From bloating to burnout: how the health of your gut can affect your stress levels (and what to do about it!)

When there are issues with our gut health, we can find that we don’t feel very resilient and conversely, high levels of physical and emotional stress can lead to a vicious cycle of bloating, gut dysbiosis, nutrient deficiencies, constipation and other issues – a vicious cycle that can be damaging to your long-term health and wellbeing. Read on to learn more and, most importantly, how to break the cycle.

How the health of your gut can affect your stress levels

Gut dysbiosis

Our gut is home to around 100 trillion bacteria, which alongside viruses, fungi and other microbes form the gut microbiome, a system that plays an important role in managing our response to stressful situations and our resilience levels. We have colonies of both ‘good’ or commensal and ‘opportunistic’ gut bacteria, and they are both equally important in balancing our gut microbiome and supporting different aspects of our physical and mental health. When we have an imbalance in our gut microbiome, with too many opportunistic bacterial colonies, too few commensal bacteria colonies or not enough bacterial diversity, this is known as gut dysbiosis. Gut dysbiosis can make us less resilient to stressful situations, can reduce serotonin and dopamine levels and can increase inflammation.

Chronic inflammation

Inflammation is one of the health buzzwords of the moment and for good reason. While acute inflammation, when it’s part of the healing process for an injury, illness, cold or flu, is ordinarily a good thing, when it goes on too long, problems can begin. This is chronic inflammation, when the immune system acts as though there’s an ongoing threat. Ongoing physical and emotional stress is a big factor, as well as disrupted sleep, too much alcohol or tobacco consumption and nutrient deficiencies. We can see this type of inflammation affect the whole body, including the gut, because so much of our immune system is housed here. And this can lead to a vicious cycle of lower immunity, gut dysbiosis and even more stress.

Bloating

Feeling bloated after eating a large meal and needing to unbutton your trousers is a feeling that many of us can relate to, especially coming out of the December festive season. But feeling bloated too often can be a sign of stress, as well as gut dysbiosis. When we’re experiencing ongoing stress, whether physical or emotional, bloating can be one of the consequences. Physical and emotional stress shifts our nervous system into ‘fight or flight’ mode, our gastrointestinal tract slows down, which means that we don’t digest food as well. When we add on habits like eating too quickly, eating on the go or not chewing food well enough, we can find that we feel bloated more often than we like.

Constipation

Constipation and bloating can often go hand in hand. One of the symptoms of constipation is bloating and long-term constipation can make bloating even worse. In an ideal world, we would have at least one bowel movement every morning, which is easy to pass and looks like a long snake. There are many reasons we might get constipated, from dehydration to not eating enough fibre, to unsurprisingly, chronic stress. Having a nervous system that is chronically in a sympathetic or ‘fight or flight’ state means that cortisol, our primary stress hormone is high, and this can slow down the digestive process, leading to constipation.

Nutrient deficiencies

Some say we are what we eat, but I think we are what we absorb is a better framing of the impact that the nutrients from the food we eat has on our bodies, including our ability to effectively manage stress and bounce back from difficult situations. For example, vitamin B6, a nutrient that comes from foods like spinach, red and yellow peppers, courgette, broccoli and poultry is essential for making over 90% of the serotonin in our body. This happy hormone, which is primarily made in our gut, also requires an amino acid called tryptophan, which we can get from protein-rich foods. Nutrient deficiencies and poor absorption can impede our ability to make hormones like serotonin and dopamine that impact our emotional and physical resilience.

How to improve your gut health to improve your stress levels

Help your gut bacteria grow

Think of your gut like a garden: fertilisers feed the plants that are already there. In the case of our gut, prebiotics feed the bacteria that are already there, helping them thrive and produce short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs) that help lower inflammation and support mental wellbeing. Prebiotics, or highly fibrous foods, are typically split into two categories: soluble and insoluble fibre, some of which you likely already include in your meals. Soluble fibre like oats, apples, beans and green bananas also reduce constipation by making stools bulkier and easier to pass. Insoluble fibre such as brown rice, the peels of fruit and veg, flaxseed, nuts and chia seeds also help by making stools softer.

