[00:00:00] Vesna: today I'm going to talk about chronic gut symptoms if you're asking yourself, why am I still bloated? Or why do I still have heartburn? This is the episode for you.
[00:00:45] If you have chronic gut symptoms, these long term symptoms of bloating, heartburn, reflux, pain in your gut, whatever it is, but something that's been with you for a long time and you feel like you've thrown everything at it, right? You've done the gut work, the supplements, the probiotics, the gut function tests and changed your diet and everything still feels like it's at the same point.
[00:01:09] Then in this episode, I really want to share with you what are the things that I've noticed about this in my own personal journey and that of my clients and over the last 20 years about what can make a significant difference to these symptoms for you.
[00:01:23] So many years ago when I went through my burnout journey, I had severe gut bloating. I always looked like I was about six months pregnant. I had a lot of food intolerances. I remember going to another practitioner to get a food intolerance test and she was like, I've never seen anyone with this many food intolerances, right?
[00:01:42] And I knew it because whatever I ate, created discomfort and there was a very limited amount of food that I could eat and enjoy. And actually on my food intolerance test, what came back was the only thing that I wasn't allergic to or intolerant to was meat. So chicken, meat, fish, everything else was giving me a reaction.
[00:01:59] And I wasn't surprised because I knew I had such bad gut symptoms that my gut was going to react to everything. Right. But. Maybe like you, I went through and I did all the gut work, I took all the supplements, the probiotics, the enzymes, the hydrochloric acid to help with protein breakdown, and did all this gut repair work, but it wasn't making any difference, and I was stuck in this place for five years and had these chronic symptoms that got so much of my attention, caused so much frustration for me because I felt so uncomfortable, I felt like I couldn't fit into my clothes, and by the end of the day, everything was distended, right?
[00:02:35] And again, I was stuck in this cycle for five years.
[00:02:37] Now, the shift for me came when, I had stress that passed, right? So I was in a relationship that I was unhappy with, and when that relationship ended, I found myself, I went to my mum's and I stayed with my mum for a while and I was eating foods that I hadn't been able to eat in like five years like pasta, bread, rice, all these foods that I hadn't been able to touch in years and they weren't giving me any discomfort.
[00:03:02] So this completely blew my mind. I couldn't understand what was happening here and how that change went from one week to the next.
[00:03:08] Now I'm not saying leave your relationship or your job or anything like that, but I came to realize that the stress and the
[00:03:15] cortisol that my body was producing
[00:03:17] was preventing my gut from healing even though I took all the right supplements and did all the right things for my gut, it was preventing my gut from healing.
[00:03:25] So in this episode, I really want to share with you what moves the needle, what really makes a difference, particularly if you have chronic gut symptoms. Okay. I have clients that when they come to me, they have anxiety about their gut symptoms, right? They are so concerned by them one because they're persistent and other because they feel like it could be something more sinister going on there that hasn't been detected yet.
[00:03:49] So it creates a lot of anxiety and a lot more tension for them. So number one, what I recommend, what I've seen, you've got to do the gut work, right? That's one thing. Like I had done the gut work for five years and then when my stress reduced, it was so accelerated and that's why I had that effect, right?
[00:04:03] So doing the gut work, I talked about this in episode eight. I really talked about. You know, creating the right pH inside the gut, removing any unwanted bacteria, repopulating the good bacteria, repairing the gut lining, and all of that. So all of that process needs to happen in order to create a really healthy environment inside the gut.
[00:04:21] The next thing is reducing cortisol. So this is anything that raises your cortisol other than your job relationship or your finances, okay? Just don't try to work on those. What you want to do is reduce anything that stimulates your cortisol in other areas.
[00:04:36] Your diet, your sleep, your caffeine, your missing meals, your sugar. Going to bed after 10 p. m., having too many carbs, not having enough protein. All of these things would trigger too much cortisol. And what we do in my program, in my work, is that we, we use all of these hacks, to change the biochemistry in the body, to reduce the cortisol, to switch the body out of that fight or flight mode.
[00:04:58] And therefore, You can enter the healing state and things happen more quickly than more accelerated. And so instead of trying to overhaul your life, what you want to do is implement these dietary and lifestyle hacks in order to kind of trick your body into reducing cortisol levels and that way your body can start to heal.
[00:05:16] The other big factor in reducing cortisol is mental stress I've talked about this a few times in these podcast episodes. The mental stress is the stuff that we carry around all day long, the worry, catastrophes that we make in our mind, all of this stuff. Drips up our fight or flight response, and it has this slow drip, drip, drip of cortisol all day long.
[00:05:36] So we need to look at that area as well, without having to overhaul our life, but reducing our mental stress.
[00:05:42] Our gut is connected to our brain by the gut brain axis. So it's not a surprise that I see people who have gut symptoms like I did at the time. And it created a lot of thinking for me, right? It created a lot of anxiety. But it kind of becomes like a catch 22. So what I see in the third thing, which is probably the really big thing to focus on, or to have awareness of, is this hyper vigilant thinking.
