I want to speak to you this week about something very near to my heart: healing trauma and how this can affect our physical bodies, especially our digestion.
Many people have had at least one traumatic experience, and sadly, sometimes many. Loss of a loved one, especially to sudden or accidental death. Sexual, physical, or emotional abuse. Poverty. Witnessing violence in war or even here at home.
As I grow my practice, I’m finding that a lot of my clients with digestive challenges also have a background of trauma. How are they connected?
In essence, it’s about how your body is wired to respond to stress. Sometimes, when events you witness or experience are overwhelming, your nervous system can turn on an unremitting pattern of constant vigilance.
I’ve written and spoken before about how we need to be in a place of “rest and digest” for ideal digestion to occur.
But if you’re constantly on the lookout for the next threat, you may rarely or never reach that true place of relaxation and peace that allows your body to feel safe and heal.
If you are someone who has experienced trauma, in this week’s video I share what I’m doing to heal my childhood trauma as a strategy for healing my digestive challenges, and I hope that you might learn about some options that could help you, too.
More and more, I’m finding that this is an essential part of the healing process, even though it can be challenging and needs to be addressed with great care.
Check out the video, and let me know if this helped you.
If you’ve been wishing to find a practitioner who can help you learn what you’re body is telling you it needs, I invite you to schedule a free 30-minute Assessment Session with me. In this focused session, we’ll discuss where you’re at, and what I think would be your next best steps. If I can’t help you, I’ll be sure to give you a referral to someone who can.
Patient stories are your stories of being a patient. Hopefully, you’ve had a good experience in your various doctors’ offices, but it’s highly likely not.
Instead, if you’re a woman with a complex or mystery illness, like an autoimmune condition, Lyme disease, a strange gut illness, or confusing allergies and food sensitivities, it’s likely you have a long list of frustrating patient stories.
Being dismissed.
Having your very physical symptoms written off as stress, or related to your menstrual cycle.
Having to fight and advocate to get the care you need and deserve.
I have my own collection of stories, and I’ve heard a lot of others as a practitioner. Some of these patient stories make me want to scream and cry. Like my celiac client, who was extremely clear with hospital staff that she was celiac, only to find that the kitchen was sending food with wheat flour as a thickener.
I recently read a book that helped me see how our experiences are not isolated incidents, but are baked into the very way conventional medicine is designed and operates. It’s called Doing Harm, by Maya Dusenberry.
She sadly exposes the systematic ways in which women are not treated equally in medicine. This truly is a women’s rights issue that needs to be addressed. Women need equal attention in medical research, chronic disease research, medical education, and more. If you’re curious about these issues, I highly recommend the book.
This week, I made a video for you sharing some of my “greatest hits” of patient stories, and sharing my top 5 tips for being an empowered advocate to get the medical care you deserve. You can check it out here.
Today’s blog post is a guest post by Ben and Rupali Brown, owners of Pali Yoga in Eureka, CA. I reached out to them to help you learn about the most useful and valuable yoga poses to support your digestive health, particularly symptoms of bloating and IBS. Ben and Rupali are a husband and wife yoga team, and offer a wide range of Vinyasa flow classes, restorative classes, barre yoga, and more. If you happen to live on the NorthCoast, check out their studio.
Whatever the cause of belly bloating, simple yoga poses can go along way towards helping to relieve the symptoms of belly bloating.
By practicing a range of asanas, we get our bodies moving, which increases blood flow and aids in the expulsion of gas and excessive fluid retention.
There are both physical and mental results of these poses that will positively effect belly bloating. Simple inversions calm the nervous system and give gas an easy pathway out of the body. Twisting stimulates your internal organs and helps you move internal stagnation, while forward folds can also put direct pressure on the abdomen to squeeze gas out.
Additionally, breathing in a way that encourages abdominal contraction on the exhales and dilation on the inhales will increase peristaltic (digestive) motion.
Lastly the benefits of calming the nervous system and reducing anxiety will have perhaps the greatest impact on the healthy functioning of our digestive system, discouraging the over-production of gases in the first place.
While practicing these poses for bloating, focus on contracting the abdominal muscles during exhales, and relaxing and dilating the belly during inhales. We recommend a range of asanas, or poses, from twists to inversions, that will help increase blood flow and stimulate the digestive tract to remove gases and fluids that have become trapped.
