Why Your Body Still Feels Stressed Even When You’re ‘Doing Everything Right’

If you’ve been doing all the “right” things for your mental health and still feel like something is off in your body, renowned physiotherapist Jessica Maguire might have some answers. She’s a TEDx speaker, the founder of Repairing the Nervous System, and someone who started studying brain-body communication after losing her own brother. 

On The Art of Being Well, she sits down with Dr. Will Cole for one of the most genuinely helpful conversations about what’s actually happening inside your body when you feel anxious or stuck. According to Maguire, a dysregulated nervous system can show up in ways most people don’t even realize. Here’s what she wants you to know.

Your anxiety might be a volume problem

Maguire explains that your body is constantly sending signals to your brain through something called interoception, which is basically your internal sensory system. Think of it like a volume dial. 

For some people, that dial gets cranked way too high after chronic or traumatic stress, and every sensation in their body triggers more anxiety. “It’s like the sensations in the body themselves are a threat,” she says. Butterflies in your stomach? Your brain reads that as danger and fires up the fear circuitry. 

For other people, the volume gets turned down so low that they feel numb, disconnected, or completely flat. “A way of coping is that the brain learns to say, this is too much. I can’t cope with this. I need to turn that down,” she says. In both cases, your body thinks it’s helping you survive.

Freeze is the most common trauma response

Everyone knows fight or flight. But Maguire says the response most people actually have during a traumatic event is freeze, and it’s the one that carries the most shame. 

“We praise people who fight. We understand when people run away,” she says. “But there’s a lack of understanding of why people might have not taken action.” If you’ve ever wondered why you couldn’t speak up, couldn’t leave, or just went completely blank in a moment that clearly called for something, that’s not a character flaw. Maguire describes it like pressing the gas pedal and pulling the handbrake at the exact same time. Your body is flooded with energy but simultaneously shutting down, and the result is total paralysis.

Breathwork can actually send you further down

Maguire went to a yin yoga class shortly after losing her brother and the long, slow exhalations pushed her deeper into shutdown. “I left feeling the most impending sense of doom,” she says. “I was so far down in that dorsal vagal shutdown energy because it wasn’t the right resource for me to use.” 

Slow deep breathing is great for the vagus nerve, but if you’re already in a low, collapsed state, it can pull you even lower. And on the other end, people who are highly anxious sometimes focus on their breath and it triggers panic because they become hyper-aware of air hunger. “For people who are dysregulated, they need to be working more with the sensory systems first,” she says. That can mean starting with physical touch and pressure—feeling your body in the chair, your feet on the ground, your spine against something solid—before ever trying to control your breathing.

Joy is medicine too

Maguire says most conversations about nervous system healing focus on the heavy stuff, but building your capacity to actually hold excitement, play, and happiness is just as important. For a lot of people, excitement and anxiety feel almost identical in the body, and their system doesn’t know how to tell the difference. 

“If people can find something that brings excitement and they’re doing that with somebody else who is in a regulated state, you are effectively doing bicep curls for your vagus nerve,” she says. It doesn’t always have to be about processing pain. Sometimes the work is letting yourself enjoy something fully without bracing for it to fall apart.

Listen to the full episode on The Art of Being Well with Dr. Will Cole, available wherever you listen to podcasts.

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