Episode 403: The Gut-Brain Axis: How Stress, Perception & the Subconscious Shape Digestive Health
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What if your gut-brain axis isn’t just a “cute concept”… but the thing running the show?
Erin is giving you the FULL class from last week’s Funk’tional Nutrition Academy Open House, breaking down how stress, subconscious patterns, and nervous system signaling directly shape digestion. This one’s for my practitioners, but honestly, if your gut isn’t improving, you’re going to want to hear this too.
You’ll understand how perception shapes digestion, why healing requires both gut work and nervous system work, and how to start interrupting the loop that keeps symptoms stuck.
In this episode:
The role of subconscious patterning in shaping your symptom experience, and how those patterns can be changed
How neuroplasticity becomes a tool for gut healing, and why your brain is not stuck in old patterns
How shifting out of a constant “on guard” state can restore motility, enzyme output, and real digestive function
The “prediction loop” your brain runs after repeated gut symptoms, and how it primes your body to react
How your brain can misinterpret normal gut sensations as “dangerous”, through visceral hypersensitivity
Resources mentioned:
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Applications are now open for Funk’tional Nutrition Academy, our 14 month clinical mentorship + training program.
Join the waitlist for Manifest Your Health. Doors open in the spring!
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All day, every day, your nervous system is scanning your environment, both internally, what's going on inside, and externally. So we have exteroception, which is taking in cues from our outside world, external stimulus. We have interoception, which is listening and being aware of the cues coming from inside our body. And then we have proprioception, which is basically like where we are in space. So your brain is constantly taking in and integrating all three of these things, and it acts like a filter. So we have stimulus that comes in, the brain has to categorize it, it has to define it, it has to say, what does this mean? What category do I put this in? And then based on its, how it tags it, how it determines what the meaning is, it signals to the rest of the body.
Welcome to the Funk’tional Nutrition Podcast, spelled with a K because we do things a little differently around here. I'm your host, Erin Holt, and I've got 15 years of clinical experience as a functional nutritionist and mindset coach, creating a new model that I call Intuitive Functional Medicine™, where we combine root cause medicine with the innate intelligence of your body. This is where science meets self-trust. Your body already knows how to heal, and this show is going to show you how. If you're looking for new ways of thinking about your health, be sure to follow and share with a friend because you never know whose life you might change.
Hey friends, today is all about the gut-brain axis, specifically how stress perception and the subconscious shape digestive health. We've got a fully packed episode for you today. There's a lot, a lot, a lot of stuff in here. You guys loved last week so much that we decided to release another class from our FNA open house. Enrollment is open for our spring cohort. Cohort, so you can apply using the link in our show notes. We would love to see your application come through.
Today is a great episode for all practitioners, but if you're not a practitioner, this is still a great episode for you if you have tried to do everything right for your gut but it's not getting any better. You have tried the protocols in the HCL and the colostrum and the collagen and all the things, the digestive enzymes.
You've done the stool test, you've done everything, everything, everything, everything, and you're still not better. I'm going to share a lot of concepts with you today to help you understand some root causes.
Some of them are from the gut, but some of them are even beyond the gut. And hopefully you'll walk away from today's episode having a little bit more of a clear understanding of what could be the driving factors of your ongoing gut issues.
And if that sounds like you, then Manifest Your Health, our brand new membership and app, is for sure going to be your next step.
It is coming soon, so make sure you get on the waitlist because we're going to it up with a discounted founder's rate that'll be linked up in the show notes. Manifest Your Health is really created for people who are navigating their own health challenges and want to embrace the powers of the nervous system, the subconscious mind, and even emotional healing to finally crack the code on their chronic ongoing symptoms. So you can check that out in the show notes. And without much further ado, here is the class.
Let's get in. This is our first open house ever, which is very exciting. I'm just gonna do a little quickie refresh for 2 weeks. Essentially what we're doing in the open house is to pull back the curtain so you can see like the behind the scenes of FNA. You can experience it for yourself. You can get a taste of whether or not this is the right continuing education school for you for functional nutrition, functional medicine. I might be a little biased. I don't know.
I may be a little biased, but I happen to think it's the best one. It's certainly the most comprehensive school. That I can say with a lot of conviction because we do a tremendous amount of market research all of the time. We are always striving to make it as good as we possibly can and kind of fill in the gaps that we see in other continuing education places. So if you are new or you have not filled out an application and you're interested in FNA, that is the first place to get started. Fill out an application just so we can review your application, approve it. We have a pretty quick turnaround time with that. And then if you are interested in scheduling a discovery call, you can talk to our lead clinical mentor, Rachel.
You do not have to schedule a discovery call to join, just an FYI. We didn't mention that on Wednesday. Like, that's not a requirement. It's just there for you if you wanna talk through it and you need the support. So for those of you who were here on Wednesday, we talked about how FNA is like 4 different programs in one. This week we're really focusing on more of the clinical education that you receive in FNA this week, and then even early next week. So Tuesday, Rachel's gonna be teaching a clinical Q&A, so you'll really get a line of sight into what the curriculum is all about. But I I also want to highlight why I include so much mindset coaching into FNA.
