32: When Gut Issues Aren’t About Food: The Stress–Digestion Connection

What if your gut symptoms aren’t just about food—or detox protocols—but about something deeper your body has been trying to say all along?

In this episode of your body speaks, Dr. Brook continues the conversation from last week’s discussion on detox safety by exploring gut signals through the lens of the four pillars of health: physical, spiritual, emotional, and mental.

Through a vulnerable personal story and clear, practical guidance, Dr. Brook explains why unresolved stress, trauma, and nervous system dysregulation can directly impact digestion—and why chasing diets and detoxes alone can keep you stuck.

You’ll learn how to tell whether your gut symptoms are reacting to food or stress, why confusing the two leads to more overwhelm, and how to take simple, body-led steps toward clarity instead of control.

This episode is an invitation to stop guessing, stop overriding your body, and start listening with discernment and trust.

In This Episode, You’ll Learn:

• Why gut issues aren’t always rooted in food—even when symptoms feel physical
• How chronic stress and trauma affect digestion through the vagus nerve
• The difference between food-led vs. stress-led gut symptoms
• Why detoxes and supplements can fail when emotional and nervous system signals are ignored
• Simple questions to ask your body when gut symptoms show up
• Gentle next steps to support digestion without chasing protocols
• How the four pillars of health work together to restore clarity and safety in the body

Helpful Resources Mentioned:

• Body Signal Decoder – Walk through gut-related signals step by step using the Pause. Connect. Ask. Adjust. framework.

Final Encouragement

Your body isn’t betraying you—and it isn’t broken.
It’s communicating.

When you slow down enough to listen, clarity replaces confusion—and healing becomes a partnership instead of a fight.

If this episode resonated, please consider leaving a review and sharing it with someone who may need this conversation.

🎧 Stay Connected + Explore More Support:

📲 Come say hi on Instagram: @drbrooksheehan

⭐️ If you loved this episode, would you take a moment to leave a five-star review on Apple or Spotify. It helps more women learn to listen, trust, and transform their health.

Transcript

Dr. Brook Sheehan (00:00)

When we are under high amounts of stress, when we are under a lot of anxiety, when there's toxicity in your environment, your nervous system became so dysregulated.

Unresolved gut issues, no matter what you've tried in terms of diets or doing the detoxes the proper way or taking proactive measures with yourself, seeing your doctors, doing the supplements, all of it, and it's still not going away. We cannot dismiss the fact that there is emotional components tied to that.

Welcome to the body speaks podcast with me, Dr. Brook Sheehan. Join me, on a journey, in discovering how to interpret the subtle signs your body uses to communicate with you - the whispers, the screams, and everything in between. Your body truly holds the answers for your health and wellbeing. It’s time to discover them, together. Let’s dive in.

Dr. Brook Sheehan (00:55)

Hi, friend, welcome back. hope you had a beautiful week since we last spoke. Today's episode is going to come off the backs of what we spoke about last week. If you listen to that episode with my guest, Dr. Kate Davis, who spoke so well about the dangers of detoxing and how important it is to make sure every system is aligned, naturally I want to move into understanding certain gut signals that our body is giving us and why sometimes it's not just the physical aspects of this.

Okay, because we can do detoxes, we can do detoxes the proper way. But if we're not checking into those other pillars of health, we can actually miss a lot of things. Now, what are those other pillars of health, Dr. Brook?

Well, if you're new to the show, four pillars of health are physical, spiritual, emotional, and mental. Now we have to make sure all four pillars are aligned to truly have that health that God designed us to have. I wanna go into a story with you and it's not an easy story for me to share, but I really do believe that this will speak to somebody and maybe you are listening here today, and you have gone through something very similar or you're going through a very traumatic situation in your life. Do not discount all of those feelings. Do not numb the pain or the signals or the things that are happening in your body.

What I want to encourage you with is do not put the blinders on. Do not allow yourself to just simply try to do detox after detox without looking at underlying symptoms. When I was 25 years old, I got involved in a relationship with a man who was not ideal. And for the protection of my child, I'm not going to go into everything, but I do need to share this.

Because I do believe that our bodies tell us things before we even partake. And I can give you a very quick example, and I know every single one of you listening right now can think of a time where you just felt so strongly in your gut about something, and maybe you followed along with that feeling. Maybe you went against that feeling, but you felt that in your gut.

Your gut was telling you something, your body was speaking so loudly and you were able to listen to that. Whether you actually listened to it or whether you ignored it, you heard it.

So when I was 25 years old, got in a relationship We ended up getting married. We ended up having a baby together. But every single time I moved the goalpost, meaning when we were dating, our dating relationship was bad. It was really, really bad. And in my broken state, in my state where I did not have any identity, I did not know who I was, who I belonged to, I didn't know anything about me, had very, very low self-esteem.

