We know that stress is really high in most people, and we often don’t put together how that impacts our ability to digest our food. There’s a lot of symptoms that can come out of poor digestion!

Maybe this is you.

You might struggle with stress – whether from work, kids, friends, health issues, etc.

Or, you may be tired, frustrated, or downright burned out.

So, let’s talk about stress and how it affects your digestion, er, gut.

What is Stress and How Does it Impact Your Body?

Stress is your body’s reaction to a perceived harm – whether real or unreal, and this begins the chemical reaction that puts us into “fight or flight mode”, our body’s natural stress response.

This causes our heart rate to go up, blood pressure to rise, and muscles to tense. All the things necessary to protect or fight. It’s totally natural.

Again, all caused by a perception of a threat, which can be different for different people.

This stress can come out in emotional, physical, or mental fatigue. Really, there’s lots of ways stress can manifest itself and there are any number of ways our body could react … making it hard to note the symptoms or stress as a root cause.

How Does Stress Affect Your Health?

1. It Impacts Your Hormones

Once this chemical reaction begins, it stimulates the release of our hormones adrenaline and cortisol – these are our stress hormones.

Now, these stress hormones are actually quite awesome. In fact, they’re essential for helping us survive these stressors by putting us on high alert in order to fight (and win!).

However, the problem is when we’re under chronic stress, because our hormones have a limited supply and we don’t give them an opportunity to replenish – this leads to a depletion of important hormones.

Warning: This can lead you straight to adrenal fatigue! (read more about adrenal fatigue and the stages here).

Long-term use of these hormones will affect your memory, weight, sleep, depression, and cause cravings because they cause you to hold on to things in order to survive. It’s a lot for your body to take.

Please note: This isn’t just for physical threats! This happens with emotional stress, environmental stress, or stress from eating a poor diet.

2. It Impacts Your Immunity

Stress also knocks down your immune response. If you find you’re getting sick all of the time, your adrenals might just be depleted and burned out. This is the time to give them a little support to get them back on track!

Long term this will impact your hair (dry or falling out), dry, flaky skin or rashes, and your ability to fight off sickness (read more about boosting your immune system here).

3. It Impacts Your Digestion

Now stress impacts your digestion because it actually inhibits your stomach from producing stomach acid – a critical component in breaking down your food.

When you’ve got low stomach acid you’re going to deal with symptoms like bloating, gas, nausea, constipation, and diarrhea. You can also get diagnosed with things like IBS, or even high stomach acid (crazy, right?).

If you were to simply stimulate your stomach acid, it could help manage many of those symptoms.

So every time you get stressed, you’re inhibiting the production of stomach acid, making indigestion a major issue.

Things like GERD and acid reflux can often be managed by simply reducing your stress and increasing your stomach acid.

How Can You Manage Stress?

Breathe.

No, really – just breathe. It sounds simple, but it’s super effective.

What this does is it activates the parasympathetic nervous system, in other words – your body’s ability to rest and digest (opposite of fight or fight). This relaxes your body and makes digestion easier.

Sounds pretty good, eh?

Then, you need to say “see ya stressors” and do a life purge because they ain’t doing you any favours!

Stress can often be the root cause of many symptoms these days, so deal with the root of your issues and get rid of it.

The last thing you can do is create boundaries. As Marie Forleo says, “Get on the no-train, choo-choo!”. Be willing to embrace saying no more often.

This brings more relaxation, less stress, and more stomach acid. Boo-yah.

And as a side note – chronically low stomach acid has a real danger to do damage to the lining of your gut or reduce your healthy gut bacteria. So watch out!

So, whenever possible, go easy on your gut to reduce the stress coming from a poor diet and feed it nourishing food.

Try out these Quinoa Pizza Sticks for a simple and nutrient rich lunch that will fill you up, without adding more stress to your gut!