I wasn't planning on sharing this, but something happened yesterday where I'm like, I gotta talk about this today. Sometimes the mindset coaching looks like business coaching, not always. There's a lot of folks that join FNA that want to create their own practice or want to build, you know, something like I did. And that's amazing. There's so many resources in there for you, but there's a fair amount, I think a fair estimate is about 30% of students who join because they want to get the clinical experience to work for another functional medicine facility. They're just like, I have no desire to do my own thing or to market or to put myself out there. Like, I'm good. So we kind of COVID both of that.
Either way though, no matter what your end goal is, you need the confidence to actually be able to do that. Ain't that a kick in the head? So what I've seen over and over and over— I've been mentoring clinicians for 7 years now. We have so many brilliant clinicians. There are so many brilliant amazing practitioners out there who are walking around with a lot of insecurities, a lot of limiting beliefs, a lot of self-doubts, a lot of fears. And it's these things that prevent them from sharing their information with the world, from sharing their medicine with the world, for having the— making the impact that they really want to make. And so I can teach you everything that I know about functional nutrition and functional medicine, and I do. It's kind of my goal here in FNA. But if I do not also support you with your mindset, with your confidence, then there's no guarantee that that education is gonna actually get out there and help somebody.
So this is something I feel really, really strongly about. You can tell, like, I'm like choking up. This is something I feel so strongly about, cuz it's like the thing that breaks my heart the most in this world is watching unexpressed potential, like watching unexpressed talent where I'm like, you can like help so many people, like, go out there and do it. And then just watching people kind of like essentially be their own, like, demise because they just can't get out of their head. Mia says, Erin, I had your imposter syndrome podcast episode from a while back on repeat this week. Love it.
Great.
We got to get out of our own ways. So again, wasn't planning on talking about this, but I got such a lovely DM from one of our students yesterday. Shout out to Katie Brewer. I don't know if she's here. I didn't see her name pop up, but she sent me a photo of her new office space and it was beautiful. And there was a video of me on the screen from one of the business and mindset modules, which is so cute. And she said, I'm gonna read what she said. She said, hey there, just feeling lots of gratitude for you, your team, and FNA today.
This shot was taken earlier when I was prepping for a client from my office that wouldn't be possible without the confidence, y'all have provided me with through the tools in FNA. The info is great, like really effing great, but it's the mindset stuff that made this happen. Thank you. My goal was to bust through a glass ceiling and let's just say it's busted. So it's big, important work. And hopefully through today's lecture, even though we're talking about the gut-brain axis, hopefully through today's lecture, you'll begin to see, know, and understand how much your mind actually matters and how much it actually dictates. But the way that I teach manifestation is through the lens of neuroscience because we are leveraging the power of our mind and our beliefs. And I have manifested so much in my life.
I'm not even like ashamed to say that anymore. I'm like, yeah, I like literally manifested it. I did it. I did, I did. I manifested it like my body of health, healthy relationships, my success, my financial success, but also like the impact that I get to have on the world. So a lot of that is what we're teaching you in FNA too, because I think it it really, really matters and it really is important. So with all that said, we're gonna get into the slides. I got my notes on how to present, so let's see, can we do it in one fell swoop? So the gut-brain access.
Now in true Erin fashion, any lecture topic that I choose could be like a 4 to 6 hour lecture. So today we're going to really focus on this second part, how stress perception and the subconscious shape digestive health. In FNA, we have a ton of modules on the gut and the gut-brain axis. So I don't want to spend any much time really going over content that already exists or recreating it. I'm sure a lot of you guys here have some good foundational education on the gut and the gut-brain axis. So again, we're really going to focus on this second part today because I think this is something that is hugely overlooked and really misunderstood. In our clients' and patients' care. And this can be like the game-changing thing for our clients.
I'm just going to do a little quickie IP note with love, with love. So everything shared in this training slides, language, frameworks, and concepts is the intellectual property of Erin Holt. That's me, the functional nutritionist. Please do not copy, record, repurpose, reproduce, teach, or redistribute this material as your own. Thank you for respecting the time, research, and creativity that went into building this. So it's just like We talk a lot about intellectual property. This is kind of modeled behavior because if you are a clinician out there in the mean streets, putting together work and sharing that work with the world, you have to protect your intellectual property. It is literally our bread and butter for a lot of us, and it matters.
This lecture took me 12 hours to put together, but it took me years of research to compile this, right? And so we never want to— I know it seems like this industry is so big. It's really small, and I've just seen some really gross stuff, and we don't ever want to be positioning ourselves as a leading authority by using somebody else's content. I've seen it a lot. It's kind of yucky and it puts a bad taste in people's mouth because they kind of always know when you're doing it. So always give credit where credit is due. That is my, that is my mentorship recommendation to all of y'all. All right. When we're talking about the gut-brain axis, I'm also talking about the mind-gut axis and what happens when you're doing everything right for your client's gut, but it's not getting any better.
Maybe you've tried the diets, the probiotics, the leaky gut support. The enzymes, the HCL, the protocols, but they're not getting the healing or the relief that you think they should. We have all been there, you know, and it stinks. Ongoing issues, GI issues, chronic constipation, food reactions, sensitive stomach— that could very well be a pathogen issue. It could very well be food sensitivities. It could also be a gut-brain issue. And when that's the case, there is no pill or supplement or protocol that you can put somebody on to really fix and resolve the issues. What we believe, perceive, and experience has a direct connection and influence over our gut health.
