There are few things in the world that will bring you to your knees faster than tummy trouble. What’s even more astonishing is that nearly 75% of women are dealing with gut issues at least a few times a month.
But in today’s fast paced hustle culture, it’s important to understand that tummy troubles don’t always stem directly from your gut, or the food you eat.
Tummy troubles can also stem from:
- Long-standing stress
- Emotional patterns & beliefs
- The health of our Vagus nerve
When the body perceives stress (real or imagined), it activates the Sympathetic Nervous System (SNS) which initiates the fight, flight, freeze or fawn response in the body.
This is how your nervous system keeps you safe by shuttling energy and blood flow away from your organs and to your limbs so you can outrun, out fight, or even out smart any perceived threat.
Notice I said perceived stress (real or imagined). The nervous system can’t determine the difference between the stress we feel from being chased by a hungry tiger, and the psychological stress we experience when we’re in a toxic relationship, we have a looming deadline, or when it’s 3am and our kiddo starts vomiting everywhere and we catapult ourselves out of bed and into a bleary-eyed triage mode.
It’s all stress!
The body simply goes into its whatever stress response it knows is going to keep us safe and alive. And it always shuts down the digestive system in the process – because the human body is designed to either deal with stress or digest. Never both at the same time.
This is how long-standing stress of all kinds can deeply impact gut health. Today, most women are walking around in an ongoing fight, flight, freeze or fawn response. That perpetual stress has a deep impact on digestion, immune system function, and mood.
Our emotional patterns and deeply held beliefs can also impact our gut health. On average, humans have about 6,000 thoughts each day. And we have an emotional response to those thoughts at an almost simultaneous time. Those emotional responses generate a chemical reaction in the body that bathes our tissues in either a life-giving or toxic soup.
Depending on what we are feeling, and how long we feel it for, the chemistry our body creates has a powerful impact on our physiology as well.
The ways we perceive the world around us, and our deeply held belief systems carry an emotional frequency or vibration. Feelings like frustration, overwhelm, doubt, worry, fear, grief, and shame are on the lower end of the vibrational scale. Joy, appreciation, passion, empowerment, hope and enthusiasm are on the higher end of the scale.
Where we spend the most time on this vibrational scale influences our chemistry, permeates our bodies, and impacts our physiology, too.
Studies have shown that worry, anxiety, and grief can affect the speed at which foods move through the digestive tract. Feelings of shame, guilt, and anger can impact the balance of bacteria in the gut, encouraging an overgrowth of unhealthy bacteria.
Both of these can lead to all kinds of systemic health issues like skin conditions, irritability and mood swings, weight gain, localized gut discomfort, and more. These are all things we may not immediately associate with our gut health.
It’s even less likely that we will make the connection between our emotional health and our gut health.
Lower frequency emotions encourage inflammation and an overgrowth of lower frequency microbes and bacteria throughout the body and in the gut. In contrast, higher frequency thoughts and emotions encourage the proliferation of higher frequency microbes.
The 3rd thing that affects gut and overall health is the Vagus nerve.
The Vagus nerve, also called the “master nerve”, controls the activation of the Parasympathetic Nervous System (PNS) in the body. When it is healthy, it helps us come out of the fight, flight, freeze and fawn response, and into the “rest and digest” state.
But its function can become compromised over time via physical compression, injury, long standing stress patterns in the fascia, organs or viscera of the body, ongoing or complex trauma, dysfunctional respiration patterns, and more.
When the Vagus nerve doesn’t function in the ways it is supposed to, the nervous system has a very hard time:
1) launching a healthy and appropriate response to the stressors in our lives, and
2) coming out of that stress response when the threat is no longer present.
Learning to tone, rehabilitate, and activate the Vagus nerve so that it functions in the ways we need it to can also radically support gut and overall health.
When it comes to tummy troubles, it can be so easy to focus on symptom relief because my goodness, don’t we want to feel better FAST?!
But all too often, symptom relief masks the underlying root causes that need to be addressed so that we can experience long-term relief – which is what all of us really want.
This is why I firmly believe that as much as diet, hydration, supplementation, and lifestyle supports are the foundation for amazing vitality and health, they will only take you so far.
Breakthroughs can happen, but very often, they don’t last. And when you keep “falling off the wagon” or that “supplement stops working” you lose trust in your body and in yourself.
To transform your body, your energy, your health and the way you live, you must look deeper.
My Self-Honoring Woman System can help you with both! Reach out for a free chat to learn how.
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