Why Am I Like This?!
We are a therapist and a psychiatric nurse practitioner and we want to share a simplified view of these complex concepts that are often misunderstood, avoided, and even feared.
This is a podcast about being human, adapting to life, and learning from our unique experience.
We try to provide the answers to question: Why am I like this?
Why Am I Like This?!
Why am I tired, bloated, and moody!?
Our gut and brain are connected through a remarkable two-way communication system that impacts our physical and mental health in profound ways. The gut, often called the "second brain," contains millions of neurons and produces 90% of the body's serotonin.
• Stress activates our fight-or-flight response, slowing digestion and creating gut imbalances
• The vagus nerve connects our brain to every organ and plays a crucial role in regulating our stress response
• Trauma and chronic stress can create gut inflammation and disrupt the gut microbiome
• People with PTSD show distinct patterns in their gut bacteria compared to those without trauma
• Healing approaches should include both targeted gut health strategies and stress reduction techniques
• Vagus nerve exercises like humming, cold therapy, and specific yoga poses help activate the parasympathetic "rest and digest" system
• Functional medicine testing can identify specific gut imbalances affecting neurotransmitter production
• Diet, movement, mindfulness, and nature exposure all contribute to balanced gut-brain function
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Hello and welcome to. Why Am I Like this? The podcast for those who didn't get enough hugs as a child? I'm Laura Wood and I'm a trauma therapist.
Michaela:And I'm Michaela Beaver. I'm a psychiatric nurse practitioner.
Laura:So, Michaela, why are we doing this podcast?
Michaela:I'm so glad you asked. We want to help you understand yourself a bit better how the things you learned about yourself and the world in childhood are still affecting you today. We want to figure out why are we like this those random things about ourselves that we might wonder about, like why am I so jumpy? Why am I so anxious? Why do I take everything personally? Why are my thoughts so negative? Why do I feel like I have to fix everything all the time?
Laura:Yes, and today we are talking about the gut brain connection and we're going to try to answer the following questions how are the gut and brain connected? How does stress impact the body and how do I find balance? So let's get into it how are the gut and brain connected?
Michaela:Okay, so I want to start by saying did you know that the gut is considered the second brain?
Laura:I did not know that until this episode.
Michaela:So the reason that they call it the second brain is because it has millions of neurons and it acts as if a second brain. It's actually sending more information to your brain than your brain is actually sending to it, so it's communicating what's going on and it's influencing what's going on in the brain.
Laura:That is very interesting, and I've heard something about like serotonin receptors too.
Michaela:Yeah, so neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine are produced in the gut. Probably 90% of your serotonin actually lives in your gut, not in your brain.
Laura:That's wild. And what is serotonin? Again, it's the one that helps us with our mood, right, yeah, so?
Michaela:serotonin is like one of our feel good, happy, you know neurotransmitters that helps to regulate mood. It's one of the more, it's one of the common ones that are modulated when we're talking about like SSRIs or antidepressants.
Laura:Right, like with depression, our brain maybe needs a little bit more serotonin. It's not getting enough serotonin, or this is a hard one.
Michaela:So we've been operating off of the like neurotransmitter hypothesis for a long time and I think that we don't really totally understand why it's not a deficiency of serotonin necessarily Now. Sometimes it is, but not always. And so you know, that's where where we kind of we just know that blocking the reuptake of serotonin and helping it hang around longer in many cases does improve depression. But you know we've kind of we don't really fully understand the whole way that things are working and why those things work sometimes and not in other people.
Laura:Yeah, that makes sense, like. So it doesn't necessarily mean that I don't make enough serotonin. It just might mean that more serotonin or sorry, serotonin staying in my brain a little bit longer than usual could be more helpful if I'm feeling depressed, and that's why the SSRIs are the thing that work for depression a lot of the time.
Michaela:Sure, yeah Well, and one of the other things that's really interesting when we look at organic acid testing, we can look at the downstream markers that might indicate, you know, if, how someone is doing at making serotonin and making dopamine and converting dopamine into norepinephrine, and sometimes we can see that there can be an issue or a breakdown where, for some reason, we're not making enough of those neurotransmitters, and so we can even look at, you know, neurotransmitter levels and different things like that to see. You know, would this be something helpful? So like we would add in, maybe like a supplement like 5-HTP in some people that can be really helpful because that's the precursor to serotonin. Sometimes people even take tryptophan. Now, don't I don't think you're supposed to take tryptophan for long periods of time, but some people will even take tryptophan and find that like that helps with them falling asleep easier. But some people are not. You know, they don't have the building blocks to make these neurotransmitters as well as they should.
