high-arousal environments — is that chaos is normal.

In polyvagal theory, developed by Dr Stephen Porges, our nervous system operates across a spectrum of states. At the top of what's called the polyvagal ladder is ventral vagal activation — the state of safety, connection, and calm. This is where we rest, relate, think clearly, and feel at ease in our own skin.

But when we live under chronic stress, threat, or unpredictability — an abusive relationship, a volatile workplace, a high-pressure emergency services role, an environment where we were always bracing for the next thing — our nervous system spends most of its time in sympathetic activation. Fight or flight. High alert. Always ready.

Over time, this stops feeling like stress and starts feeling like normal. The nervous system recalibrates. High arousal becomes the baseline. And calm — genuine, ventral vagal calm — starts to register not as relief, but as something wrong. Something missing. A kind of emptiness that feels uncomfortably close to depression.

The neurochemistry of chaos

There's a reason for this that goes deeper than habit.

Chronic stress environments flood the body with cortisol and adrenaline — the hormones of alertness and survival. These are powerful neurochemicals. And like any powerful neurochemical, the body adapts to their presence — and notices their absence.

When you leave the high-stress environment, the cortisol drops. The adrenaline drops. The constant low-grade threat response begins to settle. And the body — accustomed to operating on those chemicals — experiences their absence as a kind of withdrawal.

This is not metaphor. This is physiology.

The flatness, the restlessness, the inability to feel pleasure in ordinary things, the sense that something is missing — these are withdrawal symptoms. The nervous system, recalibrated to chaos, is registering the absence of its familiar chemistry.

And just like any withdrawal — the discomfort is real, it is temporary, and the worst thing you can do is medicate it with more of the substance.

When the body goes looking for its fix

Here is where it gets complicated.

Because the nervous system doesn't only seek relief from discomfort — it seeks the familiar. And if chaos is familiar, the pull back toward it can be profound and confusing.

This can look like:

Feeling inexplicably drawn to people who create drama, intensity, or unpredictability — while finding calm, consistent people somehow boring or unexciting.

Sabotaging good situations — relationships, jobs, living arrangements — that feel too quiet, too stable, too good to be true.

Seeking high-risk or high-intensity experiences — extreme sports, volatile situations, high-stakes decisions — to recreate the neurochemical charge that once felt like normal.

Mistaking the absence of chaos for depression. Mistaking genuine calm for numbness. Mistaking a healthy relationship for a loveless one.

The person who keeps choosing chaos — who can't seem to want the steady, kind, reliable person — is not broken. Their nervous system has simply learned that intensity is what love, engagement, and aliveness feel like. Calm doesn't compute yet. It hasn't been encoded as safety.

It's the same mechanism that drives many forms of addiction. The brain learns to associate a particular neurochemical state with feeling okay — and when that state is absent, it sends a powerful signal: find it again.

The discomfort is not the problem

This is the most important thing to understand when you're in it:

The flatness, the restlessness, the boredom that isn't quite boredom — that discomfort is not a sign that something is wrong. It is a sign that something is changing.

It is the nervous system beginning to recalibrate. Slowly, uncomfortably, in its own time — learning that calm is safe. That stillness is not the same as emptiness. That a relationship without drama can still be a relationship worth having.

This recalibration cannot be rushed. And it cannot be bypassed by returning to the chaos — any more than an addiction can be resolved by returning to the substance. Each return only deepens the groove.

What it requires is the capacity to sit with the discomfort. To feel the restlessness without acting on it. To notice the pull toward intensity and choose, again and again, not to follow it. To allow the nervous system the time and the conditions it needs to find a new baseline.

This is genuinely hard. It is the kind of work that benefits enormously from support — because the pull back toward the familiar is powerful, and sitting with withdrawal without understanding what it is can feel unbearable.

What recovery looks like

Recovery from a high-arousal baseline is not about becoming flat or passive. It is about expanding the window of tolerance — gradually building the capacity to feel safe in calm, to experience connection without intensity, to find genuine pleasure in ordinary things.

This happens through:

Regulated nervous system experiences — being in the presence of calm, regulated people. Co-regulation is one of the most powerful tools we have. The nervous system learns safety partly through proximity to others who are in it.

Body-based practices — movement, breath, somatic awareness. The nervous system lives in the body, and recalibration happens through the body as much as through the mind.

Understanding what's happening — which is partly what this piece is for. When you can name the withdrawal for what it is, it loses some of its power. The restlessness becomes information rather than a verdict.

Therapy that works at the level of the nervous system — not just talking about what happened, but helping the body learn that the danger has passed. That calm is safe. That this stillness is not a void — it is the beginning of something you haven't experienced before. Or haven't experienced in a very long time.

You are not broken. You are recalibrating.

If you recognise yourself in this — if you've been wondering why you can't seem to settle, why calm feels wrong, why you keep finding yourself drawn back toward intensity — this is worth bringing into a therapeutic space.

Not because something is wrong with you. Because something is changing. And that change, done with support, leads somewhere worth going.

A free 15-minute consultation is available — no pressure, no obligation. Just a conversation.

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Zanti Counselling | Adelaide CBD & Online | zanti.com.au

Karie Rohrlach is a counsellor and psychotherapist at Zanti Counselling, Adelaide. She works with adults navigating trauma, nervous system dysregulation, and the aftermath of high-stress environments — in person at 71 Angas Street, Adelaide CBD, and online. PACFA registered.