Digestion Isn’t Just What Goes Into Your Mouth
Every now and then I walk through the aisles of my local pharmacy perusing the supplements and over the counter medications.
I am always floored by the number of medications available for digestive issues; medications that address symptoms and not causes. There are treatments for heartburn, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, constipation, and everything else digestion related.
The aisle is the largest one in the pharmacy.
It gives me pause. So many chemicals to treat symptoms without knowing the cause.
Digestion is not just what we are eating. It is what we are consuming and processing, the people we spend our time with, what we read, what we watch on television, our feelings both realized and hidden, and of course what we eat.
Clinically, I see so many people who are eating the right foods but their digestion is not properly working. They have chronic gastroesophageal reflux disease, irritable bowel syndrome, alternating diarrhea and constipation, or chronic stomach upset. They have been to all the doctors and specialists, had all the lab testing and scopes, and have either unsatisfactory or no answers. They are prescribed medications, yet don’t feel better. They either live with the symptoms or seek an alternative approach.
I love it when they choose to try acupuncture.
Acupuncture is fantastic at regulating the nervous system and getting the body from sympathetic “fight or flight” mode into the parasympathetic “rest and digest” state. When I ask patients if they feel stressed, so many of them say, “No,” but their body tells me a different story. Living in our modern society is stressful, period.
We accept societal norms with our conscious mind as “acceptable” ways of living; however, a great many of these are driving or exacerbating a stress response. This is a mismatch for our subconscious “lizard” or primitive brain that controls our instincts and warns us of danger. With early mankind the dangers were obvious: large predators, fighting others for resources, etc. Once someone had escaped a predator or fended off a thief (“fight or flight”), they would go eat or fornicate and put their brain and body into parasympathetic “rest and digest” mode. But in modern society we have the constant sympathetic nervous system stress of making deadlines, paying bills, adhering to schedules, being in traffic, making enough time for family, self, and responsibilities, etc., and folks, we are stressed as fuck from this and rarely do we switch into parasympathetic mode.
If we are constantly in fight or flight, we certainly are not able to relax and let the smooth muscles of the digestive system do their job which can lead to heartburn and bowel irregularities. Add onto that dysregulated or unacknowledged emotions and we have the makings of chronic digestive issues.
For example, a new patient came to see me for a variety of reasons, one of them being the recent onset of heartburn/acid reflux and bowel movement irregularities. After speaking with her about her medical history, dietary and lifestyle habits and finding nothing that would explain insidious pyrosis, I asked her if she had any recent upsetting events in her life. “Oh yeah, my brother died right before this started.”
It turns out she was denying her grief, not accepting his death, and therefore not processing it, so it was sitting unaddressed in her body.
So how does this all work in Traditional East Asian Medicine? The diaphragm separates our inner world (below the diaphragm) and outer world (above the diaphragm) and was considered by psychologist Carl Jung as the seat of consciousness. Each organ system has a related emotion. Grief is the emotion of the Lung. Lung’s job is inspiration. When we have unaddressed grief, this can cause constriction in the lungs and the inability for us to fully inhale. If we are acting outwardly okay (above the diaphragm) but inside are full of unacknowledged emotions (below the diaphragm) we can push away or prevent getting in touch with our inner self and have a rigid diaphragm. The diaphragm, along with the lower esophageal sphincter, keeps the contents of the stomach in the stomach.
When these are not working properly, stomach acid can escape and travel up the esophagus causing heartburn/acid reflux. Furthermore, the knotted emotions can metaphorically “knot” the flow of the intestines leading to alternating or chronic diarrhea and constipation.
How to best digest life? Stop watching, looking at, and listening to crap that doesn’t feel right in your body.
Don’t spend time with people who regularly make you feel upset.
Trust your “gut” feeling about people and situations, then follow it. Manage your stress with exercise, therapy, enough sleep, having good boundaries (“No,” is a complete sentence), don’t eat while watching television, avoid upsetting topics at the dinner table, practice parasympathetic breathing, and get acupuncture.
Acupuncture is the factory reset for a stressed and dysregulated nervous system.