How Stress Gets In The Way Of Digestion (Plus, 3 Ways To Calm Down)

Ever notice how your thoughts and emotions can influence or create a certain physical sensation in the body? This happens throughout our day, sometimes without conscious awareness.

Let's try an experiment: Think about cutting an orange in half, looking at the pulp with its juices flowing, and now think about eating that orange. What happened? Did you start salivating? That's how connected our minds and bodies are. Images and thoughts can start to create a physical response in our body.

One of our systems that gets affected immediately when this process happens is digestion. Most people think digestion starts in our mouth with chewing our foods, but digestion itself actually starts in the brain1. Why should you care about this? Because your thoughts and emotions can influence how well you digest your food, and you aren't, in fact, what you eat; you are what you digest!

Think about when you are feeling a negative emotion like stress. How does that affect your physical body, particularly the digestive system? As a nutritional psychologist, optimizing mental health is an important part of how I help implement positive dietary changes and optimize physical well-being for my clients.

You might not realize it, but when you are stressed, your digestive system is affected. Almost instantly your salivary glands aren't nearly as activated2, and your digestive juices aren't flowing at the same frequency as when we are relaxed.

When you are stressed, your digestion is compromised before you even put food in your mouth, increasing your risk for developing digestive distress like heartburn and leaky gut.

Stress compromises peristalsis4, which is the constriction and relaxation of the intestinal muscles and what helps move the food through the intestines. In other words, it's essential for food absorption and waste elimination.

Additionally, your body's ability to produce stomach acid is compromised5 when you are feeling stressed. If you don't have adequate stomach acid, you may not be able to fully digest all of the food, particularly proteins. Stomach acid also helps protect us from pathogenic bacteria and viruses, making stomach acid important for not only digestion but overall health.

What you digest your body uses for fuel, so you want to make sure that your brain and your body are getting the most out of the food you are eating. One way to do this is by getting into a parasympathetic state when you are about to eat your food. This will calm you down and limit the effects of stress on your digestive process.

Yes, this means putting your cellphone down! This allows for the ability to focus on the experience of eating. This will help your body digest and relax as much as possible. This can be difficult at first, especially if you're used to eating quickly and multitasking while eating, but it is worth it.