FIX MY BELLY

The Link Between Leaky Gut And Stress

How Does Stress Affect Your Gut?

When you think about it, you already know how stress affects your digestion. Think about that time when that awful thing happened and you lost your appetite. In some cases, it may have even made you eat more.

Consider a very useful study about front-line workers during the Covid-19 pandemic. The amount of sheer work lead to enormous amounts of depression and stress. What's more is that this impacted their gut microbiome for at least six months.

The study above not only captures the relationship between stress and gut health but the magnitude of impact. The act of doing one's job, led to significant stress, which brought upon gut health issues. As we'll see below, these digestive problems can work in a vicious cycle.

The Gut-Brain Axis

You've probably heard the saying that the gut is like your "second brain." But what does this mean?

Most people may not know that we literally have a whole nervous system which governs our whole digestive system from start to end. This is called the enteric nervous system. This nervous system is constantly communicating with the central nervous system.

From here, we can already see that the brain can tell the stomach if something is wrong or causing stress and vice versa, the stomach can tell the brain the same information.

Research has even shown that stress and depression can have such an impact on health that it can alter gut bacteria and cause inflammation. When this gut bacteria composition is changed, it can further affect one's eating behaviour and mood. The is the gut-brain axis at play.

Interestingly enough, there's also a study which shows how a healthy gut microbiome with strong gut bacteria can be changed as one ages and goes through life and this can lead to psychological stress and cognition problems.

This is important to note because from here, we can see how problems in the digestive tract affect the brain and can change the way you think, feel, and act. From here, everything can trickle down and affect your daily life.

In addition, if we know that there's a link between our brain and our stomach, it allows us to look at treatment through a different lens, especially when considering the interconnectivity of the human body. This means that we can look at treating the "brain" as well as treating the "gut".

You may have experienced this yourself but often, physicians can prescribe antidepressants for gut health problems (most commonly for irritable bowel syndrome or ). While the reason depends on each case, the thinking can sometimes be attributed to clinicians believing that the problem in your digestive system stems from your head. The thinking is that the antidepressant is to reduce your depression and anxiety symptoms, which then calm down your gut. On the flip side, antidepressants may also reduce the signals coming from your stomach and going to your brain. In some cases, antidepressants were shown to even help with issues like diarrhea and constipation.

When thinking about leaky gut treatment, it's important to take a holistic approach. This means that we must look at managing (and hopefully, reducing) all aspects of stress. If we know that treating our brain, gut, or overall body, better might reduce life's stresses, we can can know that this might help our leaky gut.

How to Manage Stress

If you want to be able improve your leaky gut, it’s very important that you learn how to manage your stress levels. Increased stress leads to increased inflammation, and can be terrible for your gut health.

Sleep

Sleep is very important for your gut health and stress. This is largely due to the fact that sleeps your body to rejuvenate and heal itself. In fact, for many people, sleeping after having a bad stomach episode can be very beneficial. You can improve your symptoms by “sleeping it off.”

By sleeping well, you’re literally reducing the physical stress placed on your gut, which in turn causes mental stress, and getting sleep on top of it!

It’s important to know that your sleep has to be high quality for healing to take place. This means that you shouldn’t sleep immediately after eating. Generally, people have recommended 8 hours when it comes to sleeping, however, this can be more or less for you -- as usual, it's on you to determine what suits your body best.

Finally, remember the 2-way street when it comes to gut health. Basically, a lack of sleep may cause you bathroom problems but these bathroom problems can cause you to sleep more or less than usual. This shows the importance of making sure that you’re getting enough sleep.

Social

We are social creatures so having a positive social life can improve stress levels. Unfortunately, for those with digestive disorders, such as leaky gut, the last thing you often want to do is be social!

This is understandable because who wants to be social when you have to think about what you can (or cannot) eat or the nearest bathroom? How does this reduce your stress!?

While it may sound counter-intuitive, being more social is likely to be better for managing your stress levels. The key here is that you have a healthy social life with positive influences.

Here are a few ways to manage your stress through your social life and improve your gut health.