Laura:That's so interesting, and so it's. I always thought that all that serotonin lived in our brain, but now we're saying that it lives in our guts and there are other neurotransmitters in our gut as well. Yeah.
Michaela:Well, I mean, think about, you know, the whole body is connected and so when we have things in our gut, it can flow through to our bloodstream and things cross the blood brain barrier. And so you think about, like you're eating a diet that has a bunch of tryptophan and things and that is what allows us to then create serotonin, or you know, um, you know, having enough uh zinc in our diet is integral to being able to make dopamine. And so when you know things are not going well in the gut, it impacts our brain on multiple levels, and one of those is that the things that should be getting through the mucosal lining aren't getting through, and things that shouldn't get through are getting through, and the same thing happens with the blood brain barrier, and that's that can really affect our our our brain health and our mood overall.
Laura:Yeah, that's so interesting. So the foods that we eat actually affect not just our gut but our brain, because our gut is sending so many messages to our brain all the time. So it's saying, hey, this is what's going on in here. You know, I have, um, I'm not getting enough nutrition or certain nutrients, or I am getting enough, or I'm getting too much of this, or I'm not getting enough of this, like. So it's basically saying all the it's telling our brain what it needs and what it what it has. And our brain is responding by sending signals to our like, so to our mind, like our mood and our emotions and our um, maybe even physical experiences. Like it's sending pain, physical pain signals or physical signals of like, um tense, like being tense, or or um digestive issues. Like it's saying, hey, this you know, our brain is is reacting to our ability to not digest certain foods or digest certain foods and kind of speeding that up or slowing that down.
Michaela:Yeah, I think that there's definitely a lot of communication that's happening there and I think that I think that, like the signs are you think about, like you know, oh, I have a craving for this, right? Maybe there's something in that food that your body is trying to tell you that you need. I think also, like the way that it tells you that things maybe aren't working so great is like when we're having a lot of like bloating or constipation or loose stools and, you know, even food sensitivities can come out as like rashes on your skin or acne or things like that, things like that. And so sometimes, like if there's a disruption in the gut microflora, what you're actually going to be seeing is a lot of brain fog and it can be like fatigue and anxiety and things like that. And so you think of like yeast, for example, which is another thing that we look at on organic acid tests and try to correct that imbalance or mold or clostridia, whatever.
Michaela:But with yeast, you oftentimes see people that have like really big sugar cravings. Well, those sugar cravings are there because the yeast is the most predominant, you know, like imbalanced overgrowth of these yeast, and so that is, you know, trying to tell your brain. We want more sugar so that we can continue to grow Right Versus like when you have you ever gotten onto like a health kick and you're not eating sugar and you feel like you're feeling really good and you're like I don't even, I'm not even craving sugar anymore. It's so weird. Well, that's because that imbalance is kind of being corrected by starving the yeast or whatever, and so then by starving it, it is making it so that it, you know, your body is actually able to regulate itself better.
Michaela:And so, yeah, there's lots of things that can cause imbalances in the gut, like constipation can be a second, a primary reason why you could get a dysbiosis of the gut, because peristalsis actually helps to have the gut, like it's a way of keeping the microflora under check, in check, right. So then maybe you got an antibiotic because you had a, you know, a sinus infection, or you're a kid and you got an ear infection and you got on an antibiotic. Now we've just like wiped out some of the good bacteria and then we then we can see, you know, that's an opportunity for some of the bad bacteria to overgrow.
Laura:So that's why probiotics and prebiotics are so important. Grow. So that's why probiotics and prebiotics are so important.
Michaela:Yeah, I mean I think that, like, we're still studying, you know the role of probiotics and things like that and it's still one of my go-to things, but you know, there is maybe some evidence coming out that whether, like, probiotics are always the right thing, like to just be on stand at baseline, and so there's, you know I don't I haven't read the literature on this but there might be some like um conflicting data that's out there that you guys should definitely look up on your own. I don't know enough to speak on it and say like probiotics are good or bad at this point, but did you know that stress can play an important role on the gut?
