If you’ve ever experienced dry mouth, butterflies in your stomach, or trouble in the bathroom when you’re feeling under-the-pump, then you've experienced the effects that stress can have on digestion.
When you're under stress, your brain tell your gut to call everything quits for the moment, via the gut-brain axis (GBA). Saliva may stop being produced, your stomach may stop secreting enzymes to break down your food, the food in your intestines may come to a complete halt, or it may be expelled quicker than you would like it to be... 😅
In situations of repeated or chronic stress, these issues can become problematic.
Your gut could be damaged and cause more serious health issues down the line.
All because your food is not being properly digested!
On the flip side, if digestion is compromised when you're stressed, it is also true that digestion is enhanced when you're more calm.
When your nervous system is in the rest, repair and digest state, instead of the
fight, flight or freeze state, your gut functions more optimally 🧘♀️
We often talk about how to calm our bodies down in a time when life is incredibly fast-paced and being busy is seen as a badge of honour.
But we don't often think about how that impacts the way we eat and therefore how we digest and make the most of our food.
Here are three simple tips to reduce stress while eating:
1. Chew Slowly
This does three things.
First, eating slowly mechanically breaks down your food into small chunks, making it easier to digest once it reaches the stomach.
Secondly, while you chew, the stomach is alerted that food is coming and starts to release enzymes to break this food down.
The slower you chew, the more ready the stomach is.
And lastly, chewing sends pleasurable neurotransmitters to the brain – fascinating, right? (This is part of why ‘emotional eating’ exists. But that’s for another article).
Chewing will help you to feel more calm,
and you are more likely to digest well at every stage of the process.
2. Take a Break
Try to eat your food outside during your lunch break, or with your colleagues or loved ones. In an ideal world, you would eat without any distractions at all, simply focusing on chewing and swallowing your food, but these days this is often unrealistic.
However, you can choose to match your meal times with a kind of time-out,
whatever that means for you.
Try not to eat at your desk or on-the-go.
3. Try the 4:2:5 Breathing Method
Slow breathing tell your body that there are no immediate stressors present, and you are more likely to shift into the state of rest, repair and digest.
Slow breathing also slows your heart rate down, lowers your blood pressure, and therefore leaves you feeling more calm generally.
It often relaxes your muscles too – neck and shoulder tightness especially is often caused by chest-breathing instead of diaphragm-breathing.
An easy technique to try is the 4:2:5 method:
Breathe in for 4 seconds, hold for 2 seconds, and breathe out for 5 seconds.
Repeat three times before your meal.
I hope you found this valuable!
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Until next time!
Chantelle x
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