If you’ve ever felt like your digestive system has a mind of its own — bloating, pain, constipation, diarrhea that flares no matter how “clean” you eat — you’re not entirely wrong.
I want to share a story from a recent patient. By the time he came to me, he’d been through the full workup: GI scans, scopes, elimination diets, supplement after supplement. Everything kept coming back “normal.” And yet his gut was still miserable…heaviness after eating, constipation, low energy. That combination — normal tests, real symptoms — is one of the most common (and most frustrating) patterns I see.
Here’s what most people don’t realize: the gut has its own nervous system (the enteric nervous system, sometimes called “the brain in your gut”), and it’s in constant conversation with your autonomic nervous system — your fight-or-flight and rest-and-digest switch. When stress runs high, cortisol runs high, and the sphincters and valves that control digestion respond accordingly. So a system can be structurally fine and still not function well, because it’s stuck in a stress response.
My work with him combined two things:
- Hands-on care — visceral and neural manipulation to help “wake up” tissue and organs that had essentially gone into shutdown, and restore that brain-to-organ communication.
- Mindset work — helping him shift from frustration and animosity toward his own body to something closer to trust. We talked about speaking to his body the way you’d encourage a friend who’s been through a lot, rather than a system that was failing him.
It wasn’t instant. It started as “fake it till you make it” — sending his body some goodwill even before he fully believed it would help. But over time, that shift mattered as much as anything we did at the table.
He’s since graduated from care. He still has to mind his food and occasionally support himself with supplements, but his nervous system regulation — and his relationship with his own body — has changed the trajectory. When I asked him what helped most, his answer was simple: self-compassion.
How do you talk to your body? Are you supportive and encouraging like you would be to a friend or child? Or are you hard on yourself? Your cells are certainly listening…what messages do you think they need to support your flourishing, not just surviving?