So I thought that if I got married that things would be better. So we moved the goalpost, we got married, things got worse. In fact, very, very worse. After we get married and they get worse, the situation changed a little bit and I was in my head. I was mentally going, I'm never going to get divorced. I have to fight through this.

This is just my lot in life. I made these decisions. I have to figure this all out. And then the next logical step to move the goalpost, if the marriage is bad, then let's have a kid together. I am absolutely in love with my child. I don't feel the need to have to say that to you, but God has given me the most blessing, blessing, blessing, blessing out of this toxic experience that I can never say I regret or I take back or I want things to change. Absolutely not.

So I'm grateful for this journey. But the reason why I'm sharing this story with you is every single time that I moved this goalpost, every single time my body was revolting, revolting, and I was sick to my stomach, like sick, sick to my stomach, really horrible gastrointestinal pain. And I'm talking the sharp just, ugh, like could not, could not get it to go away.

Now I would change my diet and I would have some relief for certain amount of time. I would take some Pepto-Bismol, I'd have relief. There would be semi good days with him so I would have some relief. And then there would be very not so good days where we spiraled back into this. And this went on for a good amount of time.

I was losing more of myself every time this happened. So I'd have these really horrible gut pains and I would feel myself crawling back into a hole or finding myself isolating more or not doing social events, going to church, hanging out with friends.

That being said, what I want to talk to you about today is gut issues tend to, and I know I'm going to be stepping out on a limb, but there was a lot of research to show this, that when we are under high amounts of stress, when we are under a lot of anxiety, when there's toxic relationships or toxic workplace environments or toxicity in your environment, think about as a kid, if you dealt with any sort of traumatic issues growing up, whether it be maybe an alcoholic parent or an abusive parent or somebody who just had anger and rage. What did that do to your nervous system?

Your nervous system became so dysregulated in that moment that anytime you hear maybe loud noises now you're, you're jumping. Okay. This is what happens. Going back to that last statement, I I'm not stepping out on a limb because there is a lot of research for this, but I want this to be known that horrible, unresolved gut issues, no matter what you've tried in terms of diets or doing the detoxes the proper way or taking proactive measures with yourself, seeing your doctors, doing the supplements, all of it, and it's still not going away. We cannot dismiss the fact that there is emotional components tied to that.

And without getting in the weeds, but I think it's important to know this. For those of you who don't know, this nerve, this one nerve in the body gets a lot of attention. Now we have hundreds of nerves in the body, but this one gets so much attention, and that is the vagus nerve. That vagus nerve comes from your brain, and it comes down into your entire chest and abdomen region. It innervates, medical word, it sends signals to your lungs, to your heart, to your stomach, to your spleen, to your thymus, to your thyroid. It does all of this stuff.

It goes all the way down into your pelvic region, into those organs as well. And that vagus nerve sends impulse back up into that brain. Now the brain cares more about what is happening in the gut than the gut cares about what's happening to the brain. So think about it like this. Think about two different people.

One woman is on a roof. And another woman is down on floor level. Okay? So the woman on the roof, the brain wants to know more about what's happening on ground level. the person on the ground isn't yelling "hey, what's happening up there in the brain?" yes, of course it needs to know some information, but think of it like the person on the ground is feeding information to the person on the roof.

Hey, we've got messes down here. Hey, there's a insect infestation. Don't know why that popped up into my head, but there's all kinds of chaos down here, feeding that person, right? That is how the vagus nerve works. The vagus nerve is feeding. Yes, it comes from the brain, but it's feeding information back up to the brain. saying, hey, this is the scenario down here. This is what's happening.

Now, when you are under any sort of emotional distress in your life, when there are traumatic things happening, that vagus nerve starts to get mixed signals. It starts to hear information that's not really happening, or it starts to send signals in the wrong places or starts to really just create havoc. And so what you end up having is a lot of this gastrointestinal distress, this pain, this bloating, bloody stool, diarrhea, constipation, all the things that probiotics are not going to solve for you. That doing any sort of physical detox is not going to solve for you.

We have to look at the spiritual aspect of that. We have to look at the emotional aspect. We have to look at the mental aspect. It is so vitally important. I wanna take a moment here just to briefly share with you.

I do have a body signal decoder that allows you to actually walk through the steps to figure out, okay, I hear you, Dr. Brook, I hear you, that one of these pillars is off and it's probably not the physical pillar at first. It's probably the other three. So I have something that I can easily walk you through. You just select gastrointestinal distress on the signal decoder. The link will be in the show notes.

And it will give you the step-by-step framework on, if it is the emotional pillar, how do I resolve that? Because one of the things that I know for those of you who have experienced any kind of trauma, one thing is, is it feels very gray in our mind. It feels very dark and it feels very overwhelming. So it seems so much easier just to take the probiotic or just to take the Pepto-Bismol.