We recommend a sequence that begins reclining on the back, to allow the nervous system time to relax, which will create the correct conditions for the physical poses to help. Here are the poses we feel are most likely to reduce bloating and improve digestion.
Apanasana (knees to chest pose)
Draw knees tightly into chest, without creating tension in the shoulders and neck. If range of motion allows, interlace hands to elbows around the shins and hold for approximately thirty seconds. A simple modification is to practice holding only one knee at a time.
Supta Matsyendrasana (reclined twist)
Twisting sometimes offers nearly immediate relief for significant bouts of abdominal distress, and also offers the benefits of stretching tight spinal muscles and stimulating the internal organs.
Lying on your back, bend both knees and place your feet firmly on the ground. Move your hips a few inches to one side and drop your knees towards the other. Make micro-adjustments to your upper body so that both shoulders can rest easily and evenly on the ground.
If needed place a blanket under the raised shoulder to allow it to rest. Make sure to switch sides, and hold for 30 seconds at least.
Setubandhasna (Bridge Pose)
Inversions like Bridge Pose help calm the nervous system, stimulate the circulatory system, and encourage the expulsion of gas from the abdomen. Of course this can reduce bloating!
Lying on your back, bring your feet to the floor and knees to the sky, taking a moment to bring your heels in fairly close to your pelvis. Engage your thighs towards each other, press evenly through the feet and lift your hips off the floor.
Pause for a moment and bring your hands, elbows and shoulder blades closer towards each other, and then press your hips and abdomen up as high as you can while maintaining even, easy breathing.
Marjariasana Pose (Cat Pose)
Toning the front compartment of your abdomen will stimulate peristaltic motion, allowing your body to bring itself back to equilibrium, and relieve bloating.
Coming to your hands and knees, with your hands under your shoulders and your knees under your hips, press the ground away actively with your hands, broaden your shoulder blades, “tuck your tailbone”, and arch your back strongly to the sky. Focus on contracting our abdominal muscles especially with exhales and softly releasing them on the inhales.
This pose can be held, or it can be practiced in conjunction with “Cow” pose. Alternatively you can come back to neutral spine with the inhales and repeated 10-15 times with each exhale.
Malasana: (Yogic Squat)
This asana simulates the correct body position for elimination, and massages the end of the digestive tract including the colon. This can help eliminate gas and move the bowels, relieving bloating.
In a standing position, turn your toes out slightly, with heels approximately the width of your hips. Squat down between your heels. Lift the crown of your head upwards as you drop your pelvis downwards, using these two opposite forces to lengthen your spine. Use your elbows to press the thighs apart and make Anjali Mudra (prayer hands). Squeeze the thighs in against the elbows.
If it is uncomfortable or impossible to keep the heels down, prop them up. If there is too much strain in the knees place a block or a bolster under the sit bones.
Uttanasana (standing forward fold) with a pillow
Uttanasana offers the benefits of inversion, and is also a great tonic for an over-stressed nervous system. If your bloating is made worse by stress, this may help. The pressure from the pillow may also help expel gas.
Standing with your feet hip-width apart, place a firm pillow at the top of your thighs. Hinge forward from the hips and let your hands fall towards the ground. Bend your knees slightly especially if you tend towards discomfort in your lower back.
Find the ground, or yoga blocks, or your ankles, with your hands, and fold deeply, relaxing your head to gravity. Allow the pillow to exert light extra pressure to your abdomen.
Balasana (Childs Pose)
Begin on your hands and knees with toes stretched out. Shift your hips back to sit on the heels and rest your abdomen onto your thighs and your forehead onto the floor. Either extend your arms out ahead or behind you. If there is discomfort in knees place a folded blanket in between the feet and hips and/or place a bolster under the forehead. Hold for a minunte or longer.
We encourage practicing these poses and holding each for approximately thirty seconds, and repeating as needed.
Need help integrating relaxation practices AND nutrition and digestive support? Please grab your Free copy of Roadmap to Gut Recovery to learn more. You can also schedule a free 30-minute Assessment Session with me. Together, we’ll identify where your best, most efficient action towards healing can be directed. I look forward to meeting you!
Bloating is one of the most common symptoms of IBS and SIBO, and one of the most uncomfortable. Along with frequent diarrhea or constipation, bloating is probably the symptom that drives most clients to seek help.
Luckily, with some concerted effort, bloating is one of the symptoms that responds well to dietary and lifestyle habit interventions. In today’s post, I’m going to share my top 6 tips for natural bloating relief to reduce bloating due to IBS or SIBO.