So that is what we're going to talk about today. So here is your gut-brain axis, part of it. There's a lot going on. There's communication happening back and forth between the brain and the gut. You can see there's neural things happening, there's hormonal things happening here, immune inputs, microbe inputs. So there's lots of different ways that the brain and the gut are communicating. They are talking to each other by bidirectionally, so that information highway works both ways. And the primary communication pathways are through nerves, one of which being the vagus nerve, endocrine and hormonal signals, immune, and microbes.
Those are gut bacteria. So everything in your body is intimately connected. It's like what we talked about on in Wednesday's class. The gut and the brain are no exception. That's a really core tenet of intuitive functional medicine is that we cannot separate our brain from our body, but we also can't separate our gut from our autonomic nervous system. They are really working very, very closely together. So automatic nervous system— or excuse me, autonomic nervous system— my, like, my little brain code is when I think autonomic, I think automatic, because it automatically— this nervous system automatically regulates the systems that are required for our survival. So thinking breathing, Blinking, heart beating, blood pumping, creation of new red cells, you name it, right? Red blood cells, I should say.
All of this is subconsciously regulated, just meaning it is not consciously directed. It does not have to be consciously directed. It does not require conscious thought to come online for you to consciously direct it. Like, oh, it's time to create those new red blood cells today. It's 12 o'clock on a Friday. Here we go. That doesn't need to happen. So it's subconscious.
It's unconsciously happening. Our bodies can survive without the need for conscious thought. In other words, the body knows what to do. Like we talked about on Wednesday, the body knows what to do. The body knows what to do on its own. That is not an esoteric concept. That is real. So we have the enteric nervous system.
The gut has its own nervous system. And I'm sure this is a refresh for a lot of you guys. But we have this collection of neurons in the GI tract. This is like the brain of the gut. It controls motility, endocrine secretions. It's involved in regulating immune and inflammatory processes. It communicates with the brain through different inputs and different signals. Again, the vagus nerve being one of them.
Vagus nerve facilitates so much of this interconnectedness between the two. Our vagus nerve is our 10th cranial nerve. It starts in the brainstem. So you can see that here. Starts in the brainstem, and then it travels out throughout the rest of the body and innervates many of the organs within our body. And it's a continuous feedback loop between the brain and the body. So the vagus nerve, like I said, it exits the brainstem, it travels down through the neck, the chest, the abdomen, the heart, the lungs, and then there's a big plexus down into the gut. And it's not just one big beefy nerve, but it's also a series of nerve connections.
And so you You can see that the yellow line is what the vagus nerve is. So the yellow represents what's happening with the vagus innervation, and it innervates the viscera of almost every single organ, and it reaches all the way down to the colon. So these organs that you see here on your screen are literally connected to the brain. The brain-body connection is not just this philosophical concept, it's literal and it's anatomical. The gut-brain connection is this bidirectional information highway. So like I said, the signals are working in both directions, and I'm sure many of you know this, but roughly 20% of the signals are going from the brain down into the body, and then the vast majority, roughly 80%, are coming from the body in the gut up to the brain. The majority of the vagus nerve's fibers are afferent, so that means communication is coming from the body up. And I really want you to not think about it as the brain controlling the body or the body controlling the brain.
It's really more so a transference of information back and forth. So that's exactly where we're going to start is with the body up signals and probably a refresh for a lot of folks here. But we're going to start with the gut and a lot of the things that we feel familiar with and we know about. So dysbiosis, an imbalance in the gut microbiome, that could be low beneficial species, that could be an overgrowth of the opportunists or the pathogenic bacteria. But some imbalance of the gut is going to lead to all of this. We're going to see lower short-chain fatty acids. Those are the bacterial metabolites. I consider them like bacterial poop.
But these metabolites have the potential to cross the blood-brain barrier and influence our brain. We use most short-chain fatty acids. So this is your butyrate— geez, your butyrate, your propionate, your acetate. Imagine if I forgot the name of the short-chain fatty acids live on the call. I'm like, definitely learn from me, FNA is the best school ever. I don't have these written down, obviously, but most of them are used locally. They are used by the colonocytes, and then if there's leftover from there, they can support metabolic processes. And if there's leftover from there, they can circulate up to the brain, cross the blood-brain barrier, like I said, and have really positive effects on the brain and the central nervous system.
It can lower inflammation, neuroinflammation. It can increase neurogenesis and neuroplasticity. So really, really good stuff. But in order for this to happen, in order for us to see those brain benefits, there has to be such strong and robust production of short-chain fatty acids. And that needs to happen through really strong, healthy, robust beneficial species. That's really what's producing the short-chain fatty acids. When all of this is happening, we can also see less healthy mucosal barrier. We can see more damage and inflammation at the lining of the gut.
This is gonna give us more likelihood to have a leaky gut or that intestinal permeability. And when that's happening, there can be more translocation of endotoxins, of food proteins into systemic circulation. Things that shouldn't be in systemic circulation get there. And so that creates a big inflammatory situation at the gut. When that's happening at the gut, that can can certainly travel right up to the brain. This is especially true in the presence of LPS, lipopolysaccharides. The presence of LPS when it's in circulation where it doesn't belong is basically like just turns on a switch, an inflammatory switch. And LPS can actually bind to receptors in the vagus nerve and travel all the way up to the brain, and it's going to send pro-inflammatory signals directly to the brain that can activate a lot of neuroinflammation there.
