Stress is a natural part of life. Although we shouldn’t be stressed out to the max all day, every day, a small amount of stress can actually be beneficial by helping us build resilience to the adversity and challenges that life throws at us.
However, that being said, the modern-day lifestyle puts way too much stress on people in general. We’re expected to work full time (in fact, many of us have to work full time in order to pay our bills!), raise a family, have a social life, and not go stir-crazy all at the same time. It sounds pretty much impossible to put it like that, right?
Stress can cause so many negative effects on the body, especially when it’s chronic. It can cause fatigue, irritability, low mood, anxiety, and poor sleep. It can also exacerbate pre-existing chronic health conditions like eczema, psoriasis, and inflammatory bowel conditions like irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) and inflammatory bowel disease (IBD).
In fact, the digestive tract is one of the most affected areas when you’re stressed. You might be able to relate to the stomach aches, constipation, and bloating that often accompany chronic stress.
In this article, we’re going to take a closer look at how stress impacts digestion and what its main effects are on the digestive system. We will finish up with some top tips for managing stress and improve if your daily digestion.
Does Stress Affect Digestion?
We’ve already briefly answered this in the introduction, but to reiterate, yes, stress can absolutely affect your digestion. Stress and anxiety can lead to a range of different digestive symptoms, with the main ones including the following.
Bloating
Cortisol slows down digestion, increasing the volume of food that remains in the gastrointestinal tract and the length of time it remains there after you’ve eaten. It also increases gas production in the colon. All of these factors contribute to an increase in bloating.
Excess gas
When food takes longer to move through the colon, it gives the gut bacteria more time to ferment it. Fermentation is a process that causes the production of gas (mostly carbon dioxide), leading to lots of bloating, burping, and farting.
Abdominal cramps
Slower digestion and its associated symptoms can lead to aches and pains in the lower abdomen. An increase in faecal mass, which occurs when you’re constipated, can stimulate colonic peristalsis (contraction of the smooth muscle in the colon).
These contractions can be painful if they’re strong enough. In cases of severe constipation, peristalsis isn’t adequate to move the hardened stools through the colon and into the toilet, so many people find that they get abdominal cramps but still struggle to have a bowel movement.
What Are the Main Effects of Stress on Digestion?
Stress has negative implications on digestion due to various different mechanisms, which we have discussed below.
Impacting the vagus nerve
Psychological stress can cause changes to gut motility, reduce digestive secretions, and decrease regularity, leading to abdominal bloating, constipation, and discomfort. The vagus nerve is to blame for why psychological stress can cause physical changes in the gastrointestinal tract.
The vague nerve is a cranial nerve that connects the brain and gut. Psychological stress can lead to the brain sending signals down the cranial nerve and causing undesirable changes to digestion. It can disrupt the normal bidirectional communication that occurs between the brain and digestive tract to further impact digestive processes.
Changes in gut motility
In some, stress can decrease gut motility, leading to bloating and constipation. Others find that stress can cause the opposite to happen, where their gut motility increases, and they end up with diarrhoea.
Generally, acute (short-term) stress leads to accelerated gut motility and loose stools, whereas chronic (long-term) stress is more associated with slower digestion and constipation. However, it’s important to remember that everybody is unique, and your digestive system will respond differently to stress than somebody else’s.
Changing stomach acid production
Stress can either increase stomach acid secretions, increasing the likelihood that you will experience acid reflux (heartburn), or decrease secretions, reducing your body’s ability to digest ingested foods efficiently.
Increasing inflammation
Cortisol, one of the body’s main stress hormones, is sky-high when you’re chronically stressed, and this hormone can significantly increase inflammation within the body. This inflammatory response can occur in the digestive tract and exacerbate pre-existing inflammatory conditions like IBS and IBD.
Even if you don’t have a chronic digestive health condition, the increase in inflammation caused by high cortisol can cause digestive issues. Inflammation is partly the reason why you get bloating and stomach pains when you’re feeling stressed and anxious.
Changing the gut microbiome composition
Your gut microbiome refers to the approximately 100 trillion microorganisms that are present in your colon, and they play essential roles in gut health and digestion. Disruption to the composition of the gut microbiome can lead to poor digestion and an increase in digestive symptoms like bloating, gas, and constipation.
The gut microbiome plays a key role in the immune system. When the fine balance of the gut microbiome is disrupted due to excess cortisol, its ability to keep harmful pathogens out of the body is reduced. Therefore, they let more pathogens through the intestinal wall and into the bloodstream, which increases inflammation and further exacerbates the negative consequences of excess stress.
Changing eating behaviours
Stress can cause you to think, feel, and behave differently. Most people find that they want to eat more or less when they feel stressed, or they make unhealthy food choices and reach for highly processed foods over healthier whole foods.
Since dietary intake can significantly impact digestion and stress often causes people to eat differently from their usual habits, it’s no surprise that chronic stress can trigger constipation and other digestive symptoms.
Those who choose to eat junk foods when they’re stressed are more likely to experience bloating and constipation because ultra processed foods are often high in salt, saturated fats, and sugar. Each of these nutritional factors can cause dehydration, inflammation, and changes in the gut microbiome, all of which contribute to poor digestive health.
