Why are we getting gassed up when we are anxious/stressed?
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ELI5: What does “gassed up” mean?
Gassed up?
As in your feeling kinda bloated?
We talking reflux here? That’s associated with stress and anxiety absolutely, but this question is so broad and vague it could be anything.
Are you burping. Or is it the other end? We don’t know what you’re asking yet.
It’s part of your fight/flight/freeze response.
When you’re scared (whether from an actual threat or not, your body doesn’t care), your body prioritises blood flow to the organs that will help you survive the immediate threat. Your muscles, heart, lungs, the glands that make adrenaline, your brain, your senses. But you have a finite amount of blood in total, so in order to give those organs a boost other organs have to make do with minimal blood.
Your gut is not on the list of priorities, so whatever food is in it at the time of stress stops being digested by your body, which causes diarrhea. However, the microbes that live inside your gut don’t have the same constraints, so they go ahead and process that food, creating a lot of gas as a byproduct (through the same fermentation pathways that cause beer and kombucha to be fizzy).
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