Running on Fumes:What Your Body Is Actually Doing When You're Stressed
WELLNESS EDUCATION · 5–6 MIN READ
By Ramsey | Blue Mountain Wellness | April 2026
I can tell you're stressed before you say a single word.
Not because I'm perceptive. Because your body is already telling me. The way you walked in rushed and half-distracted, like part of you is still somewhere else. The way your shoulders are sitting two inches higher than they should be. The fact that you haven't taken a full, slow breath since you arrived. Possibly haven't taken an intentional breath all day.
This isn't a judgment. It's one of the most common things I see in my work as a mobile massage therapist. Most people who book a session think of stress as something they're managing fine. Their body tells a completely different story.
You're Living in Fight-or-Flight. You Just Don't Know It.
Your nervous system has two main modes. Sympathetic, what most people know as fight-or-flight, and parasympathetic, sometimes called rest-and-digest. In a healthy nervous system, you can and should move fluidly between the two states. Stress kicks in, you deal with it, and your body returns to baseline.
But for a lot of us, that return-to-baseline isn't happening. The emails don't stop. The schedule doesn't let up. The mental load of running a household, a business, a life, it keeps the sympathetic system turned on, even when there's no actual emergency in front of you.
The signs? Always feeling short on time. That low-level sense of forgetting something important. Feeling like you have to be somewhere else. That's not a personality trait. That's your nervous system stuck in a gear it was never meant to stay in.
"Most people don't recognize that they're living in a stress state, and they definitely don't know how much it's affecting the rest of their body."
What Stress Is Actually Doing to Your Body
When your brain perceives a threat (real or imagined) it triggers a cascade that starts in your hypothalamus and travels fast. Cortisol and adrenaline flood your system. Your heart rate rises. Your muscles brace. Blood flow prioritizes your limbs over your organs. Digestion slows. Your immune system takes a back seat.
That's brilliant design.. For a short-term emergency. For a chronic state of modern life? Not so much.
Your Muscles Keep the Score
One of the first places chronic stress shows up is in your muscles, specifically in a bracing pattern most people aren't even aware of. Research using electromyography (EMG) has shown that psychological stress alone, not physical exertion, just mental load, significantly increases muscle activity in the upper traps.[1] Those are the muscles that run from the base of your neck down to your shoulders. When they're chronically engaged, they get stuck. Literally, the fibres shorten, blood flow gets restricted, tissue loses hydration and it loses the ability to fully relax
Here's one that surprises people: your calves. The fight-or-flight response physically prepares your body to run. Your lower legs engage (the gastrocnemius, the soleus) ready to push off and move. When that stress never fully resolves, that bracing pattern stays. Tight calves aren't just a running problem. They're often a stress problem.[2]
Your Organs Are Paying Attention Too
This is where it gets interesting, and where a lot of people are surprised to learn how far the stress response actually reaches.
Digestion is one of the first systems to go offline when your sympathetic nervous system takes over. Peristalsis — the wave-like contractions that move food through your gut — is dependent on your parasympathetic system. When fight-or-flight kicks in, that process slows or stalls. Research has linked chronic stress to reduced gut motility, increased intestinal permeability, and impaired nutrient absorption.[3] That bloating, that 'my stomach is off' feeling? It's not always food. Sometimes it's your nervous system.
Then there's your immune system. Cortisol is naturally anti-inflammatory in short bursts — useful when you've just injured yourself. But chronically elevated cortisol causes your immune cells to become resistant to its signalling. The result is a paradox: more cortisol, less immune protection. Getting sick more easily than you used to? Worth considering.[4]
Blood sugar is another piece. Cortisol tells your liver to push more glucose into the bloodstream — your body preparing energy for that emergency that isn't actually happening. Over time, cells become less responsive to insulin, and you end up with the energy crashes and cravings that feel like a diet problem but are often a stress problem.[5]
A note on the bigger picture: In the applied kinesiology tradition, specifically the Touch for Health framework developed by John Thie, practitioners observe connections between specific muscle groups and organ systems. Within this model, the calf muscles (gastrocnemius and soleus) are linked to adrenal function. When adrenal stress is present, practitioners often find dysfunction in these same muscles, weak ankles, aching calves, tired feet. Whether you view this through a traditional lens or pure anatomy, the practical observation holds: stressed adrenals and tight calves tend to show up together.
What Actually Happens When You Get on the Table
When a client is particularly stressed, there's often a moment, usually a few minutes into a session, where I can feel them actually drop into their body. Their breathing slows. Their shoulders let go. Their body stops bracing. They reconnect with the present moment
This isn't magic. There's a clear physiological mechanism at work.
Moderate pressure from massage stimulates sensory receptors in the skin and underlying tissue. This sends signals along the vagus nerve (the long, wandering nerve that connects your brain to your heart, lungs, and digestive tract) triggering a parasympathetic response.[6] Your heart rate decreases. Your breathing slows down. Your muscles receive the signal that it's okay to release the tension they've been holding.