[00:06:06] So I see people with chronic gut symptoms. always assessing where they're at. Is it a good day? Is it a bad day? They're measuring, is it better? Is it worse? They're thinking about it. What should I try next? Why isn't it working? I've tried that already. Why aren't I getting better? They're Googling symptoms.
[00:06:22] There's this constant conversation in the head, There's this, you know, hypervigilant thinking about their symptoms. So I will see this In clients when, one day they'll be so worried about their symptoms, and then they'll be quiet for two days, and then it sparks up again.
[00:06:37] So, you know, when I talk about hypervigilant thinking, yes, we can get some thinking about it, but it's the thinking that creates the tension, the anxiety, where, It starts to overtake our mind. Like we can't get it off our mind and we think about it every day or every second day. Right. And so it's always coming back up and it's the same thinking.
[00:06:56] Why isn't it working? Why aren't I getting better? What should I try next? I've tried that. Why isn't that working? It's the same kind of thinking all the time. Now, the reason why this is so key to improving chronic gut symptoms is because, because of that gut brain connection, okay, we know that through the vagus nerve.
[00:07:15] But the other part is, is that when we get that hypervigilant thinking, we get like that because we don't want the symptoms. We want them to pass. We want them gone. And so there's a unacceptance of the symptoms, right? And it's a resistance to the symptoms and that resistance creates tension and that tension is like war in our body.
[00:07:38] We go to war with our bodies like that, right? And we're just keeping ourselves in a perpetual state of stress. So the very thing that's keeping those symptoms there, which is being stressed out of the healing mode and into the fight or flight mode, the very thing that's keeping those symptoms there is Also the thing that you're triggering throughout the day when you're thinking about your gut symptoms a lot.
[00:08:00] So this is a very tricky one because sometimes people don't notice it. So sometimes when I speak to a client, they'll be like, Oh yeah, I do that. I a hundred percent do that. And sometimes for people, it's so normal to have that script, that story running in their head all day long, but they don't really notice it.
[00:08:14] Okay. And so sometimes it takes a conversation to see that. But I can tell you that when you've had chronic gut symptoms, That conversation is there, that constant assessment and that hyper vigilance is there because the chronic stress is keeping it there, that tension, that unacceptance of where you're at, right?
[00:08:31] So I'll often say to clients, why can't you accept the bloating for now, right? What's stopping you from accepting that? acceptance is not giving up. Acceptance is being at peace. with where you're at.
[00:08:44] And sometimes our body creates symptoms because it wants to get our attention to navigate us in a different direction. But if we're in resistance mode, we can't hear any of that, right? And the symptoms persist and persist and persist, right? I want to give you an example because I often talk about this because this is a really good one.
[00:09:02] like I noticed that when I travel, when I go on holidays and it's summertime and if I go somewhere tropical or if I go to Europe in the summer. Europe in the summer these days is very hot. And, uh, the last time we went away, we went to Thailand and we went to Europe. And both times it was so hot.
[00:09:17] And I have this thing where when I'm hot, I feel the heat a lot. And ever since I was a kid. And, uh, so when it's hot and I start to feel hot, I'm like, Oh my goodness, it's so hot, it's so hot, it's so hot. And of course, it's My temperature rises every time I'm thinking it and saying it and I'm often saying it, right?
[00:09:40] Where the people around me are like, stop you're making me hot, right? And so that is hypervigilance. I can't get my mind of it because I'm so hot. It's unbearable for me. Yet, the constant thinking and focusing on it is driving up my temperature even more because I'm in a state of stress, right? It's a mini state of stress, but in a state of stress, it's driving up my temperature even more.
[00:10:02] It's making me hotter. So I'm sweating. I'm sweating. Right? And then I'm like, why am I sweating so much? I don't want to be sweating this much. Okay. Driving more thinking, raising my temperature even more. So that's a really, really good example of how quickly we can create our symptoms. Okay. Yeah. I was hot without the anxiety, without the hypervigilance.
[00:10:23] I handle that heat much better. I've caught myself in a few moments, it hasn't been many. That is something that I still battle with, but I have caught myself in moments where I don't have thinking around it. And I just feel hot and I'm okay. But it's most often that I will have hyper vigilant thinking. I don't want to feel hot.
[00:10:39] I don't want to start sweating. And so I'm resisting it, and of course, all of those scenarios happen.
[00:10:45] And my recommendation is, you know, obviously do the gut work, do the things to reduce cortisol and be aware of your hypervigilant thinking and come to a place where you can coexist. with those symptoms until your body's in a place where it can resolve it. Okay. If you do the groundwork, like the gut work and the reducing the cortisol, that's the foundational stuff.
[00:11:05] But so is reducing that hypervigilant thinking come to a place of acceptance and your body will take care of the rest.