So when we have dysbiosis, like bad bacteria combined with intestinal permeability and leaky gut, we can see the translocation of LPS, which is a very inflammatory situation. So that is one way that inflammation in the gut is traveling right up to the brain. So I'll just show you a couple of screenshots from labs. It doesn't take much to find these in our practice. For any of you running stool tests like a GI Map, you're going to see this is kind of like average modern-day gut, right? The commensals, the keystones, the good guys are low. And then we can also simultaneously see overgrowth of opportunistic or even pathogenic bacteria as well. So this is something that we're seeing in our practice. So we've got inflammation in the gut, and then these pro-inflammatory messages are shooting right up to the brain.
This is going to drive HPA axis activation. There's going to be more priming of immune cells. Immune cells is going to be more reactive. So we are seeing more stress reaction, we're seeing more immune reaction, we're going to see more neuroinflammation, and this is going lead to more of the brain-based symptoms, mood, anxiety issues, stress symptoms, all of that. So what's happening in the gut can for sure lead to gut symptoms, right? Those stool tests that I just showed you, people's bellies tend to hurt when their guts look like that for sure. But it can also lead to systemic body-wide brain-based symptoms too. And the reason that I'm spending a little bit of time here is because I really, really want you to understand that this this is where just focusing on mindset, or just focusing on brain rewiring, or just focusing on nervous system regulation can sometimes be problematic. Because if there's actual gut inflammation, or neuroinflammation going on, that actually needs to be addressed.
You cannot rewire or mindset your way out of an inflamed brain. And this is coming from somebody who's like, manifest everything, it's great. It's like manifest everything and fix your gut. We gotta do both. Okay. And I just say that because there is such a massive rise in nervous system regulation. Everybody and their mom wants to talk about it. Sometimes I get like a little sassy and a little snarky.
I never have said this to anybody out loud, but in my head I'm like, oh yeah, you wanna talk about the nervous system? Define it. Tell me what it is. You can't? Oh, okay. Maybe we shouldn't be talking about how to regulate it then. I think it's just like anything that gains in popularity, right? We can, we, if things can get wonky, messages can get wonky. But I want you to know and understand. And that like both things need to come online. That was the whole point of Wednesday's call.
It's not an either or, it's a, and also it's not brain over body or mind over body or body over brain or body over mind. It's all of it all at once.
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So kind of the take-home message of everything that I just talked about here, right? What's happening in the gut can express itself through the gut, of course, but it can also express itself other ways too, via the gut-brain axis. Now here's the real meat and potatoes of today's class. We are going to talk about brain down from here on out. Are you with me?
Let's do it.
So just as a little reminder and a little refresher, the vagus nerve does an awful lot. So brain down, it is controlling the esophagus and how the esophagus is propulsing or moving. It helps to relax the LES so that can allow food to pass through. It can relax the pyloric sphincter. We need appropriate valve function in order for digestion to work, and the vagus nerve is really controlling those valves. So we're allowing for appropriate gastric or stomach emptying into the intestines. In the intestines, the vagus nerve and the enteric nervous system regulate the contraction of smooth muscles and glandular secretion. So this is important for motility and for digestion and digestive enzymes and all the digestive juices to be thrown into the mix.
It contracts the gallbladder and promotes pancreatic secretion, and it also informs and controls peristalsis, like the movement movement of your gut. So when we have low vagal tone, or when the vagus nerve isn't working well, then none of this works well. And you know, we see this all the time in practice, that's going to lead to like a lot of problems, gut pain, IBS-like symptoms, constipation, diarrhea, pockets of gas can build up, we can see distension, we can see bloating, we can see spasms, it's very, very, very uncomfortable. When none of this is working right. So people are going to come to you being like, my belly hurts. Like, yeah, I bet it does. So what leads to low vagal tone? There's certainly a few different things that contribute to this. What we're going to focus on today is the most common, which is a sympathetic dominant state.
This is when your nervous system is revved up and it's activated. Chronic stress can disrupt the vagus nerve and cause a lot of vagal dysfunction. So let's talk about some of the very real ways that stress and sympathetic dominance can affect the gut. I always like to like really lead with like the grounding science before we get into like, and here's what your subconscious is doing, because this is really real. Stress reduces blood flow to the intestines. So I'm always telling you, and we talked about it on Wednesday, the body can heal itself. The body can repair itself. The body needs circulation in order to do that, right? The body needs blood flow.
So if we are not getting appropriate blood flow to the gut, then the gut is not gonna be able to appropriately regenerate itself. That lining of the gut is like moving and grooving. It's turning over new cells all the time. We need appropriate blood flow and circulation to bring nutrients to the lining of the gut, to actually do that. High cortisol is also going to break down the lining of the gut. It puts the body more in a catabolic state, and so when we're constantly breaking down the body, hey, guess what? It's really hard to build it back up simultaneously. High cortisol can also suppress secretory IgA. That's going to have another impact on healing and repairing the gut.
