Dr. Trisha Pasricha

The two other factors that I think we don't think about for our guts, we think about them probably more often for our brain health or for other organs, are exercise and sleep.

Well, it turns out those are incredibly important for our guts as well.

Regular exercise, like the kind you do long-term, sustain, it becomes a habit, that's associated with increased motility of your gut, which will give you an easier, more quickly passing stool in the long-term.

If you just go for a walk once in the morning, just that movement alone will start to stimulate contractions.

We have big holiday dinners around Christmas or Thanksgiving or whatever the big Easter's coming up.

You might say, you know, after a big family meal like that, what I really wanna do is lie down on the couch.

And it turns out that even just sitting upright

allows intestinal gas and contents to move about 30, 33% more effectively than lying down.

So really our bodies are not primed to be like in this prone position or even ideally sitting down in a desk chair like we do all day.

We know that's not great for our heart health.

We know that's not necessarily great for our brains, but it's actually not great for your guts either.

And then sleep, having a predictable rhythm.

Like I mentioned, your gut operates on a circadian rhythm.

It will respond immediately.

to the patterns that you've set.

So if you sleep at different times, you wake up at different times, some days you eat breakfast, some days you don't, all of this will feel like chaos to your colon.

Your colon wants to sleep at the same time, wake up, and get these predictable cues of like, okay, we're going to have coffee in the morning, and I'm going to have a nice large meal that's going to stretch my stomach a little bit, and that stretch is going to cause a reflex that'll make my colon contract.

And if you don't do those things predictably, it'll be harder for you because you then have to do the work that your colon's not doing.

But the flip side of this, which is great news for people with constipation, is that you can train your colon.

Like your colon can be trained into developing a new pattern, developing those responses to the external cues in your environment that you're going to give it.