How Your Emotional Health is actually Related to and Benefits from Gut Health [Episode #840]

This week’s topic is: How Your Emotional Health is actually Related to and Benefits from Gut Health

This topic illustrates how deeply connected all different aspects of our wellness are and that it’s never going to be just one thing that gets us there. This is why we talk so much about our Four Cornerstones, food, body, emotional wellbeing and spiritual growth and how everything is interrelated. Last week we talked about longevity and spirituality. This week we’re talking about gut health, which is in our physical bodies, however, has an impact on our emotional wellbeing and then our emotional wellbeing and our emotional intelligence has a profound impact on our physiology and how our bodies work.

We start to see how everything starts to connect like pieces of a puzzle. And it doesn’t have to be complicated. It doesn’t have to feel overwhelming when you may think, oh, there’s all these different parts. What we want to remember overall is that there is a physical component to us and we want to nurture our bodies, we want to eat well. Then there’s also a non-physical energetic component, and this is where our mental health, emotional wellbeing, and spiritual growth play in. We just want to make sure every day that we are doing practices that support ourselves in both of these areas.

Remember you can submit your questions at https://mysolluna.com/askkimberly/

[Question Answered]

Erin – New Jersey

Kimberly, first I want to share how much I love the podcast so thank you! Next, I’ve noticed that once summer ends and we head into fall, I start to have gut and digestion issues. Do you know what this could be about and what I can do to ease into fall with having these issues?

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[RESOURCES]

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Other Podcasts you may enjoy!:

• How to Boost Your Gut Health with Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
• Healthy Digestion and Elimination Tips and Tools
• The Benefit of Detoxing for Immunity and Overall Health
• Restoring Your Gut Health with Dr. Will Bulsiewicz

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Transcript:

Note: The following is the output of transcribing from an audio recording. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it is incomplete or inaccurate. This is due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.

Kimberly: 00:00 Namaste loves and welcome back to our Thursday QA& show where our topic this week is How Your Emotional Health is actually Related to and Benefits from Gut Health. Once again, this topic illustrates how deeply connected all different aspects of our wellness are and that it’s never going to be just one thing that gets us there. This is why we talk so much about our four cornerstones, food body, emotional wellbeing and spiritual growth and how everything is interrelated. Last week we talked about longevity and spirituality. This week we’re talking about gut health, which is in our physical bodies, but has an impact on our emotional wellbeing and then our emotional wellbeing and our emotional intelligence has a profound impact on our physiology and how our bodies work. So we start to see how everything starts to connect like pieces of a puzzle. And it doesn’t have to be complicated.

01:07 It doesn’t have to feel overwhelming when you may think, oh, there’s all these different parts. What we want to remember overall is that there is a physical component to us and we want to nurture our bodies, we want to eat well. But then there’s also a non-physical energetic component, and this is where our mental health, emotional wellbeing, and spiritual growth play in. So we just want to make sure every day that we are doing practices that support ourselves in both of these major buckets, these areas.

Submit Your Question for Review

So before we get into our show deeper, I want to be sure to give a little reminder that on our website, mysolluna.com/askkimberly, which is M-Y-S-O-L-L-U-N a.com, we have a section for submitting questions for the podcast. If you have something you’d like me to cover, a question that you have, I can almost guarantee that other members of our community will have the same question.

02:06 So please be sure to leave your question there and you can also check out our many different offerings. We have articles, meditations, hundreds, maybe thousands at this point of plant-based recipes that are easy and delicious and a lot going on over on the website. So please check it out and the show notes from today’s show with links to the studies, we’ll also be on there.

Question around the topic of: How Your Emotional Health is actually Related to and Benefits from Gut Health: Kimberly, first I want to share how much I love the podcast so thank you! Next, I’ve noticed that once summer ends and we head into fall, I start to have gut and digestion issues. Do you know what this could be about and what I can do to ease into fall with having these issues?

