DEPRESSION: Brain-Gut Connection (or the bugs in your body)

The Brain in Your Gut

You experience the world from two separate, but integrally interconnected, places in your body. The Central Nervous System (brain, spinal cord, peripheral nerves) and the Enteric Nervous System, (stomach, small intestine, large intestine) and both work in tandem to process information that determines thought, feeling and behavior and both influence one another through the amazing Vagus Nerve.

"Your gut uses the vagus nerve like a walkie-talkie to tell your brain how you’re feeling via electric impulses called “action potentials". Your gut feelings are very real." LINK

You absorb and process information from two nervous systems and when those two systems are synchronized and working together mood and functioning are optimal. But if either of these two systems are dysfunctional, mood and functioning will be disordered, depressed and agitated.

The gut sends messages to the brain, just as the brain sends messages to the gut and when those messages are fear-based and anxiety driven, due to inflammation from an overabundance of bad gut flora, physiological symptoms will arise. Irritable Bowel Syndrome is a gut condition often based on anxiety responses produced by the brain receiving messages from the gut that something is wrong. Panic attacks often take over the gut creating numerous digestive problems and a cramped, contracted feeling in the bowels, resulting in gas, bloating, diarrhea, acid reflux, etc.

The idea that you can simply eat anything you want and still be a happy camper is rapidly losing ground, simply because what you eat has the tendency to disrupt biological systems in your body resulting in numerous types of inflammation and many researchers are now identifying bodily inflammation as the cause of mental illness.

INFLAMMATION: Is Depression an Infectious Disease?

There are an umpteen billion bugs in your gut (microbiome) and many of these bugs travel throughout your body and even into your brain. An overabundance of bad gut flora will overcome the good flora and result in depression, anxiety, agitation and numerous other psychological/mental disruptions.

The Gut Flora: You and Your 100 Trillion Friends