Mucosal immunity will be suppressed, so we're way more likely to get GI infections. We're also more likely to have overactive dendritic cells, which is going to lead to more food sensitivities. And then that chronic fight or flight activation will suppress the parasympathetic arm of the nervous system, and we will not be able to access rest and digest. And this does not have to just be current stress. It for sure can be. Current stress can influence it in real time, but you have to keep in mind that the body remembers. The body holds on to experiences. Memory is not just recall.
It can be a neurobiological and also somatic experience as well. We have something called implicit memory where things are actually experiences, memories are actually encoded into the body. And so that leads me to talk about the nervous system and the subconscious. These two, it's one of my favorite things to talk about. These two are inextricably linked. I like to think about the nervous system as the physical expression or the physical manifestation of the subconscious mind. Dr. Candice Pert, who is one of my chef's kiss all-time faves, she said that the body is the subconscious mind.
And so this is kind of what she was talking about when she said that. All day, every day, your nervous system is scanning your environment. Both internally, what's going on inside, and externally. So we have exteroception, which is taking in cues from our outside world, external stimulus. We have interoception, which is listening and being aware of the cues coming from inside our body. And then we have proprioception, which is basically like where we are in space. So your brain is constantly taking in and integrating all three of these things, and it acts like a filter. So we have stimulus that comes in, the brain has to categorize it, it has to define it, it has to say, what does this mean? What category do I put this in? And then based on its, how it tags it, how it determines what the meaning is, it signals to the rest of the body.
So your brain and your nervous system are essentially scanning your world and your inner environment. All day, every day, every second of every day, just asking like, am I safe? Am I safe? Am I safe? Is this safe? Is this safe? If the answer is yes, if the brain determines, yep, we're safe, then your body can rest, it can digest, it can connect, and it can heal itself. If the answer is no, your body's gonna shift right into protection. That's fight, flight, freeze, and it's gonna shift into that sympathetic activation state. Our bodies, our actual bodies, physiologically react to fear-based thoughts and stress by creating stress chemistry and inflammatory compounds. So if the body senses fear, or if you're consciously thinking fear-based thoughts, your body is going to be in stress chemistry. Okay, so this is conscious thoughts, but this is also subconscious perception. If your brain perceives safety or lack thereof, that's what determines everything else—your emotional regulation, your hormone balance, your inflammation, your immune response, your sleep, and yes, your digestion.
And the thing to know and understand, and this is really important, is that your nervous system decides how safe you feel. Not necessarily how safe you are. Your felt sense of safety is not always tied to objective, measurable reality. So objectively, you could be totally safe, but if your body doesn't know that, then stress chemistry is happening. So this is how your perception, what your brain and your nervous system are perceiving, becomes your actual lived reality. What your body is experiencing. Because we've all heard that quote, perception is reality. Like this is part of what's going on.
Just to bring it to food, cuz we're all nutritionists here probably, or interested in functional nutrition and functional medicine. Anytime we eat, our body is asking, or our system is asking this basic question, do I feel safe enough to rest and digest? It's a yes or no response. That's it. I've said this a hundred times. If I've said this once, ones. This is what I mean. So if no, then you're more likely than not going to have digestive issues. And all of that starts in the brain with what the mind is perceiving.
So the mind perceives and the nervous system responds. And all of this is happening primarily based on your subconscious beliefs and your subconscious filters. So let's talk about subconscious conscious mind. It is programmed ages 0 to 7, but it's really like 0 to 12, more likely than not. And there's a lot of suggestions, research that says a lot of this can happen when we're in the womb as well. So 0 to 7 is not like wholly accurate, but I had to throw some numbers up there. So ish, 0 to 7-ish. How does that sound? During this time, we are in a very, very, very programmable, suggestible, maybe even we can say hypnotic state because there's no system of discernment or critical thinking.
The subconscious and the conscious are like one. There's no door between the two. So anything that we're seeing, anything that we're witnessing, anything that's modeled to us, we are just drinking it in and accepting it as absolute truth. Our analytical minds don't really come online in fully form until about the age of 12. So before that, whatever's modeled to us, whatever we see, that begins to build our subconscious foundation. And that begins to be the program that we run as truth, even well into adulthood. It doesn't just stop at age 12. We take this all the way with us and it's subconscious.
So most of the time we're not even aware of this stuff. So you have to think about your parents' modeled behavior, societal programming, anyone in a position of authority and power, like a teacher or a coach. Your peers, what you are seeing on TV, what is modeled to you in movies and media. So some examples, when I reference programs, some examples of that would be beliefs that we form, like speaking up leads to abandonment. I use my words and somebody left. When I have no needs, I can receive love. When I can tend to the needs of my parents, my home feels more calm. If I can make myself smaller, mom seems more relaxed.
Peace does not feel safe because I'm always waiting for the other shoe to drop. If I can make everyone else okay, I can receive love. I only receive love and attention— this is a big one for people that end up with chronic illness, or can be a big one. I only receive love and attention if I'm sick or if something is wrong. So we're gonna talk about abuse and trauma and how that can prime the nervous system. But I want you to understand that these messages can be more subtle. So it's not like you have to have grown up in an abusive household. You can have grown up in a very loving household and still be taking some messages like this in, like one time.