Kimberly: 02:58 So our question today, let’s dive right into our show comes from Erin who lives in New Jersey. So Erin, thank you so much for your participation today. I was born in New Jersey, so I have a special connection to that state. My father was also born in New Jersey, so sending you much love out there to the east coast where I spent the first few years of my life and then moved on to Connecticut and then moved past that. But thank you again so much for your question and which is Kimberly. First I want to share how much I love the podcast, so thank you. You’re welcome, my love. Thank you for listening. Next, I’ve noticed that once summer ends and we head into fall, I start to have gut and digestion issues. Do you know what this could be about and what I could do to ease into fall with out having these issues? So there is a lot that I have to say about this topic, Erin, and once again, thank you so much. And I want us to remember that our guts are this really core part of our being of our bodies, which have a profound influence on so much, right?

04:00 It has a profound impact on how we absorb nutrients, on our immune functionality, on our moods and our brain and neurotransmitters and how we feel day to day and on our energy and on our skin health. And pretty much all other aspects of our body are affected by our guts. So when we think about the transition between summer and fall from an energetic standpoint, before we get into our research today, think about what happens between these two seasons, which is a very different shift than say between winter and spring or spring into summer. You can just start to feel the energy of these shifts in your own body. Feel it in your gut. Now, when I say shifting from summer to fall, what do you feel?

05:07 For me, I can say it’s natural to feel a little bit of tightening or jumpiness or Oh my gosh, fall is here. There’s a lot going on now, right? So it could be great stuff. It could be excitement about getting back to school and getting revved up again with different work projects or personal projects and get togethers, but there’s still a lot more activity. And so it makes sense in the summer we’re going on vacation, we’re laying at the pool or we’re outside in the sun. Things tend to slow down. We tend to go at a more calmer pace. So what can often happen in our guts is this reflection of a more faster pace, a busier pace in our lives as things start to kick up in the fall. And this makes sense from this paper from the Integrative Clinical Clinicians Journal in 2018 found that the gut microbiota influenced emotional behavior, stress, and mood, and it was a bidirectional communication between the gut and the brain.

06:24 So bidirectional means that when our guts are really healthy, they can help us feel good, which we feel through the brain and also the other way around when we feel stressed, when we feel hurried, when we just feel like a bit of overwhelm where there’s a lot going on that can also directionally go down into our gut and create more dysbiosis, more bloating, more IBS or other factors of not being in full balance and health down there. So that’s the first thing I really want us to consider. There was another study published in Cell Press Journal from 2013 that talked about how gut microbiota can have an impact on anxiety as well. So if our guts are not feeling great, and again, this bidirectionality is something that we want to make sure that we’re always considering, and this is something I’ve always talked about, is that we often think and hear about today how, oh, our gut health is going to affect our brain, but know that it also works the other way.

07:39 So this is why it’s important. If we’re starting to feel this anxiety kick up in the fall, we want to slow down. We want to stick to our morning routine, our practices, our meditation, our relaxation after work at the end of the day, our evening routine, whatever it is that helps us to feel centered amongst great activity because otherwise we can’t very much start to imbalance our gut. And this might be with your question here, Erin, you might be a bit confused because you may say, well, nothing else in my life has really changed as far as my diet. I’m still drinking a lot of water, I’m exercising. But again, if we look at our holistic lifestyle and we look at the faster pace of fall and potentially a lot more stress, then it starts to make more sense.

08:36 So the microbiome, there’s a lot of research here. I’m just going to skimm through some of it and some of it we will link to it in the show notes. There is more from the Journal of Effective Disorders from 2017 showing that the gut microbiome plays a role in anxiety and depression both, and also another study that I wanted to point out from 2018 showing that the impact there was a positive impact from exercise on gut microbiota showing alterations in composition and function, which could have implications for emotional wellbeing. So here we are pulling in another lifestyle factor, which is regular exercise, which can also positively impact the gut. And what’s interesting about this one is that Ayurveda has always stressed simple practices like walking for 15 minutes after meals to increase digestion. Isn’t that interesting? So this is something that Vaidya Jay, my teacher, has always mentioned, that it’s very important that we walk instead of remaining sedentary, ideally after lunch and dinner, keep our circulation moving into best supply our gut.

