HH341: Stress Impacts Your Digestive System

Welcome back to another episode of health hacks as I continue talking about stress and how it impacts various different systems in your body that you may not be aware of. And today, I want to talk about how stress impacts digestion. Because you see, with our autonomic nervous system, you can either be in your fight or flight state high alert because of chronic stress, or you can be in your rest and digest parasympathetic nervous system, and you can't be in both at the same time. So if you're in that high alert sympathetic nervous system, your body is focused on getting you to safety. It is therefore actually shutting down your digestive system and your immune system, as well as other systems in the body, in order to be able to give you the energy you need in order to get to safety, to be able to produce the adrenaline, the cortisol, etc, so that you can get to safety, and in that moment, your body is not making salivary enzymes and other digestive enzymes. There's no stomach acid being made in order for your body to be able to break down your food. So if you are eating in a state of chronic stress, that that sympathetic nervous system, that fight or flight state and putting food into your body, your body cannot properly digest it, and that just causes problems down the line throughout your digestive system, because the food stays in there too long, it starts to putrefy, which nobody wants. And over the course of time, if we do this on a regular basis, it has all sorts of negative health effects, in the sense that, because the food isn't being broken down properly, you're not feeling satiated. This the goodness of the food is not getting to the cells that need it, so you're not getting the energy that you need. Because you're not satiated, you're going to eat more often. That leads to weight gain. It can also lead to diarrhea and constipation, because the the food's not being broken down properly, and your your body can't use it and excrete it properly, and it triggers all of these issues. And so that's something that I really want you to be aware of, because we don't often necessarily connect how stress is impacting our body's ability to properly digest our food. Now I want to leave you with something that you can do in order to support that stress level, and that is to meditate. And there may be people that are like, I can't meditate, and I want to invite you to think of meditating as just sitting quietly for a few minutes. This doesn't have to be a massive hour long or even a half hour long meditation, if you can just start with the baby steps of sitting quietly. Maybe it's outside in your garden, closing your eyes and just listening to the sounds that are happening around you, and just focus on that, nothing else. And you know, if your mind starts running. Just be aware of that and say, okay, mind, this is my moment to calm and just ask those thoughts to go away as you tune back in to the sounds that are around you, or you might like to tune into the feeling around you. It might be the soft breeze on your skin and on your face. It might be the sun on your face. There's many ways to meditate. It doesn't have to be sitting on a meditation mat and tuning into something you know to your own inner self for 30 minutes or an hour or four hours. Start off small, and as you start off small, you're going to notice you you enjoy those little moments in time that you take for yourself, that you could take several times a day, and as you build a little habit around that, maybe you do it before each meal, so that that calms your nervous system and then allows you to be eating when your rest and digest state is turned on, and your body can actually be producing your salivary enzymes, your stomach acid, and all of the other enzymes needed to break down your food as it travels through your entire digestive system. So I hope that's helpful for you, and I just want to wish you happy digesting, because it is such a critical part in your overall health.