I said something, and then after that my parents got divorced. You know what I mean? So we can like link up because we're little, we're kids, right? We can link up things. But the big take-home message here is that they form like rock-solid beliefs, and then we live the rest of our lives according to those beliefs. So the subconscious mind, it works quicker than the conscious mind. It's more automatic. Remember, when you think autonomic, think automatic. It works automatic. It doesn't always slow down and wait for logic and reason to catch up.
So I'm gonna use some real-world examples of what I mean by that. It also influences your reality, how you perceive the world. Remember, perception is reality. This is what's influencing how we perceive those messages. It filters out a lot of information, so our brains can only hold and process consciously We see so much information and I, you know, these numbers change, but there's 11 million bits of information coming at us any second. So information is like the light coming in through my ring light and the windows, the clothes on my skin. I can hear my own voice talking back to me. All of that is information coming in.
So 11 million bits per second in modern day, we can only consciously process process? 50 to 125, right? So we are deleting and filtering out massive, massive amounts of information. And how does the brain know what to throw out and delete? It does it based on the filters that you have in place. So the brain is always searching for evidence of our own beliefs. That's part of what the brain does. It's an efficiency machine. So it is always searching to reinforce reinforce more of our beliefs. So our subconscious beliefs are dictating a lot of our current reality. And that's why, like, two different people that might be in the same exact situation can have two different experiences.
And I always, like, I use this as a joke. Anyone that's married can relate to this, but it's like, sometimes I look at my husband and I'm like, we're both experiencing the same thing. How is your reaction so different? Well, we had very different childhoods, and we have very different subconscious stuff that we're carrying around with us. That's how his version of reality is sometimes very different than mine. So our childhood could dictate our current perception of the world, and it might see things through a more fear-based lens. And this is especially true if there is childhood trauma. So there's something called adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs. I'm sure many of you are familiar with this term.
These are potentially traumatic events that occur in childhood, 0 through 17. And it can include experiencing violence, abuse, or neglect, witnessing violence in the home, having a family member attempt or die by suicide, growing up in a household with substance abuse, mental health problems, instability, uh, due to parental separation or household members being in jail or prison. So there's very specific parameters that constitute ACEs or adverse childhood experiences. In adults, Adults with ACEs tend to stay on high alert because unresolved trauma can lead to a dysregulated limbic system. There's an amplification of the brain's alarm system. So negative thoughts, fears, and reactivities are far more likely to occur. And this is most likely due to habits that were learned in childhood when they weren't sure if they'd be— when they were going to face the next intense, high-tension situation. So there was like an unpredictability of stressors, waiting for the other shoe to drop, catastrophizing.
And by the way, I, I do use the term unresolved trauma intentionally. Just because somebody has experienced trauma in the past does not automatically mean that they're gonna have health issues or they're gonna have gut issues. There are ways to process and move through things that have happened to us in the past. But the body will eventually show evidence of what we have resisted, hidden, and pushed down. So if there is a history of trauma, I'm always encouraging clients to work with the appropriate people to resolve that. So there, this is just some data that history of emotional, physical, sexual abuse is often found in IBS patients. There's a higher prevalence in patients with GI disorders versus controls. This is basically just saying all of that.
Read the heading. And that is the research to back it up. So traumatic stress isn't just childhood trauma. It's any experience of helplessness, powerless, or chronic overwhelm without a chance to recover. So it's basically like too much, too fast without the appropriate resources. The reason that I say this is because I often put chronic illness in the category of traumatic stress. It is the unpredictability of symptoms, the not knowing what is going to trigger the symptoms. It can be somebody experiencing medical gaslighting, not being believed, not having resources or answers, this appropriate support to actually help them.
There can be legitimate fear associated, like, is this my forever? Like, is it always going to be like this? Am I always going to feel like this? And so that can really put somebody on guard. And keep them there. So they're constantly on the lookout for danger, and this becomes their new norm. This becomes their normal default state. So this leads to a more hypervigilant nervous system where it's constantly scanning inside and outside, looking for and expecting problems or danger or threat. So some examples that I will use using myself as an example, because this really, really used to be me. I was definitely a hypervigilant patient for sure, because of my history going all the way back to childhood, but specifically my history with chronic illness. I would walk into a house, I would see or smell a Glade plug-in, and I would— my brain would be like, not safe, not safe, like hypervigilant, scanning, scanning, scanning.
Walk into a restaurant, I would see a pizza oven. It would be next to the food prep area and I'd be like, not safe, not safe for me. I'm gluten-free and consuming gluten would trigger and exacerbate a lot of my issues. My elbows would hurt after a yoga class and I would be like, oh, this is joint pain. This is part of autoimmunity. Yoga, not safe, not safe. I would have a stomach ache after eating and be like, did I just react to the food? Am I reacting to a new food right now? Not safe. So this is what I mean by more of a hypervigilant on guard state for the nervous system.
The big thing that we have to know and understand, if you haven't lived this yourself, or even if you have, this isn't because people with chronic symptoms are crazy. This is because this is how the brain actually literally works. Emotionally intense experiences are better remembered. This has been long understood. Basically what happens when you go through an emotionally charged experience, experience, it gets tagged by the brain. It's like puts a Post-it note on it. And it's like, be sure to store this. This one is important.