What Are the Primary Causes of Bloating?
There are really just a few primary causes of bloating. A huge one is bacterial overgrowth in the intestines. Bacteria eat and excrete, just like we do. Their excretion is gas.
Some bacterial gases that can cause bloating include methane, hydrogen, and hydrogen sulfide. This last one can cause rotten egg farts, and bad breath.
Bacteria generally like to feed on sugars or starches, and this is why a diet like the Low FODMAP diet, that reduces the amount of certain fermentable starches, often helps you feel better if you suffer from bloating. Another microbiome culprit of bloating is yeasts, like candida.
The other main cause of bloating is constipation or slow gut motility. When your gut slows down, this can make it more likely for gases to build up before they are released, and this can make you feel super uncomfortable!
Some people have bloating so severe that they look pregnant by the end of the day.
Therefore my natural bloating relief tips are going to address these root causes.
Natural Bloating Relief Tips
Natural Bloating Relief Tip # 1: Stress
The first thing I want to talk about is stress. You might roll your eyes at me, but stress is a huge trigger for digestive symptoms of any kind. Stress puts your body into fight or flight mode. When this happens, your digestion slows or stops. To keep your digestion moving well, you want to be in the “rest and digest” state. To tame stress, identify your triggers, address the things you can, and create a plan to manage the stress from things you can’t control. Managing this type of stress includes meditation or mindfulness practices, physical activity, laughing regularly, therapy, and doing things you love. You owe it to yourself to handle this first.
Natural Bloating Relief Tip #2: Identify Your Food Triggers
You can make a lot of forward progress with bloating by investing time to identify your food triggers. This helps you get your symptoms under control relatively quickly. One of the easiest ways to figure out your food triggers is to work closely with a Food-Symptom Diary. (If you don’t already have mine, you can grab your free copy here and get right to work.)
Once you are feeling a little better, you can turn your attention to healing deeper layers of gut dysfunction, and hopefully expand your food choices again to a more normal template. Here are some food types that may be contributing to your symptoms to consider:
FODMAPs: FODMAPs are types of carbohydrates that feed bacteria, and may lead to a symptom flare. The goal is not to avoid ALL high FODMAP foods, but to identify the particular ones that flare your symptoms. Check out my video Low FODMAP Diet for IBS and the blog Your IBS Diet Plan in Context for instructions on how to do this.
High Carb Diet: Too much carbohydrate, sugar, and starch may be your issue. Most of this may be covered by considering FODMAP foods, but in some cases, it may be more broad than that. See if reducing your carbs while increasing your proteins and fats helps.
Too Much Fiber:Too much fiber, especially too much too fast can lead to bloating. You can reduce your intake of fiber (or prebiotics), or back off entirely until you work through other root causes.
Too Much Fat: Some people experience bloating if they eat too much fat. Some are sensitive to animal protein, while others are sensitive to industrial seed oils like canola, soy, and cottonseeed, which can easily become rancid. And for some of you, no matter what the fat is, your gall bladder is struggling to produce enough bile to help break down your fats. Figuring out which situation applies to you can help you make the right choices.
Natural Bloating Relief Tip #3: Support Basic Digestive Function
No matter your digestive troubles, you should always be supporting your basic digestive function. For a more in depth discussion of how to do this, check out my video Digestion Tips for IBS and SIBO. But here are the top three to get you started:
Stomach Acid: Stomach acid greatly helps your digestive tract keep moving, and so helps with bloating. You can support stomach acid by using a little apple cider vinegar or lemon juice in water before meals, or by using betaine hydrochloric acid (HCL) capsules.
Enzymes: Enzymes help your food break all the way down, which may reduce the symptoms of bloating. If carbs are a problem, look for enzymes with amylase. If fats are a problem, make sure you are getting lipase or ox bile. And if proteins aggravate your bloating, make sure there is some protease in there (and you did follow the previous step of stomach acid, too, right? This helps protein break down fully.)
The RIGHT Probiotics (usually no histamine producers): Probiotics are important for good digestive and immune function, but the wrong kinds can aggravate bloating. This is especially true if you are struggling with methane-dominant SIBO or histamine intolerance. Make sure to choose probiotics that don’t have histamine producing strains. Check out my video Probiotics Guide for IBS and SIBO for more information.
