Anxiety and Your Gut
Not to Stress You Out but......
Most of us know that when you’re hungry, you don’t have as much energy, and simple cognitive or physical tasks can seem difficult. But this connection runs far deeper than just communicating hunger and lack of energy. You know that funny feeling in your gut when you start to get nervous about something? Or how you might feel “sick to your stomach” about a big presentation coming up at work? Stress can directly impact the health of your gastrointestinal tract, which can lead to a whole host of other issues throughout your body.
Anxiety is perceived emotional stress. All stress, big or small, has an effect on the body. Some stress is very temporary, like being late for a meeting. The body understands how to handle temporary stress properly. Other stress, like divorce or the death of a loved one, can cause long-lasting effects that the body is not necessarily equipped to control. An article from Harvard Health Publishing at Harvard Medical School put it this way: “Stress (or depression or other psychological factors) can affect movement and contractions of the GI tract, make inflammation worse, or perhaps make you more susceptible to infection” [1]. The more you worry about something, the greater these symptoms are compounded.
Emotional stress can play all kinds of tricks on the body—many starting in the GI tract. Symptoms can include heartburn, abdominal cramps, loose stool, or constipation. What’s even more interesting? The connection between your stress and your GI tract is actually a conversation, not just a one-way message. If you are experiencing gut issues, that can lead to more stress, just as stress can lead to gut issues. It is an intimate and cyclical system.
The science behind it:
When the body is stressed, higher amounts of cortisol are released. Cortisol is a steroid hormone produced in the adrenal glands. The more stress, the harder the adrenals work to keep up. With continued over-working of the adrenal system, the resilience of the body’s cells, tissues and organs begins to break down. Because of this, the body’s longer-term capacity to respond to these changes (metabolic reserve) becomes hindered [2]. All of this leads to an overactive adrenal system, which can turn into HPA-D, formerly known as adrenal fatigue. HPA-D is often a precursor to and a symptom of many different issues, including gastrointestinal disorders. In short, chronic emotional stress can manifest physical conditions.
So what can you do about it?
Just relax. Easier said than done, right? However, this is the main idea. If you want to feel healthy again, you will have to make some changes in your lifestyle and nutrition. Whether it’s meditating for ten minutes a day, keeping a strict bedtime, or cutting out gluten from your diet, there are small things you can do that will make a difference.
If you’re sick of feeling sick to your stomach, try seeking out a functional nutritionist. Everybody is different, and should be treated individually—that is the basis of functional medicine. Whatever is causing your stress is important. We’ll look at all the areas of your life, and help you reduce stress, heal your HPA-D or your gut, and live balanced.
The key to controlling the HPA axis is diet, exercise and lifestyle habits. If you are experiencing any of the issues above, PLEASE reach out to me. Sign up for a 20-minute Health Discovery Session for $49
and we’ll get you started on a path toward better health today
https://www.health.harvard.edu/diseases-and-conditions/the-gut-brain-connection
https://kresserinstitute.com/adrenal-fatigue-hpa-axis-dysregulation/
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Heidi Toy Functional Medicine Blog
Did you know most people didn’t have refrigerators in their homes until well into the 1900’s? It wasn’t even invented for large scale commercial use until the mid 1800’s [1]. So how did people keep their milk cold and make their food last longer? Fermentation. It sounds like a gross concept, because we often associate fermentation with a bad odor, but foods like cheese, yogurt, sauerkraut and pickles are all fermented foods. And those aren’t gross, are they? Well, some might disagree with me about sauerkraut, but that’s beside the point. Fermented foods are digestive aids. Microscopic living organisms in fermented foods help extend the food’s shelf life, enhance flavor, and help the body absorb minerals. These organisms pre-digest the food, getting rid of harmful components, and create more vitamins and enzymes than the food began with. Enzyme-rich foods have many benefits including [2]: Increase digestibility of food we eat Boost immune system Increase alkalinity; neutralizing pH levels Provide a healthy balance of friendly flora in the gut (Learn more about your microbiome in my other blog posts ) Tone the colon and help with elimination Control cravings for unhealthier foods Eliminate toxins and undigested wastes in the body In the “old days,” people use to ferment all kinds of foods through pickling, canning, pasteurization and added salt. Nowadays, however, large scale fermentation has lost many of its nutritious benefits due to the need for speed to get the product on the shelf as fast as possible and as cheap as possible. The only true fermented foods you will find are sauerkraut, kombucha, yogurt and kefir, beans, wine and beer, some meats (such as salami and pastrami), legumes and nuts (such as tofu, soy sauce and miso), sourdough bread, and various kinds of vegetables [3]. Fun facts about sauerkraut: The Germans “stole” it from the Chinese! Sauerkraut (probably not labeled as such for the Chinese, but the same recipe) was one of the main foods for those who built the Great Wall of China. Genghis Khan brought it to Eastern Europe during an invasion. It also contains high levels of vitamin C, and sailors often took it on long journeys to prevent scurvy.
How can we best keep blood sugar stable? Do what our body is designed to do – use fat for energy. Our species did not survive the Ice Age because of vanilla coffee lattes and cheesecake. Throughout most of our history, we ate a diet that was likely 50-70 percent fat. Look at the old family photo albums, specifically pictures of people in the first half of the 1900s, before we had so many processed foods. You won’t see many fat people--in fact, most look darn skinny. If they lived on the farm, they ate lots of eggs, meat, milk, and vegetables out of their own backyards. “Diet foods” were non-existent. Heart disease was almost non-existent. Our metabolism is designed to work much better with fats better than with sugar. Fats provide the slow and steady fuel our body likes to use for energy. Think of fats as a slow-burning log on the fire. One log (i.e. one meal containing fats) lasts for hours. Starchy carbs, on the flip side, are like kindling. You constantly have to throw more twigs (chips, pasta, bagels) to keep the fire burning. The first step is to know your sugars by reading the labels, and then avoid said sugars as much as possible.
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Omega-3 and Omega-6 are considered “essential” fatty acids because they cannot be produced by the body--we get them from the food we eat. They are biologically active upon ingestion, which means the body utilizes them right away and cannot store them up for later. They are essential because they help with both inflammatory and anti-inflammatory responses.
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