How Emotional Trauma Impacts Your Gut And Drives Your Anxiety
Written by: Hanna Hanula, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
The emotional trauma results from events or experiences that leave you feeling profoundly unsafe and often helpless. It can result from a single event or be part of a longer experience, such as parental misattunement, abuse, neglect, abandonment, bullying, or discrimination. This psychological trauma can lead you to struggle with upsetting emotions, low self-worth, shame, digestive issues, and anxiety that won't go away. It can also create an anxious attachment with your partners, the need for control, and overdelivering or overgiving.
The nervous system creates survival adaptations from age 0 to 6 months old. These early childhood survival mechanisms could look like:
feel non-emotional
feel shame about needing anything from anyone
prefer to be in your head and intellectualize your emotions
withdraw from anything uncomfortable
disconnected from the body, intuition, maybe numb
fear both being alone and being overwhelmed by others
feel like you don't fit in.
These adaptation strategies profoundly impact your nervous system by keeping it highly activated. For example, unprocessed emotions can sensitize the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, which is the body's central stress response system, making you more reactive to stress and more likely to increase the stress hormone cortisol. Cortisol overproduction suppresses functions that aren't essential for survival, like your immune response and digestion. Prolonged stress can cause dysfunction in the nervous, immune and endocrine systems, leading to chronic inflammation, which can have a long-term impact on the body and brain.
So how does it impact your gut?
As you may already know, your gut is an enteric nervous system and a manufacturing plant for the brain chemicals – neurotransmitters. For example, your gut is where 90% of your serotonin and 50% of dopamine are produced.
The feel-good chemicals can be fabricated from beneficial bacteria, amino acids, and nutritional cofactors when the system has optimal conditions. However, suppose there is prolonged stress in the body due to unprocessed trauma. In that case, the cortisol may impair the gut flora, slow digestion by lowering the production of gastric acid and digestive enzymes, and increase inflammation.
If you suffer from low gut motility, issues with absorptions, gut dysbiosis, bloating or IBS, it can mean that your nervous system is dysregulated.
What about anxiety?
Well, anxiety is an adaptive mechanism to provide you with the 'illusion' of safety by keeping you worried about the future, controlling, planning, overdoing, isolating, and withdrawing.
On the biological side, being in a constant, highly activated state may impact many biochemical processes in the body like methylation, hormones, immune system etc. There might be issues with intestinal absorption that creates many nutritional deficiencies ( I wrote about what vitamins and minerals deficiencies to test to address the trauma in my previous article, check it out here. These nutrients are cofactors for neurotransmitters production; hence if the process is impaired and you don't generate enough GABA, serotonin or dopamine, it contributes to your anxiety and/or depression.
What is the best treatment?
The most effective therapy is the one that covers all angles, not only diet and supplements that support the body in trauma recovery but also finding the WHY behind your symptoms and releasing it from the body to regulate the nervous system, increase the emotional capacity and reconnect with the body to feel safe and secure. My healing program, Awaken Your Wellness – Holistic Anxiety Transformation, is a unique blend of naturopathic medicine, energy healing, bodily therapy, and subconscious release. If you would like to get more information about my offering, please feel free to reach out to me.
Hanna Hanula, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Hanna Hanula is a leading nutritionist, naturopath, and mindset coach specializing in the gut and mental health. She is a former sufferer of high functioning anxiety, ADHD, social anxiety, and several digestive issues (mainly IBS, Candida, Sibo, and food intolerances) who healed herself by working holistically on the gut-brain axis. She then developed her own unique method called GEM based on gut healing (G), energy medicine (E), and mindset (M). She became passionate about helping others understand the importance of the influence of food on our mood. She is a founder of Souliciously Hanna, a coaching practice through which she runs group programs called Holistic Anxiety Reset and coaches private clients. She is also the author of Stress & Anxiety – the ultimate remedies guide. Her motto is that if you really want to heal your anxiety and feel comfortable in your body, then you need to address your emotional center – your gut.