Tips to Manage Stress
Thankfully, there are lots of things that you can do to reduce your stress and allow your cortisol to return to its baseline. Below, we’ve covered some helpful strategies to manage stress more effectively to maintain a healthy digestive system.
Avoid skipping breakfast
As irrelevant as it might sound to talk about breakfast when we’re talking about stress, skipping meals can be a huge stress on the body. This is especially true if you’re a female, as oestrogen and progesterone production can be inhibited by excess cortisol.
When you wake up in the morning, your cortisol is at its highest concentration. Skipping breakfast can increase your cortisol level to an excessive amount and cause a stronger stress response.
Conversely, consuming a hearty breakfast that is full of essential macronutrients and micronutrients can help regulate your cortisol levels and avoid any potential side effects of high cortisol on your digestive system.
Get enough sleep
Inadequate sleep is a huge stress on the body, both physically and mentally. It can decrease cognitive function, lower your mood, and make you feel physically drained. It can also negatively impact your digestive health by slowing gut motility and increasing the risk of constipation.
Aim for seven to nine hours of sleep a night (ideally undisturbed). Of course, this is much easier for some people than it is for others (if you have a baby or young children, you’ll know what we mean!), but try your best to get in those essential hours of beauty sleep.
Make your bedroom quiet, cool, and dark, and practice a relaxing nighttime routine that gets your body and mind ready for rest. Aim to go to sleep at the same time each night and wake up at the same time each morning to support your body’s circadian rhythm. Doing so will ‘train’ your body and mind to feel tired when you want to go to bed and more alert around the time that you usually wake up.
Schedule time to relax
Burnout is rife in the modern day, whether you work from home, in an office, or elsewhere, and it’s mostly due to people taking on way too much work. Even if you’re sitting down in an office all day, taking on extra work tasks can be taxing on your brain. Having too many emails in your inbox, too many nags from your manager, or too many customer complaints to respond to can all contribute to your stress.
Similarly, scheduling too much physical activity or too many social events in your time outside of the workplace can cause unnecessary stress, even if these are activities and events that you enjoy. Everybody needs time to sit down by themselves and do absolutely nothing. Downtime is essential!
You will find that you feel much less stressed and anxious when you make a conscious effort to schedule time to do absolutely nothing. By ‘nothing’, we don’t mean sitting in a silent room staring at the wall. We mean something that doesn’t require deep thought, concentration, or physical exertion, such as sitting down on the comfy sofa and watching your favourite movie.
Practice daily meditation or deep breathing
Being stressed can cause your sympathetic nervous system to dominate. This is the fight or flight branch of your nervous system and causes a stress response, where your adrenal glands produce cortisol and adrenaline.
Deep breathing and meditation are effective methods for regulating your sympathetic nervous system. They can slow your breathing rate and heart rate by reducing sympathetic activity and increasing parasympathetic activity.
Practice various deep breathing techniques for stress relief and follow guided meditations to ensure your parasympathetic nervous system dominates. A regular relaxation practice will ensure you’re as calm and stress-free as possible.
How to Improve Daily Digestion
Alongside stress management techniques, try the following strategies for improving your daily digestion and minimising stress-related bloating , gas, and abdominal cramps.
Take a daily probiotic and digestive enzyme supplement
Taking A Dose For Bloating can significantly reduce bloating and constipation by supporting your natural digestive processes. Probiotic bacteria aid metabolism and nutrient production, and digestive enzymes are essential for breaking down and emulsifying the foods you eat.
Consume lots of prebiotic-rich foods
Prebiotics are carbohydrates (fibre) that are abundant in fruits, vegetables, and whole grains. They fuel the probiotic bacteria in your gut, allowing these beneficial bacteria to perform essential functions that aid digestion.
Consuming lots of prebiotic-rich foods can ensure your gut microbiome remains healthy and diverse, and your digestion is as efficient as possible.
Consider natural laxatives
If you’re prone to constipation, consider eating more foods that possess natural active properties. Such foods include onions, garlic, legumes, apples, prunes, figs, oats, chia seeds, and flaxseed.
Adding more of these foods to your diet can help with regularity and reduce the risk of constipation. At the same time, you can take a natural laxative supplement, such as A Dose For Blocked Bellies, which contains magnesium citrate and six different herbs that are known to support digestion.
Increase your fibre intake
Dietary fibre is essential for healthy digestion. Soluble fibre helps to regulate post-prandial (post-meal) blood sugar levels and reduce straining when you go to the toilet. Insoluble fibre doesn’t get broken down and remains in the large intestines, where it plays a vital role in softening the stool and making it easier to pass (thereby reducing constipation and bloating).
Dietary fibre can also fuel the probiotic bacteria in your gut (remember prebiotics, which we spoke about earlier in this article!), which helps boost your metabolism, digestion, and immune function. Fibre is abundant in whole grains, oats, potatoes, fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, beans, and legumes. By adding more of these foods into your diet each day, you can support your digestive system and ensure bowel regularity.
