Trusting Your Gut
Learn how our gut affects our mental and emotional well-being and how we can best care for both!
Trusting Your Gut: The Key to a Healthy Mind and Body
By Ginger McBride
We all know the expression,” trust your gut.” What if we took this literally? Our gut is the center of our immunity and well-being. It affects both the physical and mental properties. It directly links our brains through our central and enteric nervous systems. Our enteric nervous system may not be as well understood as our central one. It plays a part in sensory and motor neurons embedded into the line of our gut and has over one million nerve cells.
We must pay attention to what our bodies are trying to tell us. It shows we are unhappy when we don’t care for ourselves. If something feels off physically, there may be mental or emotional symptoms that align as well.
Our gut refers to our gastrointestinal system, which houses vital organs that are essential to our well-being. Without our immunity, we would find ourselves constantly in a state of illness, and who wants that? Our bodies need the tools to combat these external entities from wreaking havoc on our system. Our microbiome is a major player in this endeavor. It contains microbes, including good and bad bacteria, fungi, and viruses.
We want to have more good than bad bacteria; enabling us to have ideal digestion and access to nutrients we can use for our health. When our bodies have more bad bacteria than good, unfortunate symptoms can occur.
Interestingly enough, our guts have a direct link to our mental health as well. It has been shown that those who had compromising microorganisms in their system were also linked to certain mental disorders such as – bipolar, depression, etc. This is because certain bacteria are associated with symptoms that align with these disorders.
The good news is serotonin, also known as one of our happiness hormones, is produced up to ninety percent in our gut. When this is imbalanced, we find more stress and anxiety in our bodies, but if we maintain healthy levels, we are going to feel more focused, calm, and relaxed. It affects so much more than our general happiness but also plays a part in our digestive system. It helps absorb our nutrients and keeps our food moving throughout our bodies.
When our gut is imbalanced, we may find that we are nauseated, tired, restless, and have certain cravings and mood swings. Overall, we just don’t feel a hundred percent. We have to take care of our bodies. We have to listen to our gut when something just feels off. We can balance our microbiome with good bacteria and create more of our happiness hormones so we can feel our best.
There are so many delicious foods that are readily available to us. We just need to know what we are looking for. Prebiotics and probiotics are key parts of creating a healthy microbiome. Prebiotics can act as nutrients for our guts’ already existing good bacteria. For instance, we can find this in whole grains, bananas, and soybeans, while probiotics add to the good-bacteria population, which we can find in fermented foods such as yogurt. Together, they build our immune system up. We can further our gut health by balancing our serotonin levels by consuming poultry, fish, soy, dairy, nuts, and seeds.
There are many ways for us to go about taking care of ourselves. Sure, we can change our diet and exercise to benefit both our mental and physical bodies, but can we acknowledge the link between the two? That one does, in fact, affect the other. We can have an integrative experience for our well-being and begin to notice both sides’ positive attributes. Balancing our gut health alongside our mental health.
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About the Author
Ginger McBride is a certified health coach, freelance writer, and entrepreneur. She enjoys helping fellow entrepreneurs with their content creation. For more information, please go to www.quillninkstudios.com
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