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Transcript

Why So Many Women With IBS Also Have Anxiety · The IBS Solution with Brooke Kane

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: If you have IBS, chances are you also deal with anxiety.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: And I get it, urgent diarrhea is enough to make anyone sweat.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: You're scared of having an accident somewhere where you can't control it, and that fear is real.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: But let me ask you something.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: Does the anxiety only show up when you're worried about an accident, or does it show up when you're already home, already safe, with a bathroom 10 feet away and nothing actually happening?
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: For most of the women I talk to, it's the second one.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: The anxiety has a mind of its own.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't wait for a reason to show up.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: So if this anxiety isn't just about the fear of an accident, why do so many women with IBS have it?
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: Because the conventional treatment for both of them totally sucks.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: Think about it.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody ever actually checks anything.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe a doctor told you it's anxiety and left it there.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it was never even brought up because you already had your own answer, the accidents, the bathroom.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: So why would you ask anyone to look any further?
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: Either way, nothing got measured.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: You just had a feeling and a reason that seemed to explain it, and everyone called that good enough.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: That's not treatment.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: That's a, I don't know what else to tell you, with a little bit of good luck thrown in.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: I went through my own gut health collapse about 10 years ago, and the thing that made me angriest wasn't the diarrhea.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: It was the sitting across from the specialist after specialist and realizing nobody was actually looking for anything.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: They were matching my symptoms to a checklist and handing me a name for what I already knew I had.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: That's when I learned IBS is not a real diagnosis.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's what they call it when your bowels are a mess and nobody goes looking for why.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: And anxiety gets the exact same treatment.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: A few half-hearted questions, a quick label, and maybe a prescription.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: It's nonsense.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: I wouldn't settle for those labels, and neither should you.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: Let's actually measure something.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: A standard gut workup checks for maybe five different things: C.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: diff, H.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: pylori, blood, mucus, cow protectin, if you're lucky.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: That's it.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: So of course it comes back normal.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: They never checked the right things to begin with.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: What they're not checking is what's actually living in there.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: Bacterial overgrowth, yeast, sometimes parasites, mold markers, the actual health of your gut lining, whether your beneficial bacteria, the ones supposed to be protecting you, are even still there in any real number.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: None of that shows up on a standard panel.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: So a doctor looks at a normal result and tells you it must be in your head.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: It's not that nothing's there, it's that nobody looked.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: Now, here's the part almost no one tells you as it relates to anxiety.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: The chemical that's supposed to keep you calm, serotonin, most of it isn't even made in your brain.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: It's made in your gut.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: Your gut is basically running the kitchen for the one chemical your whole nervous system depends on to feel steady.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: So what happens when that kitchen has bacteria overgrown where they shouldn't be?
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeast crowding things out, the lining is inflamed and irritated for years on end.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: You think that kitchen is putting out a clean product, it's not.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: And no amount of telling yourself to just relax is going to fix what's coming out of a kitchen that's falling apart.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: I know what a lot of you have already tried, by the way, and I want to walk through it because every single thing on that list makes sense.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: And every single one of them missed the actual problem.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: Low FODMAP.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: You cut out food after food hoping you'll find the trigger, and maybe you get some relief for a while.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: But food was never the root issue, so the relief never holds.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: Food sensitivity panels, you get a long list of things you're supposedly reacting to.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: But food intolerances aren't random.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: There's always a reason your body started reacting in the first place, and a sensitivity panel doesn't tell you what that reason is, it just gives you a longer list of things that you need to be afraid of eating.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: Probiotics, you heard the microbiome is the answer, so you started taking one.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: But most of them never even survive your stomach acid to make it where they're needed.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: And if you take the wrong strain at the wrong time, you can actually feed the exact imbalances you're trying to fix.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: Imodium, this one I really want you to hear.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: It feels like it's helping because it stops the urgency.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: But your body's having diarrhea because it's trying to flush something out.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: When you force your bowels to hold on to whatever's actually in there parasites, bacteria, yeast, you're not getting rid of it.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: You're letting it sit in there and grow.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: None of that ever touched the kitchen.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: That's the whole problem.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: And on the anxiety side, you've probably tried therapy, breathing exercises, medications, and it probably helped a little for a little while.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: But did it ever make the anxiety actually go away?
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: Or did it just turn the volume down for a bit before it crept back up?
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: That's because every one of those is working on your nervous system.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: None of them are working on the kitchen.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: Let me actually draw this out for you because once you see it, you're going to recognize exactly where you've been standing.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: Picture a circle.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: We're going to add four points onto this circle.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: Your gut's been inflamed for years, overgrowth, irritation, the whole thing.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: So the kitchen making your calm down chemical is running short.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: Your brain isn't getting enough of that chemical.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: So you start to feel keyed up, not scared of an accident today, keyed up.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: Just this low hum underneath everything that won't switch off.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: Your nervous system feels that hum and reads it as danger because it can't tell the difference between an actual threat and a chemical shortage.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: So it flips into fight or flight.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: Your body's bracing for something that isn't even there.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: Fight or flight pulls blood away from your gut and it sends it to your muscles because your body thinks that it might need to run.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: Your digestion gets a little erratic.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: The lining that was already inflamed gets even less support to heal.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_00: And then look where that line goes next.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: Right back to point one.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: Less healing means even less of that calming chemical getting made.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: The circle just closed and you've been walking it for years.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: Every lap makes the next one a little worse.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: So when I tell you this isn't about willpower, I mean that literally.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: You're not bad at managing your anxiety.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: You're stuck in a loop.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: Let me show you what this looks like.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: Sandy was 58 years old when she came to me after 37 years of being told that her anxiety was just anxiety, nothing physical, just stress.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: She'd tried therapy, Zoloft, Atavan, breathing, meditation.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: They helped a little, but the anxiety was never truly going away.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: When we ran her oat test, one of the things we found was elevated peruvic acid.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: This is a marker suggesting that her cells weren't producing energy as efficiently as they should, something we commonly see when the gut has been under stress for years.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: We also uncovered bacterial and fungal overgrowths that were disrupting her gut brain connection.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_00: As we addressed those root causes and worked on calming her nervous system, within about three weeks, her anxiety started diminishing significantly.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: And for the first time in over 30 years, her bowel movements were starting to form.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: And I see this pattern constantly.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: Women who have done everything they were told to do for their mental health, the journaling, somatic work, the medication, and they still tell me they feel like something underneath it all is still buzzing.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: That's not because they didn't try hard enough, it's because nobody ever checked the kitchen.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: Here's the other thing that catches people off guard.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: You can't just throw a supplement at this and expect that loop to break.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: If your nervous system still thinks everything is a threat, it will treat every new supplement, a new food, something completely harmless as one more thing to brace against.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: So before we ever run a single test, we work on calming that environment down.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_00: We're not killing anything yet.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: We're just making the body feel safe enough to stop bracing.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: Only once that happens does testing actually tell us something useful.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: And only once we know what's actually growing in there can we treat it without making things worse.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: So here's what I want you to actually do.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: Stop accepting you have anxiety as the end of the conversation.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: Ask whether anyone has ever measured your neurotransmitters directly.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: There's a urine test for it, an organic acids test, and most doctors have never even heard of it, let alone ordered it.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_00: Let's start looking at the data instead of making decisions based off of feelings.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_00: I'll leave a link below if you want to get in touch with us about how we can help.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_00: And if you've been told your labs were normal but you still feel terrible, watch this next video to see what normal really means.