Laura:Well, I did know that.
Laura:I did know that about stress, the stress that we experience in our bodies and we experience that through a variety of ways, right Like we feel it in our muscles, but we feel it in our gut because one of the fight mechanisms or flight mechanisms it we feel it in our gut because one of the fight mechanisms or flight mechanisms, it can be activated in stress.
Laura:And when we're stressed and we have that fight or flight activated, it often will slow down our digestive system. And so we want to slow that down because, think about it, if you're running from a lion, it doesn't really help to have to stop to pee because or stop to poo because you're leaving a trail of yourself and it also slows you down. So the whole idea there is to slow down your digestive system in order for you to survive a threat. So when that threat system is activated it affects your digestive system. So a lot of people who have chronic stress and chronic toxic stress in your life otherwise you know trauma or you know high stress jobs, like a lot, of, a lot of people have they can also notice that in their gut.
Michaela:Yeah, absolutely, and I know you talk a lot about like the vagus nerve. Tell us a little bit more about that.
Laura:Yeah, so a polyvagal nerve, like the polyvagal theory is based on the fact that the nervous system has a vagus nerve that is connected all the way from the tip of our brain, the end of our brain, to the end of our spine, and it touches every single organ in our body. And so that nerve can basically upregulate or downregulate the use or the activity of all of your different organs, including your gut. And so when that nerve is activated and sending signals to your gut to slow down or to speed up digestion, it's going to affect how you feel and it's going to affect how your body reacts. So like if you are like trying to go to sleep, your vagus nerve is responsible for regulating all of your internal organs and is responsible for sending all those signals to your brain and to your organs that says, like it's time to go to sleep, like slow things down, like slow your heart rate down, relax your you know muscles, relax your neck, relax your shoulders, like sending all those signals. And so the vagus nerve is one of the most important, or most like it's one of the biggest impacts in your entire body.
Laura:Every single time you're interacting with the world, you're taking in information, and that's called.
Laura:There's a word called neuroception, and then there's interoception, and basically what neuroception is is it's the world around you and inside of you.
Laura:Basically, all the information that you're bringing in is anticipating whether or not it's a threat. So you're saying I've got information coming in and my brain is going to tell me if this thing is safe or if this thing is dangerous. It's using all of my five senses and it's using my interoception as well, which is that sense of my internal self. So it's using information from my body from on the inside that I don't necessarily know about. Like it's using information from my body from on the inside that I don't necessarily know about. Like it's using information from my gut. It's using information from my muscles and from all the other organs and it's telling me whether or not things in my environment or what I'm doing right now is safe or dangerous. And then it goes on to activate our fight or flight mechanism or it activates our shutdown mechanism, but it basically tells our body what to do next in the face of that safety or in the face of that danger. So if it's safe, it stays regulated. If there's danger, then it responds to the threat.
Michaela:Yeah, that is. It's just so interesting. The more I learned about this, the more that I understand that all of these mechanisms that are going on are really at the core, all about safety and trying to, you know, make sure that we you know we talk a lot about cortisol, but it's also the adrenal response, with, you know, epinephrine and the. You know that adrenal response saying like okay, we're activating the. You know HPA access, the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal access, looking at like okay, we need to like respond to this, this threat, and so you get this surge of adrenaline and adrenaline is the first part of the that response systems going into that what we call fight or flight Right.
Laura:And so when we get into that fight or flight, we're talking about the part of us that we need to activate, which is called the parasympathetic nervous system, to activate that rest and digest, because we don't want to stay in that adrenal fight or flight response if there actually isn't any danger right, yeah, we need to deactivate all of those systems in our body that have been activated in the face of danger for our sympathetic nervous system, right, our sympathetic nervous system activates those defense mechanisms and then our parasympathetic nervous system is used to kind of calm those things down and turn down the dial.
