Dr. Diane Mueller explains how psychological stress and the gut microbiome interact in a self-reinforcing vicious cycle: stress alters gut flora and reduces neurochemical support (e.g., serotonin), which worsens mood and stress-handling, further impairing the gut. She proposes breaking the cycle by "rewiring" neural responses—forming new habitual stress-responses through regular practices such as meditation, breathwork, visualization, and movement—emphasizing consistency (even short daily practices) and pairing behavioral change with external stress reduction when possible.
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Hey, everybody. Dr. Diane, here again, it's April. We're doing a series on microbes, mental health questions that came post my Microbes and Mental health summit that I hosted. And in this video, we are going to be talking about the gut and we're going to be talking about stress and the vicious cycle that people get in. So one of the questions that came up on the summit was from a mental health professional standpoint, if you're a therapist or you're working with a therapist, how does the work that is happening from a therapy perspective actually influence the gastrointestinal tract and the normal flora and contribute to the overarching depression, anxiety, bipolar type of picture? So not saying depression, anxiety and bipolar are the same, but just any sort of mental health picture really is what I'm talking about here. Right. So there's this huge relationship. So when I'm talking about stress, what we're talking about here is a vicious cycle that people get into. And so there can be situations, for example, in like other videos that you may have seen, I've talked about things like not having enough fiber can influence the gut or contacting pesticides or herbicides, or there are other toxins can impact the gut. And then when the gut's impacted, then you can get, say, low amounts of serotonin and then you feel depressed, right? So this is the pathway that can happen. The problem is that when, when we're depressed and oftentimes we don't handle stress as well, well, stress will actually further down regulate the gut. So with the vicious cycle we get into is like, say if you're depressed or you're anxious, these sorts of things, and then all of a sudden you have more stress come in your life. We all deal with stress. So at some point you're going to encounter higher amounts of stress, right? That's a human thing. So at some point, counting higher amounts of stress, well, that can then influence the gut. And then you're not regulating the stress as well. You're not making enough serotonin, say in this example as well. Then you can get further depressed and then that worsens way you handle stress. Then stress further impacts the gut, and basically you go in circles and circles and circles and circles, right? So that's essentially what can happen here. Now, when that happens, how do we get out of this? How do we break this vicious cycle? One of the ways we break this vicious cycle is by rewiring our brain. So you guys, those of you that follow my work have probably heard me mention Dr. Joe Dispenza he has a saying, and I just love Dr. Joe's work. And he has a saying that I think is so valuable, which is nerves that fire together, wire together. So it's this concept of when we do something enough times, our nerves start processing in a new way automatically. A way of looking at this is riding a bike. A lot of us spent a lot of time in childhood riding bikes, right? So that saying of, like, it's just like riding a bike, right? It comes back, right? That's what we mean by that saying. We might not have been on a bike in years, and all of a sudden we get on a bike, it's like, oh, yeah, I know how to ride a bike. Right? Well, that happened because you nerves fire together so many times because we rode a bike enough that we created that neural pathway that the brain remembers. Oh, yeah, this is. I get on a bike, this is how this operates. I pedal, I maneuver it this way. This is how I keep my balance, right? The. The brain remembers that nerves that fire together wire together. And so sometimes we can be rusty at things. Like, sometimes I notice this. I'm a big, avid snowboarder, and I notice at the end of the season, I always perform much better than that first day of the season. Like, I still. That first day of the season, I remember how to snowboard. I've been snowboarding for a couple decades, and I remember how to do that. But there's definitely, like, the first, like, week, it's like getting back into the groove, right? So there's like, a rewiring and remembering of those sorts of neural networks. So how does this apply here? So when we are in a state where we are say, okay, we encounter a stressor, we react this way, we encounter a stressor, we react this way. Most of the time when we encounter stressors, we work and we react and respond based upon our neural programming. So the way out of this, the way to say, okay, well, stress comes in, and I'm going to respond by creating a new pathway. Nerves that have never fired together haven't fired together much. What we need to do is we need to get that new neural pathway wired together. So much so that stress comes in, we're responding in a different way. All of a sudden, our gut is not affected because we're managing our stress