Your gut instinct is right: Your gastrointestinal tract has its own “little brain.”
When you’re anxious about a taking an exam, making a speech, meeting with the boss or facing any other worrisome thing, your stomach responds with knots, those fluttery sensations so poetically called “butterflies,” or worse.
We’re wired to respond that way.
“The stomach reacts to increased input from the brain,” said Dr. Stephen Hanauer, professor of medicine and director of the gastroenterology section at the University of Chicago.
“Those fluttering feelings are muscle spasms [in the gastrointestinal tract]. Some people feel nauseous, vomit or have diarrhea.”
Essentially the stomach is a muscular sack for the storage and release of food into the small intestine. By nature, it’s an agitator whose churning, messy activity allows us to digest food and stay alive.
When we’re hungry, it reacts automatically with hunger pangs, or growling, so we’re motivated to eat. When we’re sated, we stop. When we have to have a bowel movement, we just do.
“But there’s a threshold for sensations in the gut,” Hanauer said. “When we are more anxious, that threshold for feeling digestive symptoms is increased. So we feel it more.”
When we sleep, the brain settles down and the gut also settles down, he said.
Evidence that the brain is connected to the digestive tract dates to Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov’s experiments with dogs in the first part of the last century, according to Hanauer.
“Pavlov would measure dogs’ salivation and also gastric acid output in the stomach,” he said. “When the dogs saw food, they would salivate and their stomachs would actually put out more acid. Then he would ring a bell and feed them. Eventually, he would just ring the bell, and that would set up both salivation and acid output. That’s a physiologic demonstration that the brain is connected to the digestive tract.”
Dr. Michael Gershon, chairman of anatomy and cell biology at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, has even written a book on the subject, “The Second Brain,” the culmination of 30-year career devoted to understanding the human bowel.
Your body responds to your thought process, said Dr. Nada Stotland, a psychiatrist at Illinois Masonic Medical Center.
“Something scary happens–say, you have to take an exam-and your cognition goes into overdrive,” Stotland said. “You’re trying to remember all the things you need to know for the exam. You’re also talking to yourself, trying to convince yourself it’s going to be OK.
“Another part of your brain is going to direct you to find somebody to talk to. That usually makes you feel better, and then that same center is going to be sending out signals to your stomach at the same time.
“We’re still animals. We’re people; we’re very neat kinds of animals, very complicated. But we still have those roots. You never get completely above it.”
Many people experience garden-variety butterflies or stomach cramps occasionally when they’re anxious. That’s normal.
“If it’s prolonged, persistent, severe,” said Dr. Robin Fintel, a gastroenterologist at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, “see a doctor for an evaluation.
“Anyone with any sort of bowel disease–whether it’s peptic ulcers, colitis, whatever-stress will make their disease worse. It may not primarily cause their disease, but it will exacerbate it.”
As for trying to cure the butterflies, that really can only be done when the anxiety has been relieved. So either learn to get used to taking tests or public speaking, or get used to the butterflies.
