Is Stress Causing Stomach Issues
It sucks when your stomach isn’t feeling very good. Sometimes it’s after you eat when your food just seems to stay there, Other times your whole abdomen can hurt because you are constipated or have diarrhea.
How are all these things related?
Most of the time they all have a common cause… STRESS!
If the level of stress, you have goes too high, your brain can go into what is called, “Sympathetic Overdrive”. It is the biggest reason that humans are still on the planet all these years. Back in the caveman days, if your stress was super high it was because a life threatening event was happening. A wild animal walks into your area, another tribe attacks you for your food, etc. When this happens you need be able to react quickly.
In sympathetic overdrive mode you are able to take in everything in your environment quickly to search for routes of escape or what you can use for a weapon. Things also happen to your body. You need to have the energy and strength to run away from the danger or fight it off. To accomplish this, blood is diverted from the digestive organs to your arms and legs.
With this information you can understand how your stomach and intestines might start to cramp in sympathetic overdrive mode because the blood isn’t there to let the muscles work properly. A long time ago, life threatening stresses only lasted a few minutes or hours at the most. However, today, people can have so many little stresses in their life that last for weeks or months. This can create chronic stomach problems and digestive issues.
How Do non Life threatening Stresses Push You Into Sympathetic Overdrive?
Let me make it simple… We have 3 types of stress: Physical, Chemical, and Mental/Emotional. Physical stress is a car accident, or falling off a bike, or slipping on ice.
Chemical stress is easy to understand if you work in a factory, but a diet of mostly fast food is big chemical stress. So is using insecticides or pesticides on your lawn or in your house. These things are so common that often people dismiss them as irrelevant.
The third stress is mental/emotional stress. There is more of that stress hitting the average person now than at any other time in history. This is because of your phone. You have it with you every minute of the day. It brings you the internet with all that negative information, it brings you messages and emails from family members and friends that have problems. Maybe none of these stresses in your life by itself would be a big deal. However when you add them all up they might be pushing you into sympathetic overdrive.
When people say they don’t have too much stress in their life, they are thinking they don’t really have one major big stress. But the thing about stress is that it all adds up. Now you can see how people can be pushed into sympathetic overdrive without even knowing it. That is what can create stomach and digestive problems.
If this might be happening to you, we have a computerized scan that can help determine whether this is the cause of you stomach or digestive challenges. give us a call at 402-333-4848 to get that scheduled.
woman athlete with serious stomach pain in Omaha