The Gut-Brain Connection

Do you feel that constant buzz of discomfort under your skin, where you’re always on edge, irritable and disconnected, where your kids can easily push the buttons that have you snapping like a tightly wound cord. 

Does the stress of mothering have you questioning all your choices and plagued with guilt?

I know I was, and I wanted more from my mothering. More connection. More joy. More peace. To feel more like the real me and enjoy mothering my kids.

If you’ve immersed yourself in all the gentle parenting resources but still find yourself reacting in ways you regret, there might be a missing piece to your self nourishment practices. 

Your gut health. 

As a Naturopath with a background in energetics I guide my clients to work through the energetics behind their story whilst we navigate the physiological balance hand in hand. 

I believe our stories and experience shape the way our bodies respond to our environment and we see the most significant healing when we address the physical body alongside the energetic.

If your gut is stressed and irritable... so will be your brain!  

When your brain is in fight-or-flight mode, so is your gut, and vice versa. If your gut is stressed and irritable, your brain will be too.

It’s become so common to refer to our Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) but write off our irritable brain as a mindset issue. 

A Healthy Gut maintains a Healthy Brain

Your gut is an ecosystem unto itself, home to trillions of bacteria, fungi and viruses, collectively known as the gut microbiome. Just like any ecosystem, it relies on symbiosis and a delicate balance, the health of this ecosystem can determine the health of us as an individual. 

Our gut, often referred to as the "second brain," plays a crucial role in regulating our mood, stress levels, and overall mental well-being. Our Gut-Brain Connection also works in the other direction, where our stressors, environment, thoughts, and emotions feedback into our body, influencing how it responds. 

If you’ve ever got the “nervous poops” you’ll know how much your thoughts and feelings can impact your bowels… same as when you stop pooping when you’re outside your regular rhythms or have a lot of stress going on. 

It’s called a bi-directional pathway, meaning it’s communicating in both directions, your brain impacts your gut and your gut impacts your brain. Healing the gut can significantly support your mental health in numerous ways.

Our Gut health Impact on our Neurotransmitters

The gut is responsible for absorbing nutrients that are precursors to neurotransmitters. The messengers of our thoughts and feelings. For example, amino acids like tryptophan and tyrosine, which we get from our proteins, are precursors to serotonin and dopamine respectively, they need to be efficiently absorbed from the gut. 

Your gut is responsible for producing about 95% of the body's serotonin, our key happiness & feel good neurochemical, so it’s clear to see if we are missing these powerhouses of happiness we are going to struggle with choosing happiness when our brains don’t have the resources to feel it. 

A healthy gut helps in the activation of dopamine, our internal motivator neurotransmitter. I can see poor gut health as a driver behind a lot of the dopamine deficiencies that are experienced profoundly these days. 

Gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) is our neurotransmitter of calm, and we even have a microbe balance of GABA consuming and GABA producing bacterias to keep happy so we can feel at ease in our bodies. 

Do you have the Building blocks for your mental well-being?

Poor gut health can lead to nutrient deficiencies, impairing the synthesis of these crucial neurotransmitters.

Including the utilisation of iron and vitamin B12, a significant factor in mental health and energy regulation. This is also a great indicator to look into your methylation status that can contribute to mental health and energy levels.

Gut health Impact on Hormones 

Your gut microbiome plays a role in regulating your hormones, including our sex hormones like oestrogen, progesterone and testosterone balance, stress hormones like cortisol and our metabolism hormones like insulin and our thyroid hormones.

So if you are feeling a little out of control on the hormonal front, I will always suggest we take a look at the health of your gut.

Slowed digestive motility, meaning how fast your bowels move waste through your body can lead to recycling of waste products like excess oestrogen being reuptaken from the bowels and contributing to hormone imbalances. 

An imbalanced gut can disrupt our moods, libido, weight and can even influence menstrual health and symptoms related to hormonal changes, such as PMS and perimenopause. Which of course all have their role in our mental health. 

Stress and Gut Health Relationship 

Our body will not produce sex hormones like progesterone at the same time as stress hormones like cortisol and epinephrine (adrenaline). Your body will always choose survival and it’s your gut informing your brain what state you’re really in. 

Gut health affects the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, which regulates the body’s stress response. An imbalanced gut microbiome can dysregulate the HPA axis, leading to altered levels of stress hormones like cortisol, which can in turn affect neurotransmitter function and contribute to anxiety and depression.

Your gut health even influences your cognitive functions, including memory and learning. A balanced gut microbiome supports better cognitive performance and may reduce the risk of neurodegenerative diseases and improve mental clarity and focus, reducing symptoms of brain fog.

The thing is that it is all connected… Our gut health is the roots that feed into not only our brain chemicals and our hormones, but influences our adrenals and sleep, our metabolism and weight, our inflammation and toxicity burden.

Greater ecological diversity is a sign of a healthier, stronger and more resilient ecosystem.

The less biodiversity, the more fragile the environment.

And the same can be said about our inner ecosystem of our gut.

We can look to our westernised convenience based diet, preservatives, antibiotic use, environmental toxins and endocrine disrupting chemicals alongside chronic stress and residual trauma as the main disruptors of our inner ecosystem. 

We need to nourish a diverse and plentiful inner ecosystem with the right prebiotic fibres in our diet to feed a diverse range of microfloras. We need to enhance our natural detoxification pathways to clear toxins and waste. We need to maintain a strong gut wall for defence integrity and optimised absorption of nutrients. Nurturing the gut-brain connection is a long-term investment in overall health, longevity, and quality of life. 

So if you have done all the things but are still finding yourself struggling with anxiety, depression and mood swings perhaps we need to delve a bit deeper into your physiology and nourish you at your body's roots. 

Book a consultation with me here or schedule a free connection call to ask me any questions.