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As many as thirteen million people in the UK suffer from IBS. With symptoms ranging from constipation and diarrhoea to painful stomach cramps and needing to stay near a toilet, this condition can seriously affect your quality of life.
If you’re frustrated with your gut and struggling to get your symptoms under control, it’s time to take a different approach. Although dietary strategies are important when it comes to managing IBS, the missing link may lie in your brain and how it affects your body.
In this article, you’ll learn how the mind can significantly influence IBS. Most importantly, you’ll discover how to harness the power of the mind to heal the body.
What is IBS?
First, let’s recap what is meant by IBS. Doctors define irritable bowel syndrome as a range of symptoms originating from the gut that can’t be explained by a recognised digestive condition. In other words, a diagnosis of IBS is only made after other underlying diseases have been ruled out.
Symptoms often flare up unpredictably. In many cases, IBS leads to fatigue, brain fog and nutritional deficiencies, not to mention anxiety and depression.
Of course, no health issues exist without underlying reasons. In the case of IBS, these include dysbiosis of the microbiome, the population of bacteria resident in the gut, alongside inflammation and permeability of the intestinal lining. However, the role of the mind is often overlooked when it comes to gut issues.
The Gut/Brain Axis
Emotions have a significant influence on the digestive system. This doesn’t mean your symptoms are all in your head. However, it does mean what’s going on in your mind can bring about real physical symptoms in your gut.
This connection between your mind and your gut makes itself known in many everyday situations. Think about the last time you had an important meeting or nerve-wracking appointment. No doubt you had butterflies in your stomach or needed to run to the loo more frequently than usual. This is just one example of the crosstalk between the brain and the gut.
Your brain and your digestive system are connected by millions of nerves, known as your enteric nervous system or second brain. The enteric nervous system is responsible for regulating how quickly food moves through your intestines, secreting gastric acids, and synthesising neurotransmitters.
But the nerves of the enteric nervous system also send messages back and forth between your gut and your brain. On top of this, your brain and your gut communicate by means of chemical messengers emitted by the bacteria in your large intestine.
In other words, the two-way communication superhighway between your gut and your brain means they are constantly influencing one another.
How Stress Affects Your Body’s Physiology
When your brain perceives you are in danger, it releases hormones. Adrenaline puts you in fight/flight mode, with cortisol triggering the release of stored energy while curbing non-essential bodily functions so you can escape or fight off danger. Your body won’t prioritise functions like digestion when you are stressed. It’s far more concerned with protecting you from danger.
Your hypothalamus, pituitary and adrenal glands work together to co-ordinate your stress response after the initial release of adrenaline. The three organs form a collaboration called the HPA axis.
Sadly, the human body evolved to deal with short-term stressors which then abate. The norm now is for multiple stressors to continue more or less all the time. This means the body is permanently in a state of fight/flight and stress hormones are constantly elevated, with the HPA axis becoming dysfunctional.
Knowing stress has physiological effects will help you to understand that the influence of the mind on the body is definitely not all in your head. It’s not simply current stress, either, unresolved past trauma often shows up in gut issues like IBS.
To complicate matters, people who suffer from IBS often, quite naturally, become anxious about their condition and hypersensitive to sensations coming from their gut. This hyperfocus can in turn make symptoms worse in a vicious cycle.
How Integrative Medicine Can Help IBS
The good news is, as your mind can negatively affect your digestion, the power of your mind can be harnessed to support gut healing.
So, if you’ve tried dietary changes but are still bothered by IBS symptoms, it may be time to consider whether your emotions are playing a role.
Here at the Forbes Clinic, we consider you as a whole person, understanding how each part of you affects the others. Because we appreciate the importance of supporting the mind as well as the body, we have a range of mind/body therapies we can recommend to help your body dial down stress, depending on your particular circumstances. These therapies can help balance the vagus nerve, an integral part of your enteric nervous system, reduce sensitivity to pain emanating from the gut, and alter your body’s responses to these sensations.
Emotional Freedom Technique combines cognitive behavioural therapy with acupressure techniques to help empower you and support you through challenges, improving your nervous system regulation. Acceptance & Commitment Therapy can help reduce perceived stress when you have little control over the source of the stress. It helps you to step back from unhelpful thoughts and supports psychological flexibility. This can be useful if your IBS is negatively affecting your mindset.
Meanwhile, Integrative Hypnotherapy can reset the gut/brain axis and has successfully been used to reduce IBS symptoms.
As a first step on your pathway we recommend an Integrative Health Assessment. This takes your health history and nutrient status to identify the causes underlying your health issues. Following this, you’ll receive personalised recommendations including nutrient supplements and lifestyle strategies. If we feel it would be beneficial, we’ll signpost you to specialised therapies, including mind/body therapies, depending on what your body needs to heal.
If you’re struggling with IBS, you needn’t go it alone. Contact us today to start your health journey – book a Discovery Call to find out if we are the right fit for you.
