How does stress cause the stomach to be upset and make all of those strange noises?
In: Biology
You know how when you’re afraid or stressed you start to sweat, your heart starts beating fast and your become hyper aware of things? This is your body’s flight or fight system amping up the parts of you required to, well… fight or flight. Basically your body thinks it’s about to be in danger and so primes you and gets you ready to do something.
If you’re approached by someone with a knife, your fight or flight response might give you the edge to help you get away. But these days something like public speaking or stress at work can get you worked up and fool your body into thinking you’re actually in physical danger and activate your fight or flight.
So fight or flight will amp you up in some ways, but it will also tone down things that are not deemed ‘essential’ for helping you in a dangerous situation and one of those functions is digestion. What’s the point in continuing to digest lunch when you body needs to haul ass. It’s kind of like a ‘divert all power to the muscles’ situation. So you will get weird sensations as your stomach starts shutting down proper digestion functions, and this is actually what causes the feeling of ‘butterflies’ in your stomach when you suddenly get nervous.
Stress can cause an increase in stomach acid and a decrease in prostaglandins (which protect the stomach lining from the acid). This will cause bubbling and grumbling (similar to when you are hungry and you smell food, so your stomach produces more acid in preparation for digestion). It can also cause pain. If it happens often enough, your stomach acid will begin to eat a hole through the lining of your stomach, and this is called an ulcer. They are common in very stressed people.
Actually, psychological stress could make your stomach more prone to developing peptic ulcer. I’ll elaborate.
Two most common causes of peptic ulcer are Helicobacter pylori infection and excessive use of nonsteroid antiinflammatory drugs. But it is the gastric acid that causes mucosal defects (ulcers), in normal circumstances (without H. pylori and NSAIDs) gastric mucosa has strong defence mechanism against aggresive gastric acid.
So peptic ulcer can happen because of two reasons:
1) there is more agressive factors helping gastric acid (H. pylori, NSAIDs) or
2) defence mechanisms against gastric acid are weakened (like in the case of psychological stress, i’ll explain).
So why stress? During the stress, our sympatethic system is activated and because of it, blood flow is increased in organs that you need to survive (fight or flight mechanism), like your heart and muscles. Blood flow is reduced to organs that you “don’t need” at that moment, like your stomach, intestines, kidneys.
When blood flow is reduced to stomach, stomach lacks nutrients and stuff it needs for it’s defence mechanism to properly work.
Surely, this could not happen in short lasting stress, but it happens in people who are chronically under the stress.
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