Dr. Trisha Pasricha

If I were to picture this like nice steaming bowl of cheesy fettuccine Alfredo, and I'm like lifting the fork and the cheese is going down, like I could start salivating thinking about this.

I know.

This is like the wrong time.

you think about that, what other organ do we have where just our thoughts can change their function, right?

Like no matter how much I think about gushing waterfalls, I'm not actually making my kidneys filter blood more quickly and put more urine into my bladder.

At best, maybe doing that I could get the bladder to like relax and squeeze, but the kidneys are going to do what they're going to do regardless.

Our lungs are taking air in, whether I'm thinking about the mountainside or my Boston commute this morning, at the same rate.

But the gut is very different.

So researchers have known that there's been this close connection for a long time.

And for most of the last 100 years, until the 1990s or so, the way we thought about the gut-brain connection was that it's the brain calling the shots.

Like our thoughts and then our mental health issues, our anxiety, our depression, our stress, those can cause changes to our gut.

And we know that to be true.

We live that experience almost every week, every month, every day even.

When we're nervous, when you're excited because you're on a date and you get butterflies in your stomach, that is a feeling and a thought and an emotion that's causing a real change in your gut.

And this is something that I've studied and what we know is happening is that when we have these kinds of emotions, excitement, fear, anxiety...

A hormone called corticotrophin-releasing hormone is released by the brain, and it causes the stomach to come to a grinding halt.

The stomach has this kind of baseline motion where it's contracting at three cycles per minute because it's kind of just sweeping things along at all times.

That goes into a chaotic rhythm when we're stressed.

And that sort of stops things from moving forward.

But at the same time, your colon, the very last part of that colon, starts to ramp up with activity.