Natural Bloating Relief Tip #4: Get Your Gut Moving
Oftentimes bloating is closely related to how quickly your food is moving through your intestines. The more slowly it is moving through, the more bloating you are likely to have. Check out these tips for helping your digestion move along at a normal pace.
Exercise: The physical jostling of exercise helps move the bowels, and it also creates beneficial biochemical changes. At least a daily walk helps keep things moving.
Stretching and Yoga: My colleagues and friends, Ben and Rupali Brown, owners of Pali Yoga in Eureka, CA shared this with me about yoga poses that are beneficial for bloating (You can read their whole post with photos of the poses over on their blog here):
“Simple yoga poses can go along way towards helping to relieve the symptoms of belly bloating. By practicing a range of asanas, we get our bodies moving, which increases blood flow and aids in the expulsion of gas and excessive fluid retention. There are both physical and mental results of these poses that will positively effect belly bloating.
Simple inversions, such as headstand and handstand, calm the nervous system and give gas an easy pathway out of the body. Twisting, like in Supta Matsyendrasana (reclined twist pose) stimulates your internal organs and helps you move internal stagnation. Forward folds, such as uttanasana (standing forward fold), apasana (knees to chest pose), malasana (yogic squat), balasana (child’s pose) can also put direct pressure on the abdomen to help expel gas. More poses that can help include Setubandhasna (Bridge Pose) and Marjariasana Pose (Cat Pose) can be helpful as well.
Additionally, breathing in a way that encourages abdominal contraction on the exhale and dilation on the inhale will increase peristaltic motion. Lastly the benefits of calming the nervous system and reducing anxiety will have perhaps the greatest impact on the healthy functioning of our digestive system, discouraging the over-production of gases in the first place. We encourage practicing these poses and holding each for approximately thirty seconds, and repeating as needed.”
Prokinetics (ginger, LDN): Certain herbal or pharma consumables help encourage intestinal motility. These include Ginger, and low-dose naltrexone (LDN). A few commercial products that help include MotilPro by Pure Encapsulations, and Iberogast by Iberogast, and Motility Activator by Integrative Therapeutics. (You can find these products in my online supplement dispensary at FullScript.)
Massage: Loving up your belly with a little massage oil every now and then can encourage your motility. And come on, this isn’t so hard! It feel’s nice! The main thing is to always work in a clockwise direction, because this is the direction of flow for your large intestine. Try small circles all around the perimeter of your belly.
Adhesions: If chronic constipation and slow motility are a huge contributor to your bloating, you may have abdominal adhesions or scar tissue physically pulling on your intestines and slowing their flow. The gold standard for this work is the Clear Passage Clinics. There are several around the country, and they have had amazing success treating abdominal adhesions in their patients. Or look for a massage therapist or physical therapist in your area who specializes in working with adhesions.
Enemas: Regular enemas can help keep things moving. This particular tip has been a HUGE help for me. If you make a mistake with a trigger food and you’re really uncomfortable, a simple water enema, or enema with some medicinal components can relieve the pressure and allow the gas to move out quickly.
Vagus Nerve Support: The vagus nerve is the super communication highway between your brain and your gut. It is a major contributor to gut motility, so encouraging vagus nerve function can keep your gut moving. Check out my video Digestion Tips for IBS and SIBO for more information about how to stimulate the vagus nerve.
Natural Bloating Relief Tip #5: Correctly Identify Infections and Treat, In the Right Order, for a Long Enough Time
Gut infections and dysbiosis can be a significant contributor to bloating. Parasites, bacteria, and yeasts can aggravate the lining of your gut, produce excess gas and toxins, and blow you up like a balloon, especially the bacterial infections. For more information on this topic, check out my video Gut Microbiome Testing for IBS and SIBO.
Parasites: Parasites, if present, must be addressed first. To skip over this step will usually render any other attempts to deal with bacterial or yeast infections ineffective. Parasites are also somewhat difficult to find with culturing or microscopy stool samples, DNA-PCR analysis can find parasites much more reliably.
SIBO: A very frequent underlying cause to ongoing bloating is SIBO, or Small Intestinal Bacterial Overgrowth. Testing is relatively simple, and treatment includes many of the things I’ve discussed here. If you are having trouble locating a practitioner who offers SIBO testing, please schedule an assessment session with me to discuss.