better. And then when our gut's not as affected, our brain's not as affected, we make more serotonin that can help us break the vicious cycle, right? So it's really about creating these new neural pathways. And so in this example, how we create this new neural pathway is really by doing things regularly that are actually helping us manage stress. So stress is, is that pathway in our body, that is adrenaline, that is cortisol, that is all these stress hormones that are raising. We want to change that. We want to change it so that our stress is really being managed in a way where we are not triggering all of these hormones to the same sort of level. There's a place and a time for those hormones. They're not all bad. We definitely want those hormones to come online when they're needed. But we want to train our body on like the day to day stressors that really don't require our body to go into that adrenaline state that we often go into because of habit and because of that nerve wiring process. We really want to re pattern that. So our body starts seeing this other pathway as another option. And so that's where we practice things that are encouraging our nervous system to react in a different way. And things like, like meditations used for this visualization exercise, breath work, these are some of the classic things. Different movement practices maybe. And these are, these types of practices all have different types of unique inherent values. But one thing these types of practices can all have in common is getting our body into a different nervous system state, helping us respond in different ways. So you know, meditation, for example, has been shown to increase brain coherence, right? There's, there's benefits that are inherent to that. But really in the grand scheme of things like what I tell my clients is the biggest thing we really do when we're rewiring our brain pathways. The most important thing is thing is regularity, right? Our new pathways wire together. When we do something regularly enough that our brain remembers. This is how I do that. Right. So that is really truly our goal here. And the way we do that is by regularity. So how that relates to this is when you're thinking about meditation, visualization, breathwork, these different types of activities, what I encourage you to think about is of these lists of activities, which ones are most interesting to you? For me right now, and it can rotate. I've gone through periods of my life where I've been a huge meditator. At one point I did a 36 day meditation retreat. 36 days of meditating in a row at a retreat. I went very deep into meditation. At this point in my life, I'm finding myself more called to breath work. So it can change. But the point is like pick something that you feel like this is interesting enough where you can show up to it basically every day, even if it's just like, you know, 60 seconds or five minutes, you know, longer is better if you can, but that regularity is what's important. So if you're somebody that you're like, I'm just not going to sit and meditate, like, I'm just not going to do it, it's just not going to work. I mean, one, I believe anybody can learn to do this. But if you're really feeling that resistance, what I want you to have is results. And so think about what could you do? Would you be more interested in breathwork? And if that's the case, then commit to that sort of activity every day. And again, what we're really working to do is we're working to lower our stress and find different ways of keeping stress down so that the signal to the gut. Because remember, stress will impact the gut microbiota. It'll basically impact them. And we can see that the good bacteria are not functioning as well and not surviving as well when we have stress. And we need those guys for healthy brain function. So we want to change the way we are responding to stress. Right? This is an interior job. There's of course, certain things we can do to reduce stress in our life. If you have a stressful job, for example, and you have the ability to find a new job, great, maybe that's a good choice for you. But even if we control and we set our life up in this beautiful way where we're limiting, you know, as many stressors as possible. This is human life. Like everybody goes through stressful periods. Nobody gets out of the ups and downs that come with being a human. Right? So we all have layers of that, and some people go through much harder times than others. But everybody has stress in their life. So we want to figure out how we can respond. You know, reduce what we can externally, but also respond and have our nervous system respond as great as possible. So that's what I have to say in answer to this question. Thanks again for being with me again. Please don't keep me a secret. Let people know about this channel if you think it would help them. Please do subscribe so you can get updates when I release new material. And please do leave any questions you have in the comments so I can continue to curate material that is the most useful for my audience. That's really what I want to do. I just want to make this so valuable for you. So thank you for giving me the ideas of how I can most support you. You'll find other information about me in the show notes, and I'll see you next.
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