Day 11: Affirmations – what they are and how they can boost gut health
Today’s goal is not a small one: we are beginning on a journey to change our very thoughts.
Step 1: Take a moment to analyze your thoughts, you can start specifically from what you think about your gut and digestion and different foods and activities that have an impact on your digestion.
Step 2: If your thoughts are negative, how could you swap them with more constructive thoughts. Write those better thoughts down so that when you need them, you have them ready.
Step 3: Tell us in the group how you will do this. What are those good thoughts you’ll start nurturing from now on? What challenges will you have with this?
Why is this important for gut health? What do our thoughts have to do with anything?
I realize this is a pretty esoteric idea, but we do now have scientific evidence for this.
Let me start off by mentioning the gut-brain axis. In something like IBS, it is the disrupted gut-brain communication that causes IBS symptoms, not anything else. This makes your brain and your mind very important players in the IBS equation, which is good news: by affecting your thoughts, you can help ease gut symptoms, even if you don’t officially have IBS.
I recommend you read a blog post that I wrote some time ago to better understand what the gut-brain axis is https://www.akwise.co/2024/10/13/ibs-and-the-gut-brain-axis/
Recently I had a discussion with a doctor leading a functional gut disorder clinic where they see people with IBS also. We talked about cutting edge IBS research and how science is uncovering more and more about the importance of your thoughts, beliefs and expectations on IBS symptoms. Having negative beliefs and expectations don’t just affect your mind, but they also can lead to digestive symptoms.
For example, a recent study looked at non-celiac gluten sensitivity (meaning there’s no celiac disease detected but gluten seems to cause gut symptoms anyway) in a blinded, randomized control study. This means that the participants didn’t know whether what they were eating had gluten or not.
The results were highly interesting. The presence of gluten in a food was less predictive of gut symptoms than the expectation of symptoms. So if a participant thought they had gluten sensitivity, and that the food had gluten, they tended to have symptoms even if the food didn’t have any in reality.
Another study from a couple of years ago talked about the IBS cycle and how symptoms appear and are maintained. I’ve included an adapted version of it as a photo in this post.
Look at the orange circle at the top. Gut symptoms can often start from things that are happening in our brain, not our gut. This doesn’t mean that we imagine symptoms or make them up, but that the physiological IBS cascade starts in the brain.
The starting point could be a stress response from a challenging work project, or illness or death in the family. And it could also be the thought that a food or activity is going to cause IBS symptoms.
Like if you are dreading eating out so much that you start getting symptoms before you even get to the restaurant.
A real life example: someone recently told me how they now understand it was stress that was causing their gut issues back in school: they would start getting bloated and uncomfortable even before putting a single morsel of food in their mouth, that’s how much they were dreading lunch time. It’s easy to see now, but at the time it didn’t seem as simple.
What to do about it
The nice thing is that we can change our thoughts and beliefs. By working on the things in the top circle, we can begin to change what happens down the line. Perhaps it’s not the easiest thing to do, but nevertheless it’s in our own hands.
At its simplest, this could mean substituting thoughts like “I can’t tolerate x food because I’ll get diarrhea” with “even if I had symptoms before, it doesn’t mean it’ll happen again. Gut symptoms are not just caused by food.”.
I encourage you to come up with your own substitutions. Two steps:
- Understand what your harmful thoughts are that sabotage your efforts to ease gut symptoms. You can even write them down.
- What is a better, more constructive thought to have? It should be something that you can believe in. Write options down so that next time when you notice the negative thoughts creeping in, you can immediately start replacing them with positive, or at least neutral thoughts.
One more example for anyone with IBS. Let’s say you are struggling with active diarrhea. Instead of letting your mind go to thoughts like “this is so bad, why is this happening to me? I must have eaten something I shouldn’t have”, perhaps you could take a more neutral stance: “my digestion is not happy about something. In IBS, it’s not a sign of anything dangerous, it’s usually a sign of stress or a wound up nervous system, even if I don’t feel it consciously. Let me just work on calming myself, this too will pass.”
I totally made that up and it really depends on your personal circumstances what you should say to yourself. If you need help with this, get in touch and we can look at your specific thoughts 1-on-1 and see how best to improve them.
Affirmations
Another, perhaps more effective way to change your thoughts is not to wait until bad thoughts appear. Instead, keep good thoughts top of mind throughout the day. This is called affirmation.
A favorite affirmation of mine that personally helped me ease gastritis symptoms was written by Swami Kriyananda. It is for health:
“My body cells obey my will: they dance with Divine vitality! I am well! I am strong! I am a flowing river of boundless power and energy!”
I know this might be too much, even ridiculous, for some and if you feel this way, that just means it’s not right for you. I included it because it’s been so great for me and I know that it’ll be helpful for some of you. You can make up your own. Just make it positive, instead of avoiding a negative.
A simple positive affirmation could be “I am well” or “I can handle anything” (depending on what you need). An example of a negative affirmation that is not as helpful is “I don’t have pain”.
Another simple affirmation that helps the nervous system stay calm could be “I am calm, I am strong.”
So, today, I’d like you to choose to either turn a negative thought or belief into a positive thought to use when negative thoughts appear, or choose an affirmation that you keep repeating in your mind periodically throughout the day. Whichever you choose, write it down and then report in the Facebook group. Maybe someone has similar thoughts as you and finds your wording helpful!
This is a hard step, but think of it this way: your thoughts shape your whole life. Everything that happens around you is interpreted and given meaning by your brain. By changing your thoughts, you could be changing everything.
If you find this topic intriguing, I write more about changing thoughts and affirmations in my IBSwise and Finding Calm -programs.