Body Science
The enteric nervous system of the gut is intimately connected to and shares a unique bi-directional relationship with the central nervous system. Like a loop, bottom-up messages are sent from the gut to the brain, while top-down messages are sent from the brain to the gut. In addition to being responsible for our ‘gut instincts,’ bottom-up messages influence how we feel physically, emotionally and psychologically, affecting both our cognition and our decision-making abilities. Top-down messaging influences the way our gut functions and its internal environment. When our brain senses danger, for example, if a person were being chased by a bear or were risking humiliation before giving a public speech, the brain sends messages to the gut to evacuate the bowels, before slowing both motility and digestion so that energy stores might be better spent fighting or fleeing whatever is causing the danger. The brain does not always distinguish between real danger and the perceived danger found in many of our daily activities, nor does it perceive the difference between physical or psychological stressors.
In plain English, what this means is that emotional/psychological stress has an affect on the way your gastrointestinal (GI) tract functions and perhaps equally as important, the quality of the environment in which your good gut bacteria thrives or strives. Inversely, the way your GI functions and the quality of your gut bacterial health affects the way you think and feel.
Prolonged changes to emotional or psychological states can cause changes in the gut that include inflammation and the sensitization of sensory neurons that would otherwise be inactive. This results in some people being more acutely aware of their gut, suffering more pain, discomfort and irregular gastrointestinal function. Also, the physical and mechanical changes top-down messaging create under prolonged psychological duress may not only disrupt gut function but create an environment that is uninhabitable for a person’s beneficial bacteria to thrive. This leads to a consequence of disruption in normal bottom-up messaging, or in order words, a harmful communication loop. Irritable bowel syndrome may be the body’s way of expressing exposure to prolonged psychological duress including high stress, anxiety or depression. Hunger and satiety signals may even be skewed so that a person feels hunger or craves foods when they otherwise shouldn’t (we’ll save that discussion for another time). Some of these changes may have a lasting impact.
This opens the door for the possibility that many different things may contribute to the persistent and unpleasant physical experiences people suffering Irritable Bowel Syndrome endure, and with that potential symptomatic treatment deriving from all aspects of a person’s life: relational, physical, existential, emotional, mental and environmental. Finding and focusing on the greatest opportunities for stress reduction may play a key part in reducing symptoms. Those suffering from IBS may use other resources like journaling that is both food-specific and experience orientated to gather more data. They may track their intake of probiotics and prebiotics. In addition, self-care, stress-reduction and intentional physical activities all may prove beneficial to reducing GI distress.
With clients like this, we often work on improving the quality and balance of food including increasing the amounts of fermented foods and those higher in probiotics while also working on planning and prepping for more consistent whole food meal timing. We work together on stress relief techniques and exercise. We look at meditation and mindfulness practices like yoga. We work on sleep behaviours and bedtime rituals and encourage some form of stress-reducing fitness. We also need to consider that more serious psychological disorders like anxiety or depression may be involved. If this is the case, we may determine that the client is best to seek the care of someone better equipped to help them manage such conditions specifically.
The Nutrition Coaching I offer doesn’t just focus on what you eat and this is just one of the reasons why.
Are you done with diets and food fads? Do you want to transform your body and your relationship with nutrition, and are you willing to put in the hard work to accomplish your goals?
I offer a program specifically tailored to help you break big goals down into small, actionable steps that you can do every day, easily in order to build sustainable healthy habits without feeling miserable about it. I won’t tell you what to eat no matter what kind of diet you prefer. This is a program that works even for people who think they hate health and nutrition:
