The Quiet Room · evidence and corrections
What the evidence supports, and what it does not.
The Quiet Room publishes the caveats as carefully as the findings. Every practice has a plain-English sourcing statement, an evidence grade and a safety review, and the grades are changed when closer checking does not support the original judgement.
The register at a glance
The Quiet Room currently contains 111 guided practices, 85 formal citations across 28 cited practices, and 112 sourcing statements. The extra sourcing row is an editorial policy called “Practices we describe but do not teach”, so the quality register has 112 entries while the practice library has 111.
Open the full reference register or inspect all 112 quality records.
How a practice is judged
Each entry is checked against a 12-point description standard adapted from TIDieR. The register asks whether the name, rationale, steps, provider, delivery, duration, tailoring, fidelity, evidence, origin, safety and expected outcome are stated clearly enough to inspect.
Evidence is graded as well established, moderately supported, early or mixed, or traditional. A traditional grade is not a claim that a practice is useless. It means controlled trial evidence is absent or too thin to support a stronger label. Safety is reviewed separately because a plausible or effective practice can still be unsuitable in particular circumstances.
Seven published downgrades
These changes are public because the standard is not to defend an earlier grade. It is to make the label match the best evidence that can actually be verified.
| Practice | Published change | Why it changed |
|---|---|---|
| Worry postponement | Moderate to early or mixed | The primary studies are small, clinical pooling is absent and the published evidence is thinner than the technique's reputation. |
| Attention training technique | Moderate to early or mixed | The standalone evidence rests on a small set of studies, many involving the model's developer, rather than a large independent trial. |
| Self-distancing | Lowered | The experimental findings are consistent, but they are mostly acute, single-session studies in non-clinical samples and there is no pooled treatment effect. |
| Behavioural experiments | Lowered | The method is central to cognitive therapy, but there is no meta-analysis establishing a standalone advantage over thought records. |
| Yoga nidra | Lowered | The best-controlled trial found effects of about one tenth of a standard deviation, far below figures that are often repeated. |
| Naikan | Traditional | Naikan has genuine clinical use and some trials, but the controlled evidence for it as a standalone treatment remains sparse. |
| Safety plan | Well established to moderate | The landmark study was a cohort comparison, not a randomised trial. The evidence is also for plans made with a clinician and follow-up contact, not a self-guided worksheet alone. |
Chair work was corrected as well. Large quoted effects often describe uncontrolled change within a session. The controlled cumulative treatment effect is much smaller, so the register now distinguishes those figures rather than presenting them as interchangeable.
What this page does not claim
A citation does not turn a self-guided practice into treatment, and an evidence grade does not guarantee that a practice will help a particular person. The Quiet Room offers education and guided reflection. It is not therapy, diagnosis, medical advice or emergency support.
Evidence moves. The notes are dated and should be checked again when a material new review or trial appears. Corrections belong in public, not in a private change log.