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Comment by skim_milk | Hacker News Reader

That's interesting! My situation is the exact opposite, there's a very tight positive correlation between good mental health and reduced gut symptoms. e.g. my gut problems completely disappear when I'm driving or hiking, my favorite activities. Gut problems re-appear with mental stress, and find me a toilet fast!

Really I couldn't have asked for a better problem to deal with. The correlation between mind/gut health is so instantaneous and powerful, my child brain got Pavlovian-conditioned to deal with mental stress. I couldn't just dissociate from mental pain, I really had to understand and deal with causes of stress in a healthy way, otherwise I would be forced to the floor in the fetal position from all the cramps. Platitudes about always listening to your gut are funny, taken both literally and figuratively that's my life!

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Interesting, you just helped me possibly connect something in my own life.

When I was a kid I used hate using school toilets. And I was a highly anxious kid which would present as stomach butterflies. I dealt with constipation as a kid, which further made me nervous because I'd experience it AT school and be too afraid to sit down a while at school.

Fast forward 20 years, the most stressful time of my life (moving cities, dealing with depression, mom got cancer, ...) and I developed IBS-C. My intestines don't move thing along, need to stimulate with drugs. Unfortunately it hasn't gone away.

Lots of people note IBS diseases getting better or going away after life stress is dealt with and goes away, or is brought on because of psychological stress. Here's one example by an ex-psychotherapist (one of my favorites on YouTube) that, after fixing his stress, went from needing to go to the restroom 15 time a day with blood in his stool to going completely in remission after changing his life and lowering his stress levels - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9brVhmWr2M

Different people with different biology react differently but my bodily reaction to stress happened to be a lot like the one in the video.

Seriously, talk about tight feedback loops. Anxiety feels like somebody hooked it up to guitar amps. Any slight perturbance and alarms go off. I have not been super successful in mentally wrangling it, but there's always hope.

Have you tried any psychotherapies or responded positively to any? Getting exposed to situations that left me vulnerable emotionally ultimately led me to the insights and epiphanies I needed to overcome that vulnerability, kind of like EMDR therapy. E.g. social anxieties disappeared once I forcefully put myself out there and realized none of this matters, I can deal with rejection positively. In the most extreme case, I had a panic attack from an incident with THC that I am certain would have left me dead had I access to a firearm which uncovered thoughts and emotions that I was hiding from myself that I later was forced to confront and eventually heal - learning how apply a "it really do be like that" mentality productively, not too much or too little and only at the right times. Internal Family Systems was also necessary for me to understand what made up the ""real me"" and what was split-off misunderstood defenses from childhood stress, defenses of which actually caused stress and pain all said and done! While painful at first, it eventually blew over and I slowly learned how to more optimally integrate and control stress responses.

I haven't tried any therapy. I'm not sure at what point the benefits outweigh the cost in time and money. I'll look into it further as I've honestly never considered it as a treatment for gastro problems.

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