Article abstract taken from Harvard Medical Schools e-newsletter
Have you ever had a “gut-wrenching” experience? Do certain situations make you “feel nauseous”? Have you ever felt “butterflies” in your stomach? We use these expressions for a reason. The gastrointestinal tract is sensitive to emotion. Anger, anxiety, sadness, elation—all of these feelings (and others) can trigger symptoms in the gut.
The brain has a direct effect on the stomach. For example, the very thought of eating can release the stomach’s juices before food gets there. This connection goes both ways. A troubled intestine can send signals to the brain, just as a troubled brain can send signals to the gut. Therefore, a patient’s distressed gut can be as much the cause as the product of anxiety, stress, or depression. That’s because the brain and the gastrointestinal (GI) system are intimately connected — so intimately that they should be viewed as one system, rather than two.
This is especially true in cases where a person experiences gastrointestinal upset with no obvious physical cause. For such functional GI disorders, trying to heal a distressed gut without considering the impact of stress and emotion is like trying to improve an employee’s poor job performance without considering his manager and work environment.
Stress and the functional GI disorders
Given how closely the gut and brain interact, it becomes easier to understand why you might feel nauseated before giving a presentation, or feel intestinal pain during times of stress. That doesn’t mean, however, that functional gastrointestinal illnesses are imagined or “all in your head.” Psychology combines with physical factors to cause pain and other bowel symptoms. Psychosocial factors influence the actual physiology of the gut, as well as the modulation of symptoms. In other words, stress (or depression or other psychological factors) can affect movement and contractions of the GI tract, cause inflammation, or make you more susceptible to infection.
In addition, research suggests that some people with functional GI disorders perceive pain more acutely than other people do because their brains do not properly regulate pain signals from the GI tract. Stress can make the existing pain seem even worse.
These observations suggest that at least some patients with functional GI conditions might find relief with therapy to reduce stress or treat anxiety or depression. And sure enough, a review of 13 studies showed that patients who tried psychologically based approaches had greater improvement in their symptoms compared with patients who received conventional medical treatment.
Is stress causing your symptoms?
When evaluating whether your gastrointestinal symptoms — such as heartburn, abdominal cramps, or loose stools — are related to stress, watch for these other common symptoms of stress and report them to your clinician as well.
Physical symptoms
- Stiff or tense muscles, especially in the neck and shoulders
- Headaches
- Sleep problems
- Shakiness or tremors
- Recent loss of interest in sex
- Weight loss or gain
- Restlessness
Behavioral symptoms
- Procrastination
- Grinding teeth
- Difficulty completing work assignments
- Changes in the amount of alcohol or food you consume
- Taking up smoking, or smoking more than usual
- Increased desire to be with or withdraw from others
- Rumination (frequent talking or brooding about stressful situations)
Emotional symptoms
- Crying
- Overwhelming sense of tension or pressure
- Trouble relaxing
- Nervousness
- Quick temper
- Depression
- Poor concentration
- Trouble remembering things
- Loss of sense of humor
- Indecisiveness
This article supports the believe that many of us have been saying for a long time that mind and body are very much interconnected. When you are allowing yourself to become negative, anxious, overwhelmed with life’s happenings you set yourself up for a stressful reaction from your body. One of the most common side effects is stomach aches, discomfort, vomiting, and diarrhea. There is a very simple explanation for this. When your body feels it’s under stress (back when stress correlated to death related scenarios, in which we had to either fight or flight to survive). Our bodies would respond by a) getting rid of excess weight we don’t need(which is why people when frightened may loose bowel control or vomit); b) a need for food is not necessary at this point so often times hunger will be suppressed; c) the body will turn oxygen and blood away from the stomach and to the working muscles so bloating, and discomfort occur.
As a San Diego fitness trainer the best advice I give my clients is to RELAX. Allow yourself time to do nothing, read a book, watch a comedy, go for a nice long walk, and realize that you are only human, there is only so much in your life you can control and sometimes you just gotta let it go. Because over time constant stress reactions of the body can really negatively impact your health for the long term.
*****99% of all illness is stress-related****
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