Talk To A Friend

It’s universally accepted that talking to a real friend feels good. If this reduces your stress, do it! If you’re able to share with your friend your leaky gut issues, you may even be able to better plan your activities. If your gut problems are restricting you from physically seeing someone, consider virtual or digital means.

Let A Friend Talk To You

By having your friend talk to you, you may be able to contribute some value-add advice, take your mind off your leaky gut, and perhaps learn about problems (whether leaky gut or not) that others are facing and how they’re coping.

Learn Through Socialization

By being social, you’ll be able to continue to learn about your triggers. Don’t worry- this is a good thing! You might learn that certain people make you stressful due to their toxicity - great, stay away from them. You might learn that chocolate is horrible for your leaky gut after grabbing dessert with a friend - amazing, now you’ve just learned another thing about your gut.

Mental

Like many illnesses that are “physical” in nature (as leaky gut is), the mental stress is often overshadowed.

As the gut-brain axis was mentioned above, this should showcase how important it is to address psychological stress.

When it comes to combating stress from a mental perspective, there's a few helpful tricks to keep in mind.

Reflection

First, it can be helpful to simply think about the stresses, what's causing them, and simple actions that can be taken to resolve them. For example, realizing that your work is causing you stress allows you to have the freedom and choice to do something about it. From here, it's about putting a plan in place, such as, not over-committing to tasks or looking for another job.

Organizing

Following the example above, an organized schedule can help reduce stress and in turn, even make you feel good as you tackle items on your list. As a pro-tip, as we know, those who suffer from leaky gut can often have more brain fog or anxiety than others, this is where having a schedule and to-list can help you reduce stress. This is because you'll spend less time thinking and more time doing, allowing you to maximize your day and be as productive as you can be (which is still further along than many other people).

Meditation

Meditation can also play a key role in helping you manage your leaky gut. In its simplest form, this is essentially just thinking about nothing for a few minutes. The idea is to calm your mind, your nerves and your thoughts. This can be especially helpful on days when you're having a terrible leaky gut episode with symptoms.

Entertainment

Lastly, consider reading or watching something. This can be anything you want. If the goal is to relax, you get to choose. If you want to read a science fiction book, go for it. If you want to watch videos to further learn about leaky gut syndrome, do it (so long as it doesn't make you feel worse).

Physical

Exercise helps relieve tension and releases chemicals that act as an effective painkilling effect
From a "physical" perspective, there's two areas to look at: weight and exercise.

Weight

Weight plays a major role when it comes to health. You want to be a healthy weight for your body. While most assume that this simply means not to be overweight, that's only part of the issue with those who have leaky gut. Many people with digestive disorders can be underweight as their body is not functioning properly or not sending the right hunger signals. This is the key takeaway here. You want to learn what a healthy weight means for "you" and work towards getting there in a healthy way. As a bonus, this will have a side benefit of additional confidence and positivity which comes from how you view yourself, which in turn, will then also lead to others treating you better.

Exercise

Exercise is known to be very healthy for gut health. While we laid out the specific exercises for leaky gut, it's important to keep in mind that there's no one-size-fits-all for leaky gut. Recommending someone who has constantly diarrhea episodes may or may not work, it's unique to that person. The goal is simply to find an outlet which can relieve your stress and tension. This will release chemicals and make you feel better and keep your digestive system healthy.

Working out can be benefit for chronic stress, anxiety, depression, and while it can be challenging at times, maintaining a physically active lifestyle can help you manage your leaky gut.

Diet

Diet is a very interesting topic when considering stress.

While we have written about herbs, supplements, and diets which can all help manage and treat leaky gut, for many folks, "diet" goes out the window in times of stress.

For example, when dealing with hard situations, people can often resort to eating to release stress, distract themselves, or simply deal with the pain. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this reaction and it's completely normal human behaviour.

While it can take serious willpower to eat well during periods of stress (this will serve you very well if you can do so), it can be more practical to look at your general eating habits (meaning, how you usually eat, whether you're stressed or not).

We know from the gut-brain axis, that there's a two-way stress when it comes to your stomach and brain. If we focus on the stomach part, we know that having a healthy diet can mean reduced leaky gut symptoms. This ultimately can lead to a healthier mind, which may be able to help you better deal with your leaky gut.