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.
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