  We show that the mechanism of cosmological relaxation of the electroweak
scale can take place independently of the inflation mechanism, thus relieving
burdens from the original relaxion proposal. What eventually stops the
(fast-rolling) relaxion field during its cosmological evolution is the
production of particles whose mass is controlled by the Higgs vacuum
expectation value. We first show that Higgs particle production does not work
for that purpose as the Higgs field does not track the minimum of its potential
in the regime where Higgs particles get efficiently produced through their
coupling to the relaxion. We then focus on gauge boson production. We provide a
detailed analysis of the scanning and stopping mechanism and determine the
parameter space for which the relaxion mechanism can take place after
inflation, while being compatible with cosmological constraints, such as the
relaxion dark matter overabundance and Big Bang Nucleosynthesis. We find that
the cutoff scale can be as high as two hundreds of TeV. In this approach, the
relaxion sector is responsible for reheating the visible sector. The stopping
barriers of the periodic potential are large and Higgs-independent,
facilitating model-building. The allowed relaxion mass ranges from 200 MeV up
to the weak scale. In this scenario, the relaxion field excursion is
subplanckian, and is thus many orders of magnitude smaller than in the original
relaxion proposal.