Laura:I guess, in the face of safety or when the danger is passed, that's when our parasympathetic nervous system activates. So we start to yawn or we have a deep sigh or we maybe even let out tears. Those are noticeable activations of our parasympathetic nervous system, and what our parasympathetic nervous system will also do is put you back in that, like you said, rest and digest. Where our body starts digesting our food and processing that and then absorb, then we can start absorbing the nutrients. Then we can start, you know, utilizing those, the nutrients that are in our food, and then we can start, you know, passing our waste. And you know when we're not doing that if you think about stress activating our sympathetic nervous system, which slows down our digestion or even stops it completely we're not able to absorb those nutrients, we're not able to get all those healthy things from our food and helpful things from our food, and so our neurotransmitters are then affected.
Michaela:Right, not only that, but it actually it leads to leaky gut. The stress response on its own can impact that mucosal lining and disrupt it, so that the things that we want don't get through and things that we don't want to get through, like the this thing called LPS or lipopolysaccharides, they cross the blood brain or they cross, they cross the the lining in the GI tract and can cause a lot of inflammation in our body. And so, you know, that's, I think, one of the mechanisms that can lead to in the inflammatory response which it's very interesting you think about, stress. Stress can lead towards multiple different ways. It's having a similar effect on our body, but the way that it affects each person individually can be so different. One person's going to have like depression and mood stuff, which you know, you think about what's happening in the gut is also happening in the brain, right, that that blood brain barrier is probably affected as well, and so. But one person's going to have, you know, ibs symptoms, where they're having intermittent constipation, diarrhea, and then another person is going to have depression, and then yet another person is going to develop an autoimmune disorder like Hashimoto's, thyroiditis or inflammatory bowel disease.
Michaela:But it's all kind of starting from the same starting point, which is the stress response in a lot of cases, make the same starting point, which is the stress response in a lot of cases. And so, you know, you think of trauma, or even micro trauma, where you know we're taking all those small little t traumas and we're building them up and building them up until they all they, they represent a huge, you know, stressor, even though not each individual one was that big. You know people will say, well, I don't really have trauma in a normal life, you know, whatever. But it's, you know, what we're learning, especially within the context of neurobiology of trauma, is that it's not the thing that happened to us. That's the big problem. It's our own internal experience of that trauma that makes us get stuck in the trauma response.
Laura:It's the way our neuroception and interoception has actually processed, or not processed, the event as something that was safe and or something that was dangerous but now it's over and you're safe again or something that you can't get over, something that was too big to process. When we don't process that information all the way, it sticks us, it keeps us in that trauma response cycle and that can cause a lot of issues with our bodies, not just our brains, because they're connected right, and so there's like vagus nerve exercises that people do in order to mean to bring back a sense of safety to our bodies. So when we do a vagus nerve exercise, we're actually telling our brain that through our vagus nerve, we're saying, hey, you're safe, now Things are okay again, and so through physical exercising of your vagus nerve, you're actually utilizing that and you're utilizing that mechanism to return to a state of like homeostasis and activate that parasympathetic nervous system to get to rest and digest again.
Michaela:Yeah, absolutely, and what you said made me think about the ACEs study that was done. What you said made me think about the ACEs study that was done, looking at people who had what they identified were risk factors for of early childhood trauma, and they looked at their physical health. You know, years later, and there was a direct correlation between those things that happened in childhood. Like, you know, neglect abuse, parents that had mental health. You know, concerns substance abuse in parents and it directly impacted the increased risk of diabetes, high blood pressure and multiple other you know physical health conditions in adulthood.
Laura:And there's often a big autoimmune disorder correlation too. And the way I think about that is that our body is responding to this toxic stress by over activating our immune system and it's fighting off this sense of toxic stress Like, and so it's not actually fighting a physical or like an or like a external pathogen, it's fighting our internal experience of stress, and and that gut brain connection makes that make so much sense.
Michaela:Yeah, well, and it's really interesting that there are emerging studies that are showing that people that have PTSD exhibit a distinct microbiota profile or you know certain kinds of bugs in their gut right that are different than those that don't have PTSD.
