Book review: gut feelings
The human body is so cool but one of the coolest things is the vagus nerve, the largest individual nerve in the body, which winds from the base of the skull down past the heart and onward through the gut. It’s lengthy connections mean that the gut not only controls digestion, but also regulates the immune system, mood, and overall metabolism. When you’re feeling butterflies before a big date, anyone? Also fascinatingly, your intestines contain somewhere between 200 and 600 million neurons. So essentially your intestines are a part of your nervous system, in constant communication with your brain!
In Gut Feelings, Dr Will Cole explains simply that emotions affect the gut directly, which in turn influences mood. In a world searching for better health, especially better mental health, he describes:
The Real Flex
A healthy gut in a world that’s flared up
A healthy metabolism in a world that’s hangry
Balanced hormones in a world that’s unbalanced
Regulated nervous system in a world that’s dysregulated
Truly happiness in a world that pretends it is
Sober in a world that needs alcohol to cope
The gut is so full of neurons, it is incredibly sensitive to emotions and stress. This was a great advantage for early hunter-gatherers: if an angry lion suddenly pounced, their gut emptied itself before they’d even processed what was happening. They could run more quickly and perhaps live long enough to have children. But in modern life, stress isn't as straightforward as running from a hungry lion. Modern stress is chronic and chronic stress spurs the overgrowth of bad bacteria, leading to a widespread immune response – inflammation – in the digestive tract. While physical and mental health are treated as separate, they are, in fact, intertwined. Physical health is mental health and vice versa!
And some emotions have a particularly strong impact on the gut – especially shame: feelings of inadequacy, fear, and worthlessness. These feelings send a powerful message to the physical body – so powerful, in fact, that the author has called this effect shameflammation.
While gut health influences mental and physical health more than previously thought, the same is true of emotions and your gut. That means that optimum gut health isn’t a matter of juice cleanses, restrictive diets, or relentless exercise routines. It’s about feeling and expressing your emotions with self-compassion. That’s because shame, like bad gut bacteria, thrives in environments of stress, disconnection, and exhaustion. To end shameflammation, it’s vital to slow down, tune in, and reconnect.
Your gut has a lot more going on than simple digestion, with its ecosystem of microbes that aid immunity, regulate mood, hormones, and blood sugar levels, and curb inflammation. Gut Feelings shows that “no one way of eating will be sustainable if you don't have a healthy relationship with yourself.”
