Wendie Trubow, MD, MBA, IFMCPPresident at Five Journeys, Functional Medicine & Wellness Provider, Best Selling Author, Passionate Champion for Health

What Happens When You're Under Psychological Stress

24 Feb 2025 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

0:53

A short YouTube transcript excerpt in which Wendie Trubow, MD, explains how psychological stress biochemically shuts down digestion and alters the gut microbiome. Main claims: stress halts restorative digestion, causes food stasis and overgrowth of anaerobic/putrefactive bacteria leading to gas, bloating, dysbiosis, and that adrenal signals reduce liver detox and deprioritize gut function. The clip emphasizes sustained stress (physical, emotional, chemical, social) as a driver of microbiome change.

Chapters

When you talk about psychological stress, what I'm hearing is when you're stressed, you're shutting down digestion. You are no longer restoring or resting. You are losing resilience. And when you shut down digestion, your food sits in your gut and rots. And then the bacteria that are designed to digest you when you die, the anaerobic bacteria, they come out to play because the food is rotting. And then you have an increase in gas and bloating and dysbiosis and discomfort. But the other thing you want to at. Look, look at is when you're stressed, your adrenals say to your liver, hey, don't detox because we're stressed. And then the adrenals and the liver say to the gut, stop. Stop the presses. This is not a priority right now. So it's important to understand that it's actually on a biochemical level. You will alter your gut microbiome from having sustained unremitting stress, whether it's physical, emotional, chemical, social, whatever it is.
Absolutely.
It'll shut it down.
Yeah. Really fascinating thing is that psychological stress. We know that psychological stress can create just as much inflammation in our body, maybe even more than any physiologic stress, any infection. But psychological stress can also trigger the release of zonulin, which. Zonulin is a marker for leaky gut. It's released by our small intestinal cells when the junctions become leaky between them, it's gonna have a direct impact on the function of your entire microbio.