Yeasts: Yeasts like Candida may be aggravating your bloating, but can only be addressed after any parasites or bacterial problems have been cleared up. Stool testing with a DNA-PCR analysis, like the GI-MAP really helps to identify the level of yeast, and is superior to stool testing that attempts to culture the microorganisms. Yeasts are very difficult to culture.
Natural Bloating Relief Tip #6: Absorb Gases
One last possible way to help is to use binders or herbs that help to absorb the excess gasses that are causing pressure. You may not want to choose this route if you struggle with constipation, as binders may slow things down. Here are two options.
Atrantil: A product designed by a gastroenterologist, this three-herb formula can really help reduce bloating. (I don’t have any affiliation with Atrantil, I’ve just used it and found that it worked).
Binders like clay and activated charcoal: These can also be really valuable, but must be taken on an empty stomach and away from food. The one I use is called GI Detox, by Bio-Botanical Research (also no affiliation).
Conclusion
I hope that all these bloating tips can help you find some relief from your bloating, no matter the cause. Now that you know what to try, where will you focus your attention first? Leave me a comment or a question below.
If all this information feels overwhelming, know that you don’t need to stress about it. I’m here to help you! If you need some extra help sorting out how to make sense of this for your unique situation, I encourage you to do one of two things:
During my late teens and early 20s, mental and gut health challenges slowly became daily burdens in my life. The first time I experienced anxiety, I startled awake in my dorm room with my heart racing in the middle of the night, wondering if I was having a heart attack. Other times, I would sometimes experience a deep sense of foreboding, like something really bad was about to happen, and I would frantically ask my friends or partner to change plans.
By my 30s, I had frequent diarrhea and cramping attacks, which were inconvenient when I wasn’t near a bathroom. I would go through periods where I was nauseated a lot. And I couldn’t sort out why it was happening. And my worry compounded my digestive symptoms. I could see some overlap between my mental and gut health symptoms, but I didn’t really realize until later how my mental and gut health were deeply connected.
As I studied functional nutrition, it suddenly all fell into place: the health of our gut is totally connected to our mental health status.
Here are some aspects of the mental and gut health connection you may not know about that may help you understand what you are up against, and to create a plan.
1. The Gut and Mental Health -Microbiome Connection
Your gut is home to a community ecosystem of microorganisms, made up of bacteria, yeasts, and even some types of parasites. When in balance, this ecosystem helps you maintain your digestive function, create and absorb nutrients, and maintain an effective barrier against pathogens, or bad guys. These microorganisms communicate by chemical signaling messages, which can be actually transmitted from gut to brain. In this way, your gut tells your brain if you’re feeling well, or if you’re feeling stressed. This is the source of a “gut feeling”.
Healthy microbiome residents, like certain kinds of Bacillus bacteria, are responsible for creating certain essential nutrients via fermentation in the colon, such as B vitamins, vitamin K2, vitamin A, and antioxidants. Some of these nutrients help maintain good gut barrier function, and prevent toxins from unwelcome microorganisms from getting to and affecting your brain.
If you have populations of unwelcome, pathogenic bacteria, their chemical messages and waste exhaust communicate with your brain via the vagus nerve and can contribute to anxiety and depression symptoms. Collections of digestive symptoms are often a sign that gut infections may be present. Because the gut microbiome is so important to brain health, it’s important to address any hidden infections as a part of your plan to resolve your mental health challenges at its roots.
2. Regular Bowel Movements are Essential to Gut and Mental Health
If you aren’t pooping regularly, toxins and exhaust from bacteria can increase and affect your mood and mental health. For example, elevated methane gas from bacterial overgrowth in the small intestine can create severe brain fog, anxiety, depression, headaches, irritability, and fatigue. Moving the bowels if constipated may help reduce mental health symptoms. (See 9 Ways to Get to the Bottom of Chronic Constipation for additional help and resources).
3. The Thyroid- Gut and Mental Health Connection
Thyroid imbalances are closely related to your gut health and mental health. A majority of T4 hormone (made in the thyroid gland) is converted to T3 (the usable hormone) in the gut. In this way, emergent thyroid problems may be a digestive disturbance at the root, and can often be cleaned up with an elimination diet and adrenal support.
If your body notices too little thyroid hormone, your brain and thyroid gland may try to make up the difference by releasing more Thyroid Stimulating Hormone (TSH), leading to too much hormone. Too much thyroid hormone, and you may experience anxiety. Too little thyroid hormone, or low levels of T3 and T4, and you will likely feel depressed. Supporting your thyroid function by supporting your gut function can be a really important part of balancing any mental health concerns.
