Latest / Why You Got Sick: How Emotion Drives Chronic Illness & Healing in Women / #27. Billions Spent on Gut-Brain Axis Research and Women with Digestive Problems Are Still Being Told It's Food

Transcript

#27. Billions Spent on Gut-Brain Axis Research and Women with Digestive Problems Are Still Being Told It's Food · Why You Got Sick: How Emotion Drives Chronic Illness & Healing in Women

• 0:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Your digestive system processes two things.
• 0:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Food is one of them.
• 0:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the one nobody is talking about is the reason the diets aren't working and you're still struggling.
• 0:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is why you got sick.
• 0:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm Tecla de Francesco, certified MindBody Practitioner and certified Holistic Life Coach.
• 0:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: This podcast is for women living with chronic illness, autoimmune disease, IBS, chronic fatigue, PCOS, andometriosis, migraines, fibromyalgia, or persistent symptoms that no one can fully explain.
• 0:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: Twice a week we look at how emotion drives chronic illness in women.
• 0:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: One episode goes deeper into the pattern beneath the symptoms.
• 0:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: The other gives you a quick way to interrupt the cycle.
• 0:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: If you're done organizing your life around symptoms and flare-ups, this is where that changes.
• 0:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: This podcast shows mind-body education.
• 0:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is not medical advice and is designed to compliment not replace your medical care.
• 0:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let's begin.
• 1:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: In this episode, you'll discover why your gut keeps flaring even when your diet is perfect.
• 1:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: The emotional pattern that physically disrupts digestion and why most women completely miss it.
• 1:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: And you'll learn one practical shift that changes your gut environment immediately without cutting out another food group.
• 1:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Your digestive system processes two things, food obviously and emotion.
• 1:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Most women with chronic illness have no idea the second one is even happening.
• 1:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Here's what I mean by that.
• 1:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: Your gut contains its own independent nervous system.
• 1:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's called the Interic nervous system, and it contains somewhere between 200 and 600 million neurons.
• 1:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: For context, that is more than your spinal cord.
• 1:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is so complex that scientists refer to it as the second brain.
• 1:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it earned that name because it can operate entirely on its own, without any input from the brain in your head.
• 1:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: But it does not operate in isolation.
• 2:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Your gut and your brain are in a constant two-way communication through what is called the gut brain access.
• 2:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is not a wellness concept.
• 2:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is one of the most active areas of research in neuroscience and gastroenterology right now.
• 2:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Your brain sends signals down to your gut.
• 2:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Your gut sends signals back up to your brain.
• 2:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the pathway that carries most of those signals is the vagus nerve with roughly 80% of that communication traveling upward from the gut to the brain.
• 2:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: So your gut is not just digesting your food.
• 2:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is reading your emotional state in real time and responding to it.
• 2:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Here is where most women with chronic illness are getting caught.
• 2:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: They believe they are processing their emotions, and in one sense they are, but only from the neck up.
• 2:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Something happens, a difficult conversation, a moment that didn't sit right, a situation that brought up real frustration or hurt.
• 3:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Instead of feeling that emotion in the body, the mind takes over.
• 3:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: It analyzes the situation, it explains the other person's behavior, it rationalizes why you reacted the way you did.
• 3:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: It builds a logical narrative around the whole thing and fouls it away as resolved.
• 3:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: That process feels like emotional processing.
• 3:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: It looks like self-awareness, but it is not processing.
• 3:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is intellectualizing.
• 3:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: There is a critical difference.
• 3:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Processing in a motion means feeling it move through the body.
• 3:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: There is a physical component, a tightness that releases a heaviness that shifts, a charge that sort of dissipates.
• 3:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: When a motion is genuinely processed, the body registers completion.
• 3:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Their nervous system settles back down and the signal resolves.
• 3:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Intellectualizing skips all of that.
• 3:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: The mind builds a story.
• 3:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: The story makes sense.
• 4:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: The emotion gets filed away without ever being felt.
• 4:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: The narrative closes, but the body never got the signal that anything was resolved.
• 4:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: And when that happens repeatedly, when emotion-offery motion gets understood, but never actually felt, the body still has to do something with that unprocessed charge.
• 4:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Remember, emotion is energy, and it sends it to the one system designed to break things down.
• 4:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: You're good.
• 4:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: So how does this actually play out in real life?
• 4:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm going to start by telling you about my own experience with digestive symptoms.
• 4:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: In my sophomore year of university, which is second year, I started breaking out in severe acne.
• 4:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I remember thinking, this makes absolutely no sense.
• 4:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: I had never had bad skin as a teenager.
• 4:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: I had already gone through puberty obviously, so why would this be showing up now?
• 4:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I went to a dermatologist.
• 4:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: They told me they suspected a food allergy and they kind of sent me off to find out what it was.
• 4:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Turned out, I had developed an intolerance to gluten, so I cut it out and I stayed gluten for years.
• 5:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: What I didn't know at the time is that these things don't just come out of nowhere.
• 5:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: They are triggered by big emotional life changes, like moving halfway across the world from my family, and being in an intense athletic environment fighting for my life every day.
• 5:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Moving on though, cutting out gluten seemed to help quite everything down, but then many years later, my digestive system started absolutely falling apart.
• 5:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Bloading, inflammation, chaotic symptoms that looked a lot like IBS.
• 5:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: I could not work out where they were coming from because I wasn't eating anything new.
