Dr. Will Bulsiewicz

You can feel your muscles shaking because you could like literally go and jump to the top of a tree.

That is the activation of your sympathetic nervous system.

That is your adrenaline, right?

That is your react and respond to a threat.

And that is the activation of your brain.

Ultimately, there are manifestations that occur in the gut because when we do all these things in the context of the sympathetic nervous system, we ultimately have to sacrifice our gut in the process.

This is why when you are stressed, you get bloated, you feel a little bit queasy, or you may get cramps.

They can come from mild all the way up to big,

horrible waves of cramps that rip through you.

Stress can do that to us.

That is through the activation of the sympathetic nervous system.

And if we were to zoom in on what's occurring, I promised you that the physiology is there to back it up.

What's happening is the brain releases a hormone called corticotropin-releasing hormone, which sets off an entire cascade throughout your body.

That is your stress response.

And the stress response was meant to keep you alive if you were to come under attack by a foreign tribe or by an animal or whatever it might be.

The stress response was there to give you a quick response, that burst of energy that you need to save your life and protect yourself.

But unfortunately, it negatively affects our gut.

And we live in a world where we are in sympathetic overdrive with excessive stress.

And so ultimately, that, which can, by the way, include trauma, that trauma to me is like, this is just going nonstop 24 hours a day.

Ultimately, those things, we need to balance them out.