Laura:That's so interesting, but it makes so much sense, right? Because the way that our body is able to process information is similar to the way that our body is able to process the environment and process like external things that are coming in right, it's not just about the food that we eat, but it's the air that we breathe, it's the you know allergens in the air, like if our body is unable to process you know just the data that's coming in because of the PTSD which would a marker of PTSD is being stuck in that trauma response, being having flashbacks, the inability to retain certain things. So it affects your ability to learn and affects your memory, your short-term memory and moving things from short-term memory to long-term storage. So it makes a big difference there. So, when we're not able to process data and information, why would that be any different than our environmental data that's coming in in the form of external, external things like allergens, air we breathe. You know the food we eat.
Michaela:Yeah, and I think that, like what they're learning, is the more that the that these, like you know the microbiota has a bigger impact on how we kind of you know bacteria microbiota, then then you know it's going to impact the neurotransmitter production and different things, which is going to alter the stress response and could be linked to the symptoms that we're actually seeing.
Laura:And genetic expression as well. So, like your epigenetics are affected by stress in the environment and then, like the body takes in that stress and the environment then activates certain genes or deactivate, or doesn't activate them right. So that's why stressors environmental stressors can impact the progression or the onset of certain diseases and disorders in time.
Michaela:Yeah, so our brain and our gut are connected in so many different ways and, you know, I think that that's where we have some possibility of trying to impact our body in a healthy way is, you know, by recognizing that the things that are going to help the good bacteria be helped and have more healthy bacteria are the things that are going to ultimately also make our brains and our bodies function better. So, you know, focusing on avoiding some of the, you know, really highly processed, ultra like sugary, fake sugars, things like that that are really not great for our our, our body in general, but just specifically, we want to heal the gut. Now, once the gut is healed, can we tolerate some of those things? Sometimes, probably, yeah, like we're not saying forever, but you do want to try to recognize that there's an issue with your gut and try to heal it so that you can have you know better ourselves access to the nutrients that we need that we know affect our neurotransmitters, like I love what you were saying earlier about.
Laura:You know tryptophan, zinc, some of those things that directly precede the production of, like dopamine and serotonin and other neurotransmitters that are going to affect our mood and that are going to alleviate our anxiety. I know there's a lot of different foods that you can eat that are good for your brain and like when we think about their brain food right, think about superfoods. Those are things that, through our gut, is going to send the signals to our brain and send the healthy nutrients to our brain. That's going to activate the signals to our brain and send the healthy nutrients to our brain. That's going to activate the balance that we really are looking for in our lives.
Michaela:Yeah, but I think that okay. So we eat all the healthy foods, we are, you know, challenging our gut and we're trying to get things under control, yet we have this like really high level of stress and so if we don't also fix the stress, you know we can't, we're never going to get into a place where our gut can truly heal. And so things like, you know, stretching and yoga and and you know, focus on yoga that actually has more of the mindfulness and the, you know, brain, you know body connection pieces versus just, you know, moving from pose to pose to pose, but where we're actually like doing more breath work and things like that can you know, alter that stress response in our body.
Laura:And vagus nerve exercises can help too. So yoga actually has a lot of poses. A lot of yoga poses and exercises in yoga are exercises that balance out and that support the healthiness of the vagus nerve. Things that are other things that are helpful for the vagus nerve, like things that directly affect, like your neck and throat, like gargling and humming, are things that can be calming to your vagus nerve. Things like it sounds kind of silly, but there's a specific position where you give yourself a hug and you kind of have your left hand your left hand over your chest and your right hand underneath your left elbow. You're giving yourself a hug, but what it does is it actually poses your nervous system in a certain way that helps your vagus nerve send those signals of calming to your body and to your brain and to your body. So there's lots of very specific vagus nerve exercises that anybody can just look up that you can do to help find that balance too.
Michaela:And like cold therapy, right, like immersing your hands or doing like cold plunges and things like that can also be really positive for activating the vagus nerve and increasing vagal tone and improving your immune system responses.
Laura:Yeah, cold therapy is a really good one. The you know even something when I talk to my clients who have, like high levels of anxiety, I often recommend like putting just dipping your face in a cup of in like a bowl of ice water, or putting your hands in a bowl of ice water, or sometimes putting an ice pack on your chest or on your upper back, like the back of your neck, like those areas specifically, can help activate that and increase your vagal tone as well.
Michaela:Yeah, yeah, I love that.
Michaela:One of the other things like at, you know, active healing and at core self that we do also focus on is the functional medicine testing, like we had kind of talked about.