4. The Gluten- Gut and Mental Health Connection
Many authors have noted the presence of mental health symptoms with the consumption of gluten. Grain Brain by Dr. David Perlmutter, Why Isn’t My Brain Working by Dr. Datis Kharrazian, The Autoimmune Fix by Dr. Tom O’Bryan, The Paleo Diet Cure by Chris Kresser, L.Ac., Healthy Gut, Healthy You by Dr. Michael Ruscio, and many more explain how consuming gluten foods breaks down gut barrier function which allows toxins to reach your brain and affect your moods and mental well-being.
As partially digested gluten (and other) proteins make it to the brain through a leaky gut, they can cause inflammation in the brain and contribute to mental health symptoms, including anxiety, depression, brain fog, poor memory, and even schizophrenic episodes. There was some very interesting research done in state hospitals in the 1960s removing gluten from the diets of schizophrenics. The patients experienced noticeably improved symptoms, and symptoms got worse with the reintroduction of gluten. If you are experiencing gut and mental health challenges, you might consider a gluten elimination diet. You can read more in 6 Reasons to Quit Gluten If You Have a Chronic Illness.
5. The Importance of Good Digestive Function for Gut and Mental Health
Many of our mood-supporting and regulating amino acids and neurotransmitters, like GABA or 5-HTP, or serotonin are in part made from protein foods in our diet. For your body to have access to the amino acids that build neurotransmitters, they must be chemically broken down from protein with hydrochloric acid in your stomach. If your body is low on stomach acid, then you can become deficient in aminos important for your mood regulation. Further, even if you can break down the proteins, if your gut function is compromised by bacterial overgrowth, yeasts or parasites, you may not be adequately absorbing the aminos you need either. Supporting your belly for robust digestive function is important for your mental health. You can read more in Have You Skipped These 9 Digestion Tips in Your Quest to Heal?
6. The Stress- Gut and Mental Health Connection
I hope by now you can begin to understand how important good digestive function is to support gut and mental health. High stress levels work against this process, and not only decrease our mood, but deplete our ability to maintain a positive mood. Stress also decreases our digestive efficiency, by slowing down digestion. To make matters worse, staying stressed out burns through large quantities of amino acids, which can further deplete your stores. Coupled with a compromised digestive system, you can see a self-reinforcing feedback loop worsening your mental health state. To make sure your stress isn’t wrecking your gut and mental health, it’s imperative to focus on effective stress relief practices, such as breathing, yoga, meditation, or simply doing something you love.
7. The Importance of Fat for Gut and Mental Health
In a world that has mistakenly villianized dietary fat, our mental health has suffered. Not only does too much carbohydrate-rich food feed the bacteria and other microorganisms that can destabilize your gut and therefore your mood, your body need fats to make your hormones. Your hormones help keep your moods in check, help you feel motivated, confident, and relaxed. As women begin to experience perimenopause, for example, levels of progesterone decrease, which can increase feelings of anxiety and stress. This process often collides with increased family and career demands, leading to a confluence of events that can precipitate a mental health crisis. If this woman also happens to be eating a low-fat diet, she will feel far worse than a woman who is consuming healthy fats. Make sure that you are including healthy fats (olive, avocado, coconut, ghee, or butter) and are avoiding industrial seed oils (cottonseed, soy, canola, safflower oils) in your diet, and are supporting healthy fat digestion with stomach acid and enzyme support.
Conclusion: What does all this amount to?
To work on resolving anxiety or depression at its root cause, it’s important to consider what exactly is going on in the gut, the interface between your gut and your food, and to work to balance and correct it. In most cases, the gut is a significant contributor to mental health symptoms, and must be balanced. This work is done by managing stress, adjusting the diet to reduce inflammation, removing infections, and repairing the gut barrier function and leaky gut. It can take some time, but the mental health improvements, without medication, are worth the effort for those that want to avoid medication.
If you are experiencing gut and mental health symptoms, know that you are not alone and that there is a lot you can do to heal yourself from the inside out! When you’re ready for a some support and action in crafting a plan to investigate your root causes and heal, schedule a free 30-minute phone call with me here. Together, we’ll assess where you are, and what your next best steps would be. I look forward to talking with you.