However, it's not the best option in these situations. And that is what you will be provided is to be able to go, okay, I feel so cloudy in my head. I don't even know where to start. This is where we're gonna start. And we're gonna start with one small step forward because it requires making intentional shifts little by little by little.

Now, unfortunately, I stayed, over the course of four years that I felt this stomach pain. That was the time that him and I were dating and married. I still had to unravel a lot of pieces of nervous system dysregulation in my body as a result of all the trauma that I've endured.

Now, co-parenting with a person like this has been an absolute nightmare. However, I'm going to look at the blessings in all of that. So there has been a lot of progress. I don't get gut pain like I used to. Now, when I get gut pain, a lot of times it's because my stomach's yelling at me like, "hello, I told you to stop eating and you continue to keep putting food in me. What are you doing?" So yes, there can be digestive things.

But don't miss the fact that there can be underlying stress components to your actual gut distress. On that note, I want to share with you how to start telling if your bowels are reacting to stress or to food and why that changes the next step.

I want to walk you through a few questions you can ask your body as I'm asking them. You can say, is this true for me or is this not true for me? One of the things… Because gastrointestinal pain, can be very similar, whether it's physical or any of those other pillars. The actual manifestation of symptoms is going to look very much the same. And I mentioned some of those, the bowel changes, the incontinence, the constipation, the bloating, the distension, the just feeling icky in your body.

So there's two different lanes you can go in when you're thinking about this. Is it the food lane or is it the stress lane?

If you assume it's food when it really is stress, you'll end up chasing the diets, the protocols, and you'll miss the real signal. If you assume it's stress when it's food, you'll stay confused and you'll keep getting blindsided. So you'll keep going into the stress loop of what's the trauma, what's the trauma, while missing a component that maybe you're eating carrots and the carrots aren't working for you.

And just like I always say, this isn't about perfection. It's about clarity and trust. So I want to take you down these two lanes. Here are the questions getting to that. do you know if we're in the food lane, lane one, these are questions. What did you just eat? How soon after eating did your symptoms start? Does it happen consistently or does it happen with similar meal? Okay.

If it's the stress lane, what was happening in the hours before these symptoms showed up? I want to make this clear. It does not have to be trauma related. It could be because you have a stressful meeting with your boss and that's coming up and you know, my gosh, like you're eating breakfast and all of a your belly starts hurting. It can be that simple, but that's a stress response. Were you rushed?

Were you tensed? Were you bracing? Were you in conflict, overextended or pushing through while you were trying to eat? Like obviously all of those body signals, all of those feelings in our body is stress signal. Did this flare up with pressure or relational stress? Like all of a sudden you're talking to your husband or your boyfriend or something happens with a coworker and you start to feel this. Okay. All we're doing right here is building a log of information. We're mapping patterns so we can stop guessing. And then we're going to take one right step.

So if you're not using the body signal decoder, and you don't have to, that's just a resource that's available. If you're not using the body signal decoder, if it looks stress-led, if you're in lane two with the stress, you're like, yep, I'm getting a yes to those questions.

I want you to choose one calming, grounding action around your meal. Meaning I want you to slow down. I want you to breathe. Take a couple breaths before you start to eat. I want you to sit down and I want you to chew your food methodically. I want you to think about how many times you're chewing that food. I don't want you to just take a couple bites and swallow. Take a couple bites and swallow. Nope. Really reduce the amount of time that you're just eating and swallow.

If you're in lane one and you're answering yes to those symptoms, and if it looks food led, then I just want you to choose one gentle experiment. Simplify those meals, making them a little bit smaller or less complex, meaning it doesn't have to have every flavor and all the seasoning and all of that kind of stuff. It can be one thing. Reduce one irritant. And if you're just like, well, how do I figure that

Put something on a plate. If you're eating a certain breakfast, you eat the same breakfast all the time or your lunch or your dinner and look at it and go, is there anything on here, body that you're not okay with? And just give yourself a little pause, tune in. And maybe you don't get an answer. So I would say have a few bites of everything, but don't feel like you have to finish that plate. That's another component in terms of the food lane is we always feel like we have to finish the plate. We don't.

I hope this information that I shared today was helpful. I hope being vulnerable and raw and sharing that story didn't make you feel sorry for me. That's not what I was looking for. I want that story to encourage you that it does not have to be like this.

But I encourage you to really take an active look on what your body is trying to say to you because it's speaking to you, it has something to say, and it is trying to alert you to danger before you are even aware of it. Whether it be food or stress, take one small action forward.

And if you do desire and want to learn the body OS framework, the pause, connect, ask and adjust and be able to work through the four pillars, you can download that body signal decoder today and be able to work through some of those symptoms. Have a blessed day and Be sure to rate and review the podcast. If you are getting value from this, it really truly helps other people who are experiencing similar symptoms to be able to know that they are not alone.

And if you know of somebody who needs this information, please share this episode with them. It would mean the world. Thank you so much.