#1 – How Your Emotional Health is Related to and Benefits from Gut Health: Your Gut

09:56 So back to some real important things that I want to highlight here. Number one is remembering that our interconnected beings between our nonphysical and our physical all affect each other. So the gut is made of this incredible mix of bacterium. It’s a living organism, so to speak, inside of your body. And then the brain, which is so delicate and complex and influences so much including how we feel, and this gut brain access is constantly influencing our emotional wellbeing, our cognitive functioning. It is very important that we pay attention, as you mentioned, Erin, if things start to feel off as we go into fall. And we want to look at that from a lifestyle perspective. And so the first thing we want to look at is food wise, how can we really make sure that we’re nourishing our guts in the fall particularly, and this is both energetic and from a more quantitative standpoint, is that we want to make sure that we’re reducing any sort of inflammation in the gut, which can also be kicked up by excess stress.

11:18 So eating more calming foods like ginger instead of garlic and fiber, which is really nutritious to the gut and helps to feed the microbiota and helps to also reduce inflammation. We want to make sure that we are eating a lot of a wide variety of foods, lots of plant foods that are really easier to digest and nourishing overall. So we want to avoid foods that we know don’t agree with our system that take more energy, whether that’s dairy or processed sugars or inflammatory vegetable oils, things of that nature that could really upset our guts. This is a great time for having soup and stews and one pot meals are really wonderful this time of year and will feel deeply nourishing to your gut and to your body.

#2 – How Your Emotional Health is Related to and Benefits from Gut Health: Your Body

The next thing that I’d like you to consider is your body, right? So for the body cornerstone, one of the most important things that we can do is to take regularly your sauna, SBO probiotics.

12:35 And I’m so passionate about this formula because I tried so many and there were the refrigerated ones that were really expensive, and then there were ones with really high culture counts. But the more I dug into the research, the more I became confident that really what we need is to align back to nature and to our true nature. And so our ancestors ate a little bit of soil and unwashed vegetables, and that is where the soil-based organisms come in that can survive your stomach acid and get to your gut. So I think it’s really important that especially in the fall when things are busy, we stick to our routines, we take our probiotics, and if we ever start to feel overloaded, which is quite regular or quite regular occurrence, for me it’s a regular practice as well. It’s taking detoxy so that I don’t feel that buildup, I don’t feel constipated, I don’t feel heavy, which also really affects me mentally.

13:40 I start to feel more frustrated and have a shorter fuse. I noticed when I don’t go to the bathroom. So you can also check out detoxy and the digestive enzymes, which are really, really wonderful for making sure that you’re absorbing your food better and digesting it better and not sitting with it or creating more excessive bloat that isn’t helpful, especially when we’re talking about feeling really good and getting our gut in perfect alignment in the fall. So it’s really important for stress and anxiety, as I mentioned earlier, from an emotional standpoint, just to make sure that we have the proper mix day in and day out. So it’s one of the things that I make sure family members are sticking to is their probiotics. I think it’s a wonderful gift to give. When my dad comes here, I love to load him up with these important products because we want our loved ones to be healthy and to feel really great.

14:46 And also to remember that the vagus nerve, which you may have heard, which connects the gut and the brain plays a role in this bi-directional communication. It allows signals to pass between the brain and the gut. And there’s a lot that Ayurveda says about the vagus nerve, but if you’re looking to strengthen or cleanse or rejuvenate this connection, one of the practices that is promoted and Dr. Jay talks about is in your morning routine, you can do some oil pulling. So you can swish some sesame oil or even coconut oil around in your mouth for a few minutes before spitting it out. And this is said to help activate that vagus nerve, to reestablish that really important connection or to strengthen it or to cleanse it, however you want to think of it between your brain and your gut.

#3 – How Your Emotional Health is Related to and Benefits from Gut Health: Your Mental health and emotional wellbeing

15:39 Now, let’s talk about mental health as well and emotional wellbeing. And I mentioned slowing down. I think it’s also really important to think about inner connection, connection to others that is meaningful and of quality. So instead of just zoning out in front of the TV or watching programs, which can be okay if you’re really tired, and sometimes we just want to zone out at the end of the day, but finding ways to connect to your family or regularly just having great conversations at dinner or doing crafts together, which I love to do with my kids or little projects. My husband builds little wooden things with my son, my older son. And I just think the quality time together is very vivifying. I think it’s very healthy and foundational and so that we don’t feel so alone or being tossed around. And we all know this.

