When Stress Isn’t Just a Feeling — It’s Fuel for IBS
April is not only IBS Awareness Month — it’s also Stress Awareness Month.
‘Stress’ is used to describe a feeling state triggered by activation of the autonomic nervous system (ANS), the part of the nervous system that gets you moving. You feel it in response to everyday demands, challenges, exciting opportunities, and perceived threats.
⚡ If you’re living with IBS, it’s likely the condition is being fuelled — and maintained — by threat stress.
🚨 Threat stressors are perceived dangers to your physical and or emotional wellbeing. They include demands your nervous system doesn’t believe it can meet. Threat stressors activate the survival (stress) response - part of the ANS designed to keep you safe. But when that response becomes chronic, it keeps your gut stuck in survival mode: sensitive, unpredictable, and uncomfortable.
Here’s how that happens⬇️
· Your body is wired to protect you. It’s called your survival network.
· When you're exposed to a perceived threat (real or imagined), your survival network releases hormones like adrenaline and cortisol.
· These divert blood and energy away from your digestive system to your muscles — prepping you to fight or flee.
Great if you need to outrun a lion. Not so great if you’re just trying to digest your dinner.
If that threat goes on too long?
You’re left in a state of chronic stress with a dysregulated gut and a nervous system that stays on high alert.
🔁 And the IBS symptoms themselves?
They become new threat stressors — triggering more discomfort, more vigilance, more dysregulation.
This is the stress–symptom–stress loop.
It’s not just in your body — and it’s certainly not just in your head.
It’s a brain–body response that starts with a perceived threat, that
activates your survival network, and keeps your gut stuck in survival mode.
The good news?
🧠 The stress–symptom–stress loop can be broken.
🧠 Your nervous system can be reset.
Relief is possible — through a mind/body approach that addresses both the cause and the symptoms.
👉 This is exactly what we do inside my Freedom from IBS program.
🌿 This Stress Awareness Month, don’t just “manage” stress.
Get curious about it.
That’s where real change begins.