Trust Your Gut: Stress & the Vagus Nerve

For Stress Awareness Month (April), we asked Kat, our Mental Health Safeguarding and Clinical Supervision Lead, to explain the relationship between stress and our gut health and what we can do to improve our physical and mental wellbeing when stress starts to emerge.

Kat writes:

“Have you ever wondered why we say trust your gut or talked about our gut instinct?

This is due to our stomach being so intricately linked to our thoughts, emotions and stress.

The brain and gut are linked by the vagus nerve.

Stress and anxiety can both trigger the vagus nerve to respond, which can cause a number of symptoms such as pain in the abdomen, vomiting, nausea, dizziness, or fainting.

If we are under constant stress, this can cause longer term gut issues such as Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS). Chronic stress has been linked to health problems involving diabetes, heart disease or asthma.

When the body is not under stress, the vagus nerve sends commands that slow heart and breathing rates and increase digestion. In times of stress, control shifts to the sympathetic system, which produces the opposite effect. This is known as the fight, flight or freeze mechanism.

What does this mean to me?

Sometimes at times of stress because our brains are busy with lots of information, it is often harder to know how we are feeling in the moment or even notice we are stressed. But if we listen to our gut, it is easier to spot that shift in our emotional wellbeing. We can use this as our early warning sign for stress levels being high.

What can I do to help?

When we notice shifts in our stomach such a wind, bloating, or nausea or general gut changes, it is important to act. We should move ourselves to take a moment away from life, even just for one minute.

We can do this by changing our breathing rate. Simply put, if we breathe out for longer than breathing in, these calms our body systems. I like to breath in for 2 seconds, hold the breath for 3 seconds then breath out for 4 seconds. This give us a moment to gather our thoughts and take our body out of the fight, flight or freeze state we are within. This then enables us to think more clearly and rationally about where we are at in the moment.

We may need to then create an action, for example ask for help, write a list, or take a break from the task we are doing.

The more we work with the smaller elements of stress, this then prevents them from snowballing into a bigger more compact issue. Which is often extremely hard to unpick what the route cause is.

So, trust your gut, it will serve you well.

Want to write a blog for us?

If you’d like to share your mental health journey with us via a blog, a video, a poem, a song – whatever form speaks to you most – please contact Connie, our Communications Lead, at connie@maryfrancestrust.org.uk. Please note we do not accept submissions from professional bloggers – our platform is reserved to our clients, volunteers, staff and supporters.

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