Michaela:So, you know, looking at what, you know, what's going on in your stool, sometimes we can find that there's parasites in there, we can find that there's an overgrowth of yeast or clostridia which could be, you know, impacting the dopamine system, and, you know, some people can end up looking like they have ADHD symptoms, but it's really that they have this disruption in their gut microbiota, and so we can use functional medicine in psychiatry to help us figure out what is exactly out of whack so that we can target those things specifically. Because you know, if we don't know what's going on, then we're just taking a shot in the dark, and so then you're doing all these things and you don't feel like you're getting better, and maybe there's a specific, you know, approach or plan that we can lay out for you so that you can, you know, get the most benefit out of it without having to just feel like you're, you know, torturing yourself, eating healthy foods constantly without feeling like you're getting any of the benefits.
Laura:Well, yeah, and I think it's so important to do that testing because, like you said about probiotics, like it's not a one size fits all approach, like we need to target those specific things that are going on with our own bodies and minds, and our mind is really, really powerful. We can affect our body health by making sure that our mind is healthy too. So, as you mentioned, when we're talking about yoga, like mindfulness, other things that are helpful for our mind is therapy. Going outside, being in nature, send signals of safety to our brains, Like when we're like looking at things that are growing and looking at the trees that are blowing in the wind, and being outside in nature can really be helpful. Getting movement every day, movement every day, like regular exercise, can help make sure that our body stays active and stays mobile and stays, you know, in in optimum, optimal shape, like making not just like our shape, like weight wise, but just, you know, move it or lose it. You've got to do them, you've got to do the keep your body healthy.
Michaela:I've heard of so many people, even people who are athletes, that like, really work out regularly where they weren't doing a good stretching routine and just not stretching me everything feel tight and made them feel really sick and then started just adding stretching in. Then some of that tightness, you know, got better and they started to feel better because, you know I don't think that you know, we appreciate this as much but like we get a headache and we feel nauseous and we're like, oh, I have a migraine. Well, not always is it actual migraine. It could be that you have a tension headache and so sometimes, if you have a band across your forehead you know migraines are typically unilateral in nature, but if there's a band across your forehead and you have, you know, sometimes that intention in your neck, your trapezius muscle goes from the top of your head all the way down to the middle of your back and so it's connected to all these things. And when we have anxiety and stress, we get increased blood flow to our neck and one of the criteria is tension in our neck and shoulders, tension in our body, and so we can clench our jaw, we can have all these things that are connecting that stress to our body and can cause a lot of us to feel sick to our stomach or not feel great. And so that's a piece.
Michaela:And then one of the other things when you were talking I was thinking about you know the humming and stuff, and you know um doing mindful eating. So not just like mindful eating but also like being in your body when you're eating. So do a vagal nerve, um, vagal toning exercise where you like hum really loudly or sing really loudly before you eat and then take some, you know, slow, deep breaths and activate. That rest and digest before you eat will help you and then you slow down with your eating. That helps your brain and your body be connected while you're ingesting foods and that can help with decreasing the risk of leaky gut or helping heal the gut, because you're encouraging digestion when you're eating and that's going to help you not, you know, have acid problems and things like that that will impact your ability to digest food.
Laura:Yeah, those are all really good tips. I think that if we put all that together, you know we're eating well, we're focusing on the targeted areas that our body specifically needs help with by getting some testing, by doing an evaluation and making sure we're targeting our approach. We're not just doing one size fits all. We're getting some movement, we're stretching, we're toning our vagus nerve. All of those things are going to be really, really helpful at finding balance in our lives and in our minds and in our bodies. Absolutely, that's so helpful. Thank you so much for sharing all of this. This is so helpful. I learned a ton and I really appreciate it.
Michaela:Yeah, I love talking about this because it just reminds me of all the areas that I know I can improve on too.
Laura:Yeah, so that's a really good place to end it for today. Thank you so much for listening to why Am I Like this. If you like our show, please leave us a rating and review on your favorite podcast platform. Follow the show and share it with your friends. This episode was written and produced by me, laura Wood and Michaela Beaver. Our theme song is Making Ends Meet by Thick as Thieves, and a special thanks to Core Self Benavieri Counseling and Active Healing Psychiatric Services for sponsoring this show.