16:44 This is something that’s been talked about quite a bit since Covid, but now there isn’t as much emphasis on it. And I just want to say it’s so important that we keep those regular connections up with community and loved ones and also with our ourself. So that constancy of journaling, prayer, meditation, not just when we start to feel on edge and that we’re about to explode, but regularly, regularly making sure that we are praying, meditating, sitting in stillness, being in nature. And I think that one of the things that we want to shift when we think about our day and what’s productive is not packing in so much as we can and using every last minute to get in every email that we can answer and doing as much as we can. But really a productive or successful day is one that includes downtime and rest and reflection.

17:47 And this has been a big shift in me and my taste, which used to be quite harried and busy, especially in the few hours between picking up my son from school and dropping him off. And now I know how important it is to have some time just to be by myself and to breathe. And I don’t see it anymore as wasting time or should be doing more. It took me a long time to shift that mentality. But notice how much more fulfilling your days are when you have some time just to be. I was in New York a couple weeks ago, and if you’re listening to this, and you’re from New York, know that I lived there too for a long time, and it’s got some wonderful elements and all the culture and amazing food and excitement. But just walking in the street, which is a very different pace than where I live.

18:56 I live in a very agricultural rural place in Hawaii and in la very quiet. And I could really feel in my body, the hurriedness. So no matter where we live, I just want to encourage you that you can set your own pace in your life and in your body, and our bodies respond to that. Our guts will respond to that. Your guts will be more efficient, you’ll feel better in your brain. You’ll start to feel more even keeled. Your body does well when it’s in more equilibrium. So one of the things that I would also recommend, Erin, is to create a nice pace across your life.

19:47 Steadiness. So trying to wake up at the same time, doing your morning routine, taking your probiotics, praying, meditating, doing your work, finding space to sit or relax after work or even the middle of the day, not saying yes to everything. Spreading things out, saying yes to things that really feel good and where you feel connected to the community. And then creating an evening routine and a sense of regularity and going to bed and nourishing yourself and drinking hot elixirs and living this beautiful pace. And I think that you’ll find by incorporating all these different factors that you’ll start to feel really great within yourself. And when you start to feel that balance in your lifestyle across your life, you’ll find it in your gut. And of course, we have to do the practical things, as I mentioned, eating the fiber, reducing the sugar, taking your SBO probiotics and so on.

20:51 But beyond that, notice because you mentioned between summer and fall, there’s big shift. Just notice that as you regulate your pace in the fall, just regulate across your life and you start to create this sense of regularity and balance in all your rhythms and all your routines. Notice that your gut will align. Your gut is so highly intelligent and sensitive to what’s happening beyond it and in your life that it will start to relax and be more efficient and thrive and proliferate. And so the more I relax, the more I balance my life and have these downtimes and not feel guilty about them. And all these other things that we talked about today, the healthier I notice that I feel in my gut and in my body and my digestion continues to thrive and work really well, which is a real cornerstone of health and wellbeing.

21:52 So I hope that this inspire you, Aaron, and everyone listening to this, that no matter what the season, we can really come into our balance and elevate our gut health. And it’s something that’s very much not everything’s within our control, but there’s a lot of lifestyle factors that we can control and we can work on and balance. So I am so grateful for all of you listening to this for being part of the community. I look forward to connecting with you more. Please check out the show notes at mysolluna.com. We’ll link to some of this research as well as other shows that I think you would enjoy. And as I mentioned at the top of the show, if you haven’t yet joined our mailing list, I write a newsletter every month and then we share happenings and lots of exciting stuff. So be sure to put your email in there.

22:49 And please stay tuned for all our Black Friday sales, and we’re having a digestive enzyme sale prior to Thanksgiving to kick things off. So you’ll see that over on the website as our gift to you to make sure that you will be able to digest well over Thanksgiving break, which for some is the beginning of a little bit of a downward spiral, which I do not want to have happen to you. We want to make sure that we are very much nourishing ourselves and feeling great from Thanksgiving through all the holidays, feeling energized, feeling grateful, feeling joyful. So stay connected with me. You can also find me on social at underscore Kimberly Snyder. We’ll be back here Monday for our next interview show to then take great care sending you happy. Happy Thanksgiving. Happy holidays upcoming, and lots and lots of love. Take care.