As I’ve previously said, your physical health is just as important as your mental health. We always compare physical complications with mental complications but often fail to see the massive differences between the two. I have used the analogy before – you have broken your leg (a physical problem). People will help you because its visible to them that you are less capable to do normal tasks like opening the door or climbing stairs. You are dealing with a mental problem and nobody bats an eyelid. How can people help you when they cannot see what the problem is? Poor mental health often goes unnoticed compared with poor physical health. Apart from different symptoms and visibility, they actually have quite a lot of similarities. While many think your physical health is a completely different thing from mental health, I want to talk, through my experiences, about how the two aren’t just related, but are almost dependant on each other. Poor physical health can lead to poor mental health. Good physical health can lead to good mental health. Poor mental health can lead to poor physical health, and Good mental health can lead to good physical health. In my experience, I always thought that when I felt sick and nervous, that it was my stomach being upset and that caused me to feel nervous, which made me feel more nauseous, which made me feel anxious and so on. But after dealing with something that was physically demanding for so long I came to the conclusion that it was my nerves and anxiety that were causing my stomach to not feel so good. As a child I got stomach bugs more often than the average kid. In my head, feeling nauseous was the single worst physical feeling. You'd think the more I got stomach bugs the better I'd be able to cope with one when it happened, but I dreaded the thought of feeling nauseous, so much so that in my late teens, if I ever felt the tiniest bit unsure in my gut, like the feeling you get at the start of a stomach bug, I would overthink and think "yep, this is gonna be a rough 24 hours". More often than not it was just a little rumble in my stomach and the feeling of "this is the start of a bug" would pass in a matter of seconds. But occasionally my thinking would make me more anxious and so began the spiral of anxiety nausea anxiety nausea anxiety nausea. When I was about 22, when I'd started having more responsibility and stress that was building up inside, I started to have anxiety attacks. At the time, the first few anxiety attacks, I had no idea what the hell was going on. Felt faint, felt cold but boiling hot and sweating at the same time. In a state of panic and "people are watching me thinking this and thinking that". I felt like I was going to vomit. And the first few anxiety attacks, I did vomit, badly. The vomiting is what made me think "it's a stomach bug”. The bug is making me more anxious and its making my nausea worse and so on. But these stomach bugs kept happening. Once a week for a month, then more frequent, then it happened in work. I vomited in the work toilets and said to myself "go tell your boss you are feeling really sick and have just threw up in the toilet and he'll tell you to go home, and you'll be in your own bed in less than half an hour". I got up, went and told him, he told me to go home, I left, and by the time I'd sat down in my car, I felt completely fine. Not nauseous, not anxious, not ill. It was that day that I realised these were not stomach bugs I kept getting, they were anxiety attacks. The thought of being in my own bed brought me out of my anxiety attack and into my mental comfort zone. I looked more and more into what anxiety was and could relate to a lot of what I read about what happens when you have an anxiety attack. I found that apparently the brain and the stomach are connected directly because the brain grows in sync with the stomach while the fetus forms in the womb. The stomach and brain always have that connection between them. It's why when you get nervous, your stomach churns a little (butterflies).
Having dealt with the anxiety for a few months, I ended up waking up every morning and feeling extremely nauseous. Sometimes vomiting because it was so bad. I didn't really want to admit to some family or friends or my boss about my anxiety so I kept saying that there was something physically not right (which turned out to be somewhat true). I had bad morning sickness (briefly I thought I might be pregnant) which I saw the doctor about. There was no mention of mental health. I was genuinely nauseous most mornings and I knew in myself that the anxiety, although perhaps was related to the physical sickness, was a separate issue. After several tests including blood tests, an endoscopy, an ultra sound (definitely not pregnant), nothing showed up. I then had another test which looked at how food gets digested in my body. They gave me some yummy soggy radioactive substance-covered cornflakes and took an x-ray every 15 minutes to watch how the food was digested. They found that my stomach muscles were not working properly and some muscles were not working at all. I would wake up in the morning with my dinner still undigested in my stomach causing the nausea and vomiting. They called it gastroparesis. Doc said a low fat low fibre diet will help. Sure enough within a few days I started to feel a lot better. No more morning sickness.
Relieved that there was a name for it and a reason that I was feeling nauseous and that it wasn't just in my head, I asked the doctor "why has this happened? I eat reasonably well, I don't smoke, I look after myself. What causes this problem" his answer? "we don't know why it happens. It just happens to some people. Sometimes people's stomach muscles just stop working or don't do what they're supposed to". I couldn't help but think if it had something to do with the fact I had been suffering horrendous panic attacks, vomiting episodes (not stomach bugs) and copious amounts of stress. I made my mind up after pondering on the thought for a few weeks. The relationship between my brain and my stomach was like a visible line I could see connecting the two. An article published by Harvard Medical School says “a person’s stomach or intestinal distress can be the cause or the product of anxiety, stress or depression”.
When someone with anxiety has it nonstop, it is absolutely exhausting. It's physically draining. It demands a lot of your body. Your body continuously releases chemicals in your body like adrenaline and cortisol (stress hormones). This is the reason someone who deals with anxiety for a long period of time can have stomach problems. Your stomach does not want you to digest anything. It wants you to either fight or flight, so you release all these stress hormones into your stomach and it is physically draining. I believe it’s the reason I developed gastroparesis. A professional doctor didn't seem to make the connection, but I never explained that I had been dealing with anxiety attacks for several months.
I would love to give you advice on dealing with sickness in anxiety but despite having the experience I do in the issue, I can't really recommend how to not have the physical symptoms of anxiety. Sometimes you get anxiety that results in a physical effect on your body. For me, anxiety resulted in a physical problem with my stomach. I continue to feel small bouts of anxiety if I get a weird feeling in my stomach. The irrational side of my brain says "your gonna feel sick. That's going to be horrendous. You're gonna throw up. There's nowhere to throw up. Your gonna panic, then you'll definitely need to be sick". After years of experiencing that process, I have learned how to recognise and jump in at the first sign of this process. The rational side of my brain now steps in at the "your gonna feel sick" stage and says "I might end up feeling nauseous, but it's gonna pass. It's just a feeling in your stomach, the likelihood of it being a stomach bug is really really small. Look at the shape of that cloud. It looks like Don Corleone. Damn that’s a good film. Especially that bit when... ". That's where being mindful and present comes into play. It can distract you from what might happen to make you pay attention to what is happening right now.
Give the wee video below a watch. It explains the whole brain to stomach thing in a more science-y yet easy to understand way with some pleasant illustrations.