Maybe you can relate to the following stress story:
One morning recently, I woke up just a little late. My son (who is 7) wanted help getting dressed, and my daughter asked if I could help her with an online order before school.
Once I got my son dressed, I made everyone breakfast, and then collected my son’s water bottle and soccer gear, and made sure he had his weekly homework assignment. Because he’s gluten-free (and also quite picky), I made his lunch. My kids argued with each other over breakfast, which got my blood pressure pumping.
I sent them both off to school, and worked on organizing a meeting I was hosting. The caterer fell through at the 11th hour. Shortly after, I realized that there was an open house at school that evening, during the hour when I normally cook dinner, but 30 minutes after soccer practice ended. My husband was unavailable to cover for me.
By mid-day, I was feeling amped and stressed, and I could hardly focus. My stomach hurt, and I was developing a headache. I was angry at everything.
Maybe this scenario, of overlapping and constant daily stress, plays out with similar events in your life?
But if you’re dealing with an ongoing health challenge, this ongoing stress experience can really impede your progress. Without some kind of method to reduce and calm this stress, you will continue to live in a “fight or flight” state, and spin your wheels.
I say this about a lot of things, but dealing with your stress level is a non-negotiable. By this, I mean that you must actively work to reduce your stress levels regularly, so your body can be PHYSICALLY able to work on repair and healing.
What Stress Does to Your Body
One of the major things that happens when you are under stress is that your brain tells your adrenal glands to produce cortisol and adrenaline. Your body is designed for this.
Your body is designed to respond this way when you are confronted with a threat on your life: a wild animal, a threatening human, a near-accident, a major injury.
When your body makes the surge of cortisol (and adrenaline), your liver mobilizes a store of sugar, so you can physically have the energy to respond to the crisis. You are meant to experience this stress, and then literally either run or shake off the excess energy. This is why when you get really scared, you can’t control yourself from shaking.
But every day in your modern life, you experience many small stresses throughout your day: you double booked your mid-morning hour. You have a pressing deadline at work. Your kid comes down with a cold and stays home, keeping you home from work. There was traffic on your commute. You have a fight with your spouse. Your house is a mess. You have a chronic health condition. Your neighbor is making too much noise. Sometimes it’s all of these in one morning.
Though each of these obviously isn’t a major life-threatening emergency, your body doesn’t know the difference. Your body thinks this stress is a major threat, and it releases cortisol and adrenaline.
It’s reasonable and normal for this to happen every once in a while. But we are experiencing this tens or hundreds of times per day. AND, on the whole, we’re less active, and not discharging all that mobilized energy.
Over time, this continuous stress response can decrease your ability mobilize it. Your adrenal glands get tired! At this point, when your reserve has been worn down, you become less able to mobilize your cortisol.
Without enough cortisol, you feel TIRED. Groggy. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. You also get sick more often. You have new aches and pains. You begin to develop all kinds of symptoms, everything from insomnia, to hormone trouble, weight gain, muscle loss, blood sugar problems, and more.
When you exist in a constant fight or flight stress response, many important body functions shut down.
Brain function declines, immune function gets worse, cell repair doesn’t happen, digestion slows or shuts down, libido decreases, and at the cellular level, your body elevates your blood sugar, leading to chronic inflammation.
In a lot of ways, imbalances with your cortisol stress response can be linked to just about ANY physical sign or symptom. So let’s talk about how you can calm down your stress response, so you can start creating the possibility of healing.
Stress Management is a Non-Negotiable Health Foundation
With all these high stakes, reducing stress is an important foundational health practice.
The 2nd Step of my Roadmap to Recovery (you can grab your copy here) is to Create A Solid Health Foundation. Diving into crazy testing and aiming for the root cause right off the bat is putting the cart before the horse. If your stress is through the roof, no amount of testing, supplements, or food changes are going to fix your health challenge.
So what do you do about it?
It’s true that you can’t always get away from stress. If you are a parent like me, your kids will demand a lot from you. If you work, your job will be stressful. No matter your life situation, you likely experience moments you wish you could forget.
But you CAN work to rearrange some aspects of this. Zooming out from ground zero, you can work to invent creative solutions to handle the stress ahead of time. You can improve your kids’ self-sufficiency by teaching them. You can work on pre-emptively planning things at work to improve your flow.
And you can also work on managing your physiological response to stress. The most common way to get there is by inviting a meditation or mindfulness practice of some kind.