This one is important. Don't forget this one. Hold on to this one. When emotionality is high, the amygdala activates. So the amygdala is our fear response. It's part of the limbic system. The hippocampus prioritizes memory encoding. And the brain is a meaning-making machine, but it's also a prediction-making machine.
And guess It is going to predict what happens next based on what has repeatedly happened in the past. And this is especially true if it has been stamped with that Post-it note. If it was an emotionally charged experience, your brain is gonna have really good recall to pull that front and center. So think about fear-based experiences. Think about when your gut has hurt for 6 months straight, right? Your brain has tagged that as dangerous. Really, really, really, really important. And it is going to predict what happens in the future based on what has happened in the past. It's the number one core concept of neuroplasticity.
Neurons that fire together wire together. We've all heard that one. When an experience happens, clusters of neurons are firing. If that happens repeatedly, those connections strengthen. And that is especially, especially, especially true when emotional intensity is present. When a circuit fires repeatedly, it can become over time the default setting, the response that is most likely to occur. And when the brain— remember, it's a prediction-making machine— when the brain predicts something is coming, it is signaling down to the body body, get ready. The body starts preparing for it before it has even happened.
It's like, hey, we've been here before, we know what to do, let's go, let's get ready. So if you have, or your clients have, a history of chronic gut issues, stomach pain, food reaction, if that has been their default setting, then it is more likely to continue to be. I always describe these pathways as ice like the Jamaican bobsledding team. It's just like, whoosh, this is the way we go. This is what we're doing. And remember, the subconscious works faster than the conscious mind. So we aren't always able to like timeout, pause, and reframe the experience and contextualize it. Like, hey, I just saw a pizza oven.
That doesn't mean I ate a whole pizza pie, you know? So if I Like, let's say I ate a meal at a restaurant and after I ate the meal, that's when I saw the pizza oven and I'm like, oh my God, there's gluten all over the food prep area. Oh my God. And all of a sudden my tummy starts to hurt, right? I can be like, listen, listen, listen, slow down. That does not mean anything. But that's— none of that is happening. We can't stop to contextualize it. The subconscious has already taken over. Okay.
When your brain is perceiving a threat or lack of safety, it sends signals down to the body and the gut. Signals from the gut up also have to be run through the brain and the nervous system though. So anything that's coming up here, it has to go to the brain, and then the brain has to decide, what do we do with this?
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So visceral information, this is the interoception that we were talking about. We mentioned this on Wednesday, but we also talked about this a little bit in the lecture. Interoception are cues coming from inside our body, body up cues. So the signals come from the body up, and it has to go to the brain so the brain interprets those signals. And so this goes to the insula. The insula in the brain is the primary hub for interoception, and then it talks to the amygdala, the fear center, and they basically have to decide, like, what do we do about this? Like, what do these signals mean? And it integrates those signals with emotions with stored memory, and it creates subjective feelings. So this is how chronic stress, or I should say, this is not how, but I want to tell you, new concept, chronic stress and traumatic experiences can impact interoception and accuracy.
We can have, especially after chronic traumatic stress and nervous system hypervigilance, we can have inaccurate Interoception, meaning that the signals that are coming up from the body, the brain is flagging them as problematic. This is more so with overactive interoception. We do have deficient interoception, which we talked about on Wednesday, but I really want to focus for today's lecture on overactive interoception because this is what we can see in IBS patients with this visceral hypersensitivity. But basically we can hyperfixate on the signals coming from inside of our gut. We can associate them with something negative. The sensations that are coming up into the insula are automatically linked with our fear circuitry. And all of this is associated with anxiety. So we see this hypervigilance, this person stays on guard, it is constantly assessing for threats, and it's constantly overestimating those threats.
That's what I mean by interoceptive inaccuracy. It is, remember the nervous system's job is to decide if you are safe, but that's just based on perception, not necessarily objective reality. So I think this is the best way to really describe it. And if you work with IBS clients, you will see this. And if you don't know this, definitely something you should put a Post-it note on it. Tell your brain, put a Post-it note on it. Okay, this one's important. Visceral hypersensitivity is pain or discomfort in your visceral organs.
Organs. So there's like the soft organs, like around here. With visceral hypersensitivity, the threshold for pain is lower than normal. So these people can feel normal sensations, like gas or food moving through the intestines, but it perceives— the brain perceives it as painful. So these people are going to be in more pain all of the time, because whatever the body is sending up to the brain, the brain is like, this is bad, this is real bad, this is a threat, this is pain. The brain decides It is pain. And so then the person experiences the pain. If we interpret what is happening as harmful, we will see increased pain, not just with IBS, not just with visceral sensitivity or hypersensitivity.
This is with everything all of the time, any type of chronic pain. Just as an FYI, this is just a systemic review that basically says that people with IBS have specific attentional biases toward negative emotional GI stimuli. So they are going to be more likely to experience pain. So we know, we know, we've addressed already today that if you are in a heightened and activated state, then the body will not be in rest and digest. It is either sympathetic or parasympathetic, one or the other, fight or flight or rest and digest. So if you're up here, which this person is there, everybody we just talked about, right? They're all like there, they're locked in heightened arousal. That we're not going to be in rest and digest. We've established that when the body is not in rest or digest, people are going to be more likely to have digestive issues.
