When I was little and had to go to school, I would get an upset tummy. Adults would call it ‘butterflies in your tummy’…Umm wtf? I didn’t eat any caterpillars and let them pupate and turn into butterflies!! I know, I know this is just an expression we use for children and sometimes adults when we’re correlating a stressful event with digestive discomfort. But what is actually going on?
Let's get physiological
Our bodies have two governing systems – our Sympathetic Nervous System (SNS) and our Parasympathetic Nervous System (PNS), or ‘Fight, Flight or Freeze’ and ‘Rest and Digest’. Just to quickly recap on a bit of our evolution, as primitive humans we lived with a great deal of danger. Literally life and death situations. Going out to collect some wood for the dinner fire and BAM A SABER TOOTH TIGER! Ready to eat you for its dinner! To survive extreme situations like this, our body developed this reaction to pump us full of stress chemicals to deal with the threatening stimulation, instantaneously. These stress chemicals supercharge our bodies to GTFO of the situation, or battle it. Our heartrate increases to surge blood into our skeletal muscles so that we are basically flooded with superstrength – temporarily.
On the other side, our PNS is responsible for slowing everything down, bringing the blood back from our peripheries and into our digestive system (hence the rest and digest name). We need this because our digestive organs need to be supplied with blood to digest our food and absorb its nutrients. During this state we also wind down to sleep and allow our body to clean house – dealing with pathogens, cleaning out dead cells and repairing tissue (Gibbons, 2019).
So, what is the big deal then?
In primitive times, we experienced a highly stressful situation and then followed by a state of calm, because we either got to safety, or we’re tiger dinner. In order for our bodies to make the most of the aforementioned stress chemicals, we processed them while physically fighting or running away, freezing likely got you turned into tiger dinner…
Back to modern times, we still experience stressful situations, for most of us, not so much life and death levels, but a moderate level of consistent stress. In a time when we’re more connected than ever (digitally), and we have multiple devices in our homes emitting stressful content, it’s very challenging for us to switch off from this. Look, even now, you’re reading this on a screen!
A constant level of stress means that we’re living in a state of SNS dominance and not ever fully reaching our much needed PNS state. What are the implications of this? Well, for starters, we feel stressed all the time! This can look a bit different for all of us, but some of the common symptoms of stress are: irritability, inability to focus, racing heart, anxiety, sleep disturbances and digestive upsets. Many of these are caused by deficiencies caused by malabsorption from impaired gut function. When we’re in the wrong nervous system state we’re not readying our digestive system to adequately function. Blood needs to be sent to our digestive organs to allow a cascade of enzymes and acids that work to process our meals (Pedersen et al., 2018).
Imagine it like this, you’re trying to bake a cake. You’ve mixed up the most beautiful cake batter and it’s ready to bake. But you don’t have enough time to preheat the oven. You don’t even have time to turn on the oven and allow it to bake. So you just whack it in there and cross your fingers it turns out. This is essentially what we’re doing to ourselves when we haven’t primed our gut for digestion. This is where the butterflies in the tummy situation comes in. When we’re feeling stressed, threatened or nervous, our SNS is activated and blood is diverged away from the digestive tract. This is impeding our ability to digest effectively leading to feelings of:
fullness
heart burn
excessive gas
nausea
diarrhoea or constipation.
"Acute and chronic stressors have also been reported to affect the immune system, and an increase in various inflammatory markers has been reported in states of acute stress and chronic stress." - Won & Kim, 2016
While our bodies have buffer systems to allow us to get by doing this occasionally, long term prolonged practice of this is likely to result in the previously nutritional deficiencies, which can lead to neurotransmitter imbalances, leading to deeper ingrained mood disturbances such as chronic anxiety and depression, just to name one potential pathway (Liu & Zhu, 2018; Won & Kim, 2016).
Other potential pathways can lead to autoimmune diseases, chronic fatigue, impaired immunity, SIBO, inflammatory conditions, sleep dysfunction, hypertension, blood sugar dysregulation, and even metabolic syndrome (Fisher & Paton, 2012; Foster et al., 2017; Molina-Torres et al., 2019) .
So what can we do about this?
Reduce stress.
Yeah sure *rolls eyes*, if it was easy enough to just reduce stress, then we’d all be laughing, or floating merrily on cloud 9.
Let’s look at it from a different perspective. When you’re working out, you do a warm up to prime the body for peak performance and then stretch and warm down to avoid injury. It’s essentially the same thing for our nervous system. After a stressful period or experience we need to warm down.
This could be in the form of:
going for a head clearing walk
some yoga
meditation
a warm bath
mindful colouring
chatting to a friend
singing
dancing
reading a book
– whatever activity is going to help slow you down and give your mind a break. Notice I didn’t say scroll through social media or watch Netflix (while these are fun, they’re not helpful to wind down your nervous system).
If you’re really struggling to feel wound down after stressful periods, there are helpful herbs and nutrients that can assist you with this while you get back on track.
It’s always best to work with a suitable qualified practitioner to help get to the root cause of your issue. I love helping clients recover from acute and chronic stress states. Let's work together.
Reference:
Fisher, J. P., & Paton, J. F. R. (2012). The sympathetic nervous system and blood pressure in humans: Implications for hypertension. Journal of Human Hypertension, 26(8), 463–475. https://doi.org/10.1038/jhh.2011.66
Foster, J. A., Rinaman, L., & Cryan, J. F. (2017). Stress & the gut-brain axis: Regulation by the microbiome. Neurobiology of Stress, 7, 124–136. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ynstr.2017.03.001
Gibbons, C. H. (2019). Basics of autonomic nervous system function. In Handbook of Clinical Neurology (1st ed., Vol. 160). Elsevier B.V. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-444-64032-1.00027-8
Liu, L., & Zhu, G. (2018). Gut-brain axis and mood disorder. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 9(MAY), 1–8. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2018.00223
Molina-Torres, G., Rodriguez-Arrastia, M., Roman, P., Sanchez-Labraca, N., & Cardona, D. (2019). Stress and the gut microbiota-brain axis. Behavioural Pharmacology, 30(2and3-SpecialIssue), 187–200. https://doi.org/10.1097/FBP.0000000000000478
Pedersen, A. M. L., Sørensen, C. E., Proctor, G. B., & Carpenter, G. H. (2018). Salivary functions in mastication, taste and textural perception, swallowing and initial digestion. Oral Diseases, 24(8), 1399–1416. https://doi.org/10.1111/odi.12867
Won, E., & Kim, Y.-K. (2016). Send Orders for Reprints to reprints@benthamscience.ae Stress, the Autonomic Nervous System, and the Immune-kynurenine Pathway in the Etiology of Depression. Current Neuropharmacology, 14, 665–673. https://doi.org/10.2174/1570159X14666151208113
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