It may feel a little cliché to think about meditation, but it really and truly does WORK. And even if “meditation” makes you think of annoyingly poised people wearing white and sitting on a cushion, and you can’t imagine yourself doing it, you are likely already doing it. It just may look different.
This is what I like to suggest: find something that you absolutely LOVE. What is it for you? Surfing? Walking by a river or lake? Being with someone special? Listening to music? Reading your favorite author or magazine? Eating out? Going to plays? Making love with your partner? A hobby, like knitting? What feeds your soul and makes your heart sing?
TIP #1: If “meditation” as we imagine it doesn’t do it for you, pick that thing you do where HOURS can slip by, and you don’t know what happened. Do this.
And do it regularly. Daily if you can.
What I find really makes the difference is disrupting your brain from the “nothing is going right” thinking pattern. It’s inviting a state of being where you are in the moment. It’s that space where hours can fly by, and you didn’t even notice.
Stress and Digestion
I mentioned earlier that the stress response slows or stops digestion. It’s difficult to properly digest your food and provide your body with the nutrition it needs when digestion is slowed or stopped.
The best way to invite good digestion is to focus on chewing your food well and breathing while you eat! It’s remarkable how relaxing this simple technique is for lowering your stress level.
TIP #2: This may take a little bit of practice, but here’s how to eat for stress relief and good digestion:
Choose a place to sit down to eat. Don’t eat standing, on the run, or in your car. Outdoors is best, especially if you work indoors.
Remove all distractions: put away your phone, your iPad, reading, everything. Focus on EATING and nothing else.
When you sit down, take a deep breath, and make a statement of gratitude for your food. For example, “Thank you for this delicious, nourishing food.”
Think about eating your food. Smell it, and look at it, and think of how good it’s going to taste. This should encourage salivation and your enzymes, which will improve your digestion.
Dive in to eating. Take a bite, set your fork down, and thoroughly chew, allowing your food to mix with your saliva. Aim for 20-40 chews per bite. Really experience the flavors!
Each time your mind begins to wander to other things, return your attention to your food. If you remember something important you need to do, keep some paper handy to write it down. You can deal with it after your meal!
I promise that eating in this fashion will feel great, restore your peace of mind, AND improve your digestion. I like to think of these moments as a mini-vacation. We don’t need to go to Hawaii or the Bahamas to experience rest and relaxation, we only need to bring our awareness home.
Remove Hidden Sources of Stress: Toxins
When I use the term “hidden stressors”, I’m often referring to underlying infections that may have been left unaddressed. But there are other kinds of hidden stressors that are important to be aware of.
One that you can work on in your own life is electronic pollution, from EMFs, wifi, and cellular radiation. Reducing exposure to these stress sources as you are able helps your body cope better with the other stress it’s dealing with.
TIP #3: Try these tips to reduce your hidden toxin sources:
Turn your cell phone off, or to airplane mode at bedtime.
Unplug any electronics with power packs in your bedroom.
Turn off wifi routers while not in use, and overnight. If possible, use a cord to connect to the internet.
Use headphones on your cell phone or cordless phone, instead of holding the phone to your ear.
Another hidden stressor is chemicals in cleaning products, hygiene products, and housewares, like pots and pans, furniture, and carpet. They can be present in your soaps, detergents, air fresheners, cleaners, shampoo, toothpastes, deodorants, and more.
An easy way to reduce the burden on your body is to replace these with non-toxic formulas as you are able, or to make informed choices when buying new furniture or housewares. See the Environmental Working Group’s consumer reports for more information.
Conclusion
It may seem like stress is insurmountable, but with some dedicated intention, you can get it under control, and create the conditions your body needs to heal.
Though it can be tempting to get excited about the next best thing when it comes to fixing your health challenges, focusing on foundations is essential, and sets you up for success. You need to take a serious look at your stress, and create new approaches to reducing stress in your life and on your body.
If I didn’t mention your preferred stress reduction method, please leave a comment and share it below!
To find out about the other essential health foundations you need to allow your body to heal, and the 7 steps to get to your personal remission or long-term management plan, get your copy of Roadmap to Recovery here.
Or, if you need support identifying your underlying stressors that are contributing to your symptoms, so you can make a plan, I invite you to meet with me for a 30-minute Assessment Session. Here, I can help clarify where you are on YOUR Road to Recovery, and provide guidance about your next steps.