Diversify your gut bacteria

If we go back to the garden analogy we explored in the last section, the best gardens always have a variety of plants, which make the environment as diverse and interesting as possible. The same holds true for our gut bacteria. Probiotic or fermented food supports a diverse gut microbiome by adding additional bacterial strains such as Lactobacillus, which research shows have links to improved mental health through increased serotonin production. These days, it’s easy to find a huge variety of probiotic food and drink in supermarkets. You might already eat a lot of full-fat yoghurt, cheese and pickles, so why not try other probiotic options such as kefir, a fermented drink made from water, milk or coconut; or sauerkraut, a fermented food made from finely shredded cabbage.

Eat a rainbow

You may have heard nutritionists recommend the idea of ‘eating a rainbow’ when you put your meals together, but what does that really mean for our gut health? Picture a farmer’s market during the spring or summer: there is a rich variety of brightly coloured fruit and vegetables available. Each colour represents a different phytochemical and nutrient that have important benefits for our immune system and other aspects of our physical and mental health. The reds, blues and purples in blueberries, red onions, aubergine, plums, blackberries and red cabbage are anthocyanins, an antioxidant that helps reduce inflammation and improve cognitive function. These brightly coloured fruit and vegetables are also a rich source of polyphenols, nutritional compounds that can prevent the growth of pathogenic bacteria and reduce inflammation in the gut. In addition, polyphenols act like prebiotics, feeding existing gut bacteria and helping them make short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs) like butyrate that help reduce anxiety and depression. Make a game of eating a rainbow: every week, choose a colour and then focus on adding fruit and veg in that colour to your meals. You might choose orange and then have fun adding in carrots, pumpkin, butternut squash, cantaloupe, apricots, mango, tangerines, oranges and sweet potatoes in your meals that week.

Eat mindfully

How we eat is just as important as what we eat. When we rush our meals by eating too quickly, eating on the move or trying to multitask, we might find ourselves feeling bloated, gassy or not absorbing all the nutrients from the food we’ve just eaten. Eating isn’t just an opportunity to fuel – our meals are an opportunity to slow down and take a pause from a busy, stressful day. Here are my top tips for eating more mindfully: take a few deep breaths before starting your meal to calm your nervous system, then when you’re eating, make sure to chew each bite at least 10 times. This can reduce bloating and give the stomach less work to do to digest your food. Another way to eat more intentionally is to put your fork and knife down between bites and allow yourself to get as much pleasure as possible from the food you’re eating.

Take breaks between meals

It’s become commonplace for many of us to snack in between meals, believing that it’s important continuously fuel our bodies. If you struggle with bloating, then adding spacing between your meals could be helpful. This is due to the motor migrating complex (MMC), a burst of contractions in the gastrointestinal tract that moves the food we’ve eaten further through the digestive process. Think of the MMC like a brush that moves undigested food, bacteria that shouldn’t be there and dead cells down the digestive tract – eating disrupts this process. The MMC typically begins around 90 minutes after eating and takes between 1.5 – 3 hours to complete. If you’re reading this, thinking that you can’t imagine not snacking or grazing throughout the day, here’s what to try instead. Add more whole food protein, fat and fibre sources like dairy, eggs, olive oil, butter, nuts, seeds, fruits, vegetables, red meat and poultry to your main meals. These foods take longer to digest, reducing the need to snack. You’ll then feel fuller from your main meal for longer, your moods will stabilise due to reduced blood sugar imbalance, and you’ll find that bloating is reduced.

Taking care of your gut can increase your resilience and your ability to bounce and it needn’t feel complicated. The small actions we take every day, like eating more mindfully, adding in more fruits and vegetables, trying new-to-you food and drink or taking a break between meals can have a positive impact on our gut health and by doing so, help us manage stress better.