Research from Tiffany Field's Touch Research Institute has documented that massage is associated with increases in serotonin (around 28%) and dopamine (around 31%), the neurotransmitters involved in mood regulation and reward.[7] Studies on cortisol reduction from massage show mixed results in rigorous reviews, so I won't overstate that part, but the parasympathetic shift itself is well-established.
For the muscles that have been stuck in a contracted state, those knots in your traps, the tension in your calves, targeted pressure helps break the contraction cycle. The tissue responds, blood flow returns, and the muscle can finally do what it was never designed to stop doing: relax.
The 'Running on Fumes' Sign Most People Miss
After some sessions, a client will say something I hear often: 'I didn't realize how tired I was.'
That's one of the clearest signs someone has been running on cortisol. When your stress hormones are chronically elevated, they can mask fatigue, keeping you functional, alert, even wired. But underneath that, your body is depleted. The moment the nervous system finally gets permission to stand down, the exhaustion surfaces.
Sound familiar? The reliance on caffeine, coffee, nicotine, or other stimulants. Struggling to fall asleep even when you're exhausted. Energy crashes in the afternoon. Waking at 3am with your mind already running.
This is a self-reinforcing cycle. Elevated cortisol suppresses melatonin in the evening, disrupting sleep. Poor sleep raises cortisol the next day. Caffeine (which elevates cortisol for several hours after consumption) adds to the load and can keep that evening cortisol elevated when it should be falling.[8] Blood sugar instability (from cortisol-driven insulin resistance) creates the crashes that trigger more cortisol to compensate. Round and round.
This cycle isn't a willpower issue. It's a physiology issue. And it often starts with a nervous system that simply hasn't had permission, or the right conditions, to reset.
Four Things Worth Noticing in Your Own Body
You don't need to be in pain to benefit from paying attention to your stress load. Here are four simple things to check in with:
• Your shoulders right now. Are they sitting where they should be, or are they subtly lifted and forward? A lot of people can't fully answer this question, they've lost touch with what relaxed actually feels like.
• Your breathing. Take a full breath right now. Did your chest expand, or your belly? Shallow chest breathing is a sympathetic nervous system pattern. It both reflects and maintains a stress state.
• Your calf tension. Press your thumb into your gastrocnemius, the meaty part at the back of your lower leg. More tender than you expected? That's worth noting.
• Your sleep and energy pattern. If you're wired in the evening and groggy in the morning, that's an inverted cortisol curve, a common sign of HPA axis dysregulation from chronic stress.
So Here's the Question
If someone could tell you were stressed just by watching you walk into a room, and your muscles, your digestion, your immune system, your sleep have all been quietly adapting to that stress for months, would you want to know? Or would you rather wait until your body makes the decision for you?
Massage isn't a cure for stress. Nothing is, because stress is part of life. But it is one of the most evidence-informed ways to give your nervous system a genuine reset, not just the perception of relaxation, but an actual physiological shift from sympathetic overdrive to parasympathetic recovery.
Most of my clients tell me the same thing when they leave: they didn't realize how stressed they actually were when they came in. Your body already knows. It's just waiting for you to listen.
— Ramsey
Blue Mountain Wellness | Mobile Massage Therapy, Blue Mountain & Collingwood, ON
Sources & References
[1] Westgaard & Bjørklund (1987); Lundberg et al. (1994). Psychological stress and trapezius EMG activity. European Journal of Applied Physiology. Confirmed: mental stress alone elevates trapezius muscle activity independent of physical load.
[2] Harvard Health / Cleveland Clinic. Understanding the fight-or-flight stress response. Sympathetic activation engages lower limb musculature in preparation for flight response.
[3] Mayer EA et al. (2009). Neuroendocrine control of gut function. PMC2714186. Chronic stress impairs gut motility, increases intestinal permeability, disrupts microbiome.
[4] Frontiers in Endocrinology (2025). Cortisol and immune function: from acute protection to chronic immunosuppression via glucocorticoid receptor resistance.
[5] Jackson Heart Study (2019). Cortisol and fasting glucose: elevated cortisol associated with significant glucose elevation, particularly in insulin-resistant individuals.
[6] Field T et al. (2010). Moderate pressure is essential for massage therapy effects. PubMed 19283590. Moderate pressure activates parasympathetic response via vagal pathways.
[7] Field T et al. (2005). Cortisol decreases and serotonin and dopamine increase following massage therapy. International Journal of Neuroscience, 115(10). PubMed 16162447.
[8] Lane JD et al. (2002). Caffeine impairs glucose metabolism and raises cortisol. PMC2257922. Single caffeine dose elevates cortisol for up to 6 hours; incomplete tolerance in regular users.
