Something changed in my gut. I hadn't changed a thing.
Not my diet. Not my routine. Nothing obvious.
But my digestion was off. Unpredictable. Uncomfortable.
I've been a practitioner for thirty years, I know the body well.
What’s really going on here?
The answer wasn't only in my stomach.
Our gut has a direct line to stress.
Most people think of digestion as a plumbing problem. Food goes in, gets processed, comes out. If something goes wrong, we look at the food.
But the gut doesn't work like plumbing. It works like a conversation.
A constant, real time conversation between your gut and your brain. And when life gets heavy, when stress accumulates, when sleep suffers, when you're carrying more than you let yourself acknowledge, that conversation changes.
Your gut feels it first. Often before your mind does.
In Chinese medicine we have said this for thousands of years. The Stomach and Spleen sit at the centre of everything. They are not simply digestive organs. They are the root of how we take in, transform and distribute nourishment, physically and emotionally. When that centre is disturbed, the whole system feels it.
There is a reflex in your body most people have never heard of.
It's called the gastrocolic reflex.
When food or drink arrives in your stomach, your body sends a signal to your large intestine saying: something's coming, make room. The colon contracts. Things move along.
This is normal. This is healthy.
But in a stressed nervous system, this reflex becomes hair trigger. The signal fires too fast, too hard. You eat something, maybe something cold, maybe something fatty, maybe just your morning coffee, and you urgently need a bathroom. Not because of what you ate. Because your nervous system is wound up.
The food is just the spark. The nervous system is the fire.
Cold is particularly interesting here. In Chinese medicine cold contracts and stops movement, or paradoxically can cause sudden urgent movement downward when the system is already dysregulated. This is not metaphor. It is a description of something physiologically real that Western medicine is only recently mapping in detail.
And it can go the other way too.
In some people the same stress response slows everything down. The reflex becomes sluggish. Things stop moving. Bloating, heaviness, constipation, not because of the food, but because a body in survival mode diverts energy away from digestion entirely.
Fight or flight doesn't need to digest. It needs to run.
So it shuts digestion down.
In Chinese medicine we call this rebellious qi or sinking qi. The normal direction of flow is interrupted. What should descend doesn't. What should transform, sits. The middle jiao, the centre of the body's processing capacity, loses its rhythm.
This is why two people can eat the exact same meal and have completely different experiences.
Same food. Different nervous systems.
One person digests easily. The other bloats, cramps, rushes to the bathroom.
The difference is not the food. It is the state the body is in when the food arrives.
And yet. Food still matters. Just not in the way most people think.
This is where it gets interesting.
The question is not only what you are eating. It is how the food came to be in front of you.
There is a real difference between grabbing takeaway on the way home, eating it in the car or in front of a screen, and standing in your kitchen, choosing ingredients, taking time to prepare something warm and real.
That difference is not just nutritional. It is neurological.
The act of cooking, the attention it requires, the slowing down it demands, the sensory engagement of smell, warmth, texture, is itself a signal to the nervous system that you are safe. That there is no emergency. That you can rest, digest, receive.
This is not a small thing. This is medicine.
When we are in survival mode we reach for convenience. We eat fast, standing up, distracted, between tasks. The body registers this. It stays in a state of low level alertness. Digestion is compromised not because the food is bad but because the nervous system never received the signal that it was time to rest and receive.
Reclaiming the kitchen, even once or twice a week, even simply, is a direct act on the nervous system. The attention you bring to choosing your produce, preparing it with warmth and intention, sitting to eat it, these are not indulgences. They are the conditions under which the body can actually do what it is designed to do.
In Chinese medicine the act of nourishing oneself is considered as important as the nourishment itself. How we receive is as significant as what we receive.
So what changed for me?
I hadn't changed my diet. But life had been full. The kind of full that accumulates quietly, professional load, the weight of holding other people's pain, interrupted sleep, less time in nature, less stillness. Less time standing in my kitchen with intention.
My nervous system had shifted. And my gut was telling me.
That's not a gut problem. That's information.
What have you noticed?
Has your digestion shifted without anything obvious changing in your diet?
Have you noticed a connection between a stressful period and what happens in your gut?
Have you been looking at the food when perhaps the real conversation has been happening somewhere else entirely?
And when did you last cook something slowly, with your full attention, just for yourself?
Sit with that.
The next piece.
In the next blog I want to introduce you to something remarkable, the network of 500 million neurons living in your gut wall, making decisions without asking your brain. And the nerve that connects it all, travelling from your brainstem to your intestines, carrying far more information upward than it ever sends down.
Your gut is not waiting for instructions from your brain.
In many ways, it's running the show.
If something here speaks to you, you can work with me in person at my clinic in Preston and at The Yin Palace gatherings in Melbourne, or online through my qigong community and Rage Rising. The Three Treasures Pathway is offered both in person and online.
With Love,
Anny 🌹