• 5:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I was so convinced I was accidentally consuming gluten that I remember pulling everything out of my cupboards and going through every single label, looking for something I had missed.
• 5:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: But there was nothing, and those symptoms kept escalating.
• 5:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: At that point, also, my body was showing me other things too, so I had completely lost my menstrual cycle.
• 6:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: I had stopped sweating.
• 6:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: I was visibly inflamed and had gained close to 30 pounds.
• 6:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: My system was shutting down and food had nothing to do with it.
• 6:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: Eventually, those digestive symptoms led to a chronic pancreatic condition diagnosis.
• 6:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: I was told I would need to take prescription enzymes with every meal for the rest of my life.
• 6:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's a condition that's now reversed, but when I came to understand later, was that there was an enormous amount of emotional turmoil that was happening underneath all of it.
• 6:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Things I was caring every single day and working very hard to keep suppressed.
• 6:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: And because none of it was being felt or processed through the body, it was coming up through my digestive system.
• 6:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: I see this pattern right now happening with a woman I'm working with.
• 6:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Every time she's exposed to an emotionally charged situation, conflict tension, even hearing about the death of someone she knew, but was not particularly close to her digestive symptoms spike without fail.
• 6:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: It does not matter whether the emotion is hers, or whether it even makes sense to her logically.
• 7:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: If there is an emotional weight in the environment, and she does not have a way to process it through her body, her gut starts responding.
• 7:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: That is what we are building together, her capacity to actually feel and move through those emotions instead of keeping them in her head.
• 7:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Until that capacity develops, her gut keeps being the place they end up, because that is the pattern.
• 7:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: When emotion stays in your head and never moves through the body, the gut becomes the default processing center as the second mind.
• 7:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: And your gut is not equipped to do that indefinitely without consequences.
• 7:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Here's what makes this so much more than a digestion problem.
• 7:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: Once your gut is disrupted, it does not just sit back, they're waiting for you to fix it.
• 7:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: It starts changing the signals it sends back to your brain.
• 7:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Those signals directly affect your mood, your stress tolerance, and your capacity to handle emotion.
• 7:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: So the very thing that caused the gut disruption and processed emotion becomes harder to deal with because the gut disruption itself is now making emotional processing even more difficult.
• 8:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Stress hits the gut.
• 8:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: The gut sends distress signals to the brain.
• 8:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: The brain becomes less equipped to process the next emotional experience.
• 8:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: So more emotion goes unprocessed and the gut takes another hit.
• 8:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is why digestive issues are really just digestive issues.
• 8:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that is why women with IBS, bloating, chronic gut problems, so often experience anxiety, low mood and fatigue all alongside them.
• 8:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is not separate conditions stacking up by coincidence.
• 8:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's one system caught in a loop.
• 8:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is the why.
• 8:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is why we care about this.
• 8:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Your gut is not a separate problem from how you feel emotionally.
• 8:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: They're in the same conversation, and you cannot fix one long term without addressing the other.
• 8:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: So how do we actually start processing emotion through your body instead of just your head?
• 9:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: A Harvard neuroanatomist named Jill Taylor observed something that changes the way we think about this.
• 9:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: When an emotion is triggered, the chemical reaction it produces in your body lasts about 90 seconds, 90, after that minute and a half, the chemistry completes and the sensation passes.
• 9:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: What keeps the emotion going beyond that point is not the feeling itself.
• 9:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's the thoughts you keep attaching to it.
• 9:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: The replaying, the analyzing, the story you build around it.
• 9:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: That means the emotion was ready to leave your body in under two minutes, and you are the one keeping it there.
• 9:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: So here is the practice.
• 9:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: The next time something lands emotionally, so a conversation the bothers you.
• 9:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: A moment that causes hurt.
• 9:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Do not go to your head.
• 9:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Go to your body.
• 9:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Stop and ask yourself, where am I feeling this right now?
• 9:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Is it in your chest or your stomach or your throat or your shoulders?
• 10:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some more in your body, there's a physical response happening.
• 10:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Put your hand there and stay with it for 90 seconds.
• 10:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: Try not to analyze the situation.
• 10:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: Don't try and explain the other person's behavior or build the narrative.
• 10:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Just feel what is actually happening in your body and let it be there.
• 10:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: What most women notice is that the sensation peaks, then it starts to fade on its own.
• 10:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Without the story or the analysis.
• 10:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: The body does what it is always trying to do, process the emotion and letting it go.
• 10:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: That is what processing actually feels like, not understanding but feeling.
• 10:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Every time you do this instead of going straight into your head, you're giving your gut one less thing to carry.
• 10:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let's recap what we talked about today.
• 10:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Your gut processes emotion as much as it processes food.
• 10:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: When your emotion stays in your head, it never gets felt in the body and your gut starts paying the price.
• 10:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: The 92nd practice we just talked about is how you start changing that.
• 11:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Your gut symptoms are connected to emotional patterns that are specific to you.
• 11:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: I developed a free chatGPT prompt that identifies what those patterns are and which physical symptoms they are connected to in under 30 seconds.
• 11:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Right now it is completely free but that will not always be the case.
• 11:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: The link is in the show notes, make sure you head right there.
• 11:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'll see you in the next episode.