And then that's— those digestive symptoms are going to be sent back up to the brain, and your brain is going to be more likely to perceive those symptoms as unsafe. It's going to ring the alarm bells, it's going to trigger the amygdala, the amygdala is going to talk to the HPA axis, and then we have the stress stress cascade. So it is really just a loop, like wash, rinse, and repeat, around and around and around we go. Subconscious beliefs and nervous system patterns can be embedded and expressed through the body. So how to help your clients join FNA? Obviously, we unpack a lot of this in FNA. We explore all this, we uncover all this. It takes us 14 months, but I will do my to use the next 8 minutes of class to help you in the event that you're not in FNA. A big one is to offer reframes.
So help your clients recontextualize their symptoms because yes, this is for sure a subconscious mind game, but that doesn't mean that we can't bring conscious thought online to help interrupt the pattern. So know and understand, and if you can educate, if your clients are open to this kind of education, explain to them how a fear-based story or a fear-based narrative about what they're experiencing will actually influence their biochemistry. Thoughts are signals down to the body, and we can change someone's biochemistry by getting them out of fear. And so if we can help them, and this does not mean that their pain isn't real or their symptoms aren't real, because the last thing they need is somebody else telling them that it's not real. It's like, it's real and it's in your body and it's in your brain. Both are true. But if we can tell a different story about their symptoms, it can really help to alleviate the fear associated with the symptoms. And if we can alleviate the fear, we can also alleviate the severity of the symptom.
So back to the yoga joint pain example, this was a game changer and it was literally one conversation that changed everything for me. So I was diagnosed with systemic sclerosis back in 20— forget now, 2015. And that's a scary thing to be diagnosed with, by the way. I was in a lot of fear. It's like, what? And a 1-year-old baby? I was like, what do I do with this? And I was very active. I taught yoga, and I was practicing yoga, and my elbows would hurt all the time. And I'm like, this is the joint pain. This is the autoimmune stuff.
And so every time I experienced— I don't know why it was elbows for me. That was like my thing. Every time I experienced elbow pain, joint pain, I would be like, this is autoimmune disease progression. That was the fear-based narrative in my mind. And I went to a physical therapist who's like now one of like one of my close friends, Kristen Zames, and she offered a reframe for me. She's like, oh, you hyperextend your elbows. And I don't know if you can tell here, I hyperextend my elbows. And so you're doing a lot of chaturangas and down dogs and all the vinyasas.
She's like, you're going to just have a lot of extra wear and tear on your joint because the musculature isn't doing what it's supposed to do. And so it's all coming into the joint. So she just offered a very different context and a very different narrative for me. So when I felt joint pain, I was like, oh, that makes sense, given the context. And it removed the fear-based story of my disease is getting worse, and I'm going to die. Okay, so that's why I mean, like helping to reframe and recontextualize things for our clients. Really pay attention and watch out for identity words. I am, I am someone who, that's just who I am.
I've always been the one to, I'm just not blank, always or never language, and over-identification with a diagnosis like, well, because I have I have IBS, I can't do that. Things like that, because our subconscious minds will never outperform our own self-identity. So how you see and perceive yourself will be locked in as a program and as truth. And like we talked about earlier, your brain is designed to show you more of what you believe in. So if you're saying these things, if they're beliefs, you're basically programming your mind to like, go out and show me more of this. So maybe there's a belief that no matter what I do, no matter what I try, I can't heal. Nothing ever works for me. That is that like very like always never language, like never, never nothing you do.
But if we believe that, then we are going to scan our environment and scan our experiences to feed more of that back to ourselves. And then we're like doubling down on our belief over and over and over again. So if we can if you can watch for these identity words and help them poke holes at these words, that can be really effective. Visualization, meditation, and the expectant state. The subconscious mind does not know the difference between real and imagined, so that can work to our disadvantage. Like we talked about today, walking into a restaurant and being like, there's a pizza there, there's pizza there. I'm def— I definitely got glutened already. I got glutened, right? It can work to our disadvantage.
Or it can work to our advantage because your subconscious mind is going to bring to your awareness what it thinks is important. So if, if your clients have value tagged digestive discomfort, pain, bloating as important, like this is a big deal, put a Post-it note on it. The mind and different systems in the brain are actively going to show them more of that and bring more of that into their conscious awareness. So through different techniques, visualization, meditation, we can help them become more aware of when they're not in pain, when they're not feeling terrible, and really try to lock that in and help to interrupt what they expect to see. Our expectant state, what we expect to see, will dictate what we actually see and experience. So if we can change that expectant state, that is huge. And this is the, the last thing that I want to leave you with, is that the mind and the brain can change. So we talked about a lot of things today.
Some of it can feel really depressing, like, cool, I just have these subconscious beliefs. Well, they suck, but you can change them. We have something known as neuroplasticity in the brain, the mind, the brain, they can change. And so your clients and you have the ability to change our filters, to change our perception, and therefore our lived reality. So don't walk away from this feeling hopeless. There is a lot of hope and a lot of resources to help people out of these things.
Thanks for joining me for this episode of the Funk’tional Nutrition Podcast. Please keep in mind this podcast is created for educational purposes only and should never be used as a replacement for medical diagnosis or treatment. If you got something from today's show, don't forget, subscribe, leave a review, share with a friend. And keep coming back for more. Take care of you.