Pain hurts - physical or emotional, and either can increase gut dysbiosis.

Our calm, is also our gut microbiome's calm. Our stormy weather is also their storm. Is peace within our gut worth working on the peace within our mind? or vice-versa?

I have been working on a course about special diets for autism and other people or children with special needs. It has been very eye opening after my initial impression of “Omg…how can anyone eat like that?” Having lived through my own severe colitis/diarrhea symptoms, I can understand why someone would embrace a restrictive diet that is relieving their gut symptoms. When you have a migraine or severe gut pain (or back spasms) then nothing else is really going to work well - it is hard to concentrate because any little movement can set off the pain again. If something seems to stop the pain, then the person may be very motivated to continue with a diet restriction or some other change in habits.

• Migraine → lay down in a dark room with a cool compress on the forehead/and/or over the eyes. Get your lower legs above your heart if possible. And maybe the stomach nausea will go away too if you lay still enough.

• Gut pain/colitis → lay down. In darkness or an eyecover may help but laying down is the key point. Stop moving and let your body focus on digesting the food that isn’t settling well. Give it a half hour and maybe some of the food will be digested and absorbed instead of rocketing straight through — and taking along with it a lot of your precious electrolyte minerals.

• Back spasms → stop laying down or sitting over a computer so much and try to do some flexibility stretching for your thighs and gentle sit-ups to help strengthen your abdominal muscles. We spend too much of modern life hunched over forward and that leads to an imbalance in muscle strength. We need to strengthen the arching backward muscles more and the sit up straight and tall ab muscles instead of continuing to slouch forward in the chair. Arm and shoulder exercises that stretch our shoulders backward may help - pretend flying perhaps or leaning forward in a doorway while your arms are holding the door frame.

  • 3 Simple Exercises for Stiff Back (Youtube)

Squats, deep knee bends, are healthy and used to be the normal way to sit outside - “hunker down”, no chair needed. This position is also how we would normally have a bowel movement. Improving squatting muscle strength may also help with improving bowel regularity. How Squats Heal the Body (Youtube)

Pain clearly hurts when it is a headache, backache, gut ache, or broken toe, but somehow, for me, the broken toe is more manageable. It is more external, easier to isolate from motion than a bad migraine, backache or severe gut pain. (*My broken toe pain is better now but still a little inflamed, the knee scab is healed and my arm also back to normal.)

Emotional pain can seem less like “pain”, but to the body, when we watch someone else go through trauma we may be experiencing some increased inflammation and ‘trauma’ too - sympathy or empathy pain.

If we are holding onto emotional pain from childhood it can add chronic tension to some area of the body that might have started in a childhood situation or maybe a later accident or some other traumatic event that left us feeling bad about our reaction, or with residual fear around certain situations or types of people. We may also be left feeling bad about ourselves. Many people with early childhood trauma report feelings of not being good enough, not deserving love, comfort, or even deserving pain. Then as an adult, those unspoken beliefs may leave us seeking out bad situations and responding poorly to congratulations or friendly gestures.

Health bonus → Reducing inflammation in our body can help the feelings of self-worth in our brain.

The following is an excerpt from a mental health training on working with feelings of being ‘not good enough’ — Working With Core Beliefs of 'Never Good Enough' (nicabm.com)

The big picture goal - we need to reach a point of internal acceptance and validation as being enough, valuable without needing to have done something external to show that. Other people will always vary in whether they approve of you or your work - even if you did a fabulous job, someone probably will quibble, or not like it because you did it - but so what? Our own internal validation is something early childhood ideally promotes instead of inhibiting and replacing with constant external disapproval, judgement, extreme expectations of perfection, or other issues like a codependent or mentally ill or neglectful parent who is expecting their child to parent themselves and their unwell parent too.

The excerpt brings in the point that our self-esteem and self-worth can be negatively affected by brain inflammation, not just early childhood issues. AND that reducing the brain inflammation through exercise improved the brain connectivity involved in better self-esteem and self-value. The study looked at exercise, but Dr. Kelly McGonigal points out that improving nutrition or sleep would likely also help - and I would add that, yes, working on the mental self-talk and stored body tension would also be reducing inflammation within the brain and body. Eating pomegranate peel would probably help too. ;-)

“Dr. McGonigal: I wanted to use this an opportunity to share some research that most people probably haven’t heard of yet. It's a relatively new insight about self-esteem and a sense of worthiness in the brain and how it's related to physical health. […]

And I wanted to first just share what the neuroscience insight is, which is about, if you're looking in the brain for basic self-esteem, self-worth, what do you see in adolescents and adults?

What you see is connectivity, increased connectivity, between parts of the center of the brain — the rewards system. […]

What you see is increased functional and structural connectivity between the part of your brain that processes reward and positive motivation and the part of your brain that process your sense of self, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. And you see it not just in terms of these parts of the brain talking to each other more but an increased density of the white matter that is along the tracks of the neurons talking to one another.

So, this seems really important to feel like who you are is good enough. You need the part of your brain that experiences hope and positive motivation to be strongly connected to the part of the brain that thinks about yourself. And you can see changes in self-esteem reflected in changes in this connectivity also. […]

By the way, I should say narcissists show reduced connectivity. One of the new theories of narcissism is that the reward system isn't strongly connected enough to the sense of self. And narcissists are desperately trying to get, like, a hit of dopamine by trying to get people to acknowledge their worthiness. So, I thought that's real interesting too.

Anyway, so what does this have to do with physical activity?

[*Holding tension chronically within the body due to negative feelings was the topic of this video.]

Well, one of the things that seems to really damage this connection is inflammation, systemic inflammation. And this has been shown in both animals and in humans. And if you reduce inflammation through physical exercise, you can strengthen this connection. We're really talking about exercise, not necessarily a posture of the body, but any sort of exercise, which has been demonstrated to reduce systemic inflammation — walking, tai chi, yoga, running, swimming, dancing. Basically, all of it has that effect on the body.

I think this research is so interesting and promising because it further points to the necessity of self-care for experiencing self-esteem because one could also make an argument for nutrition, not just physical activity — anything that's going to reduce inflammation. One could make an argument for sleep, which is probably going to reduce inflammation. And it's fascinating that you can build in a sense of self-worth in the structure of your brain by taking better care of your body. So, that's what I wanted to share.”

Working With Core Beliefs of 'Never Good Enough', Module: A Bottom-Up Approach to Working With Implicit Memories of Inadequacy, (Copyright by nicabm.com)

Stress of any kind - emotional or physical - can be adding to gut dysbiosis. A calmer mind and gentler self-talk will be more pleasant for our microbial community too.

Song lyric that popped in my head: “We built this city on Rock-n-Roll” (Jefferson Starship, Youtube) - on what do we want to build our internal community?

We build a lot of ourselves on early childhood experiences.

According to Aaron Doughty’s look at the research, (Youtube), the same traumatic upbringing can make one child an empath and another a narcissist. The empath is more tuned into other’s feelings so they can know what they might need to do in turn in order to better survive the situation. Another child might turn off feelings and input from their surroundings and be more dissociated or numb and they may later be more narcissistic - turned inward but towards a false self-image that might be very fragile. Neither child as an adult may be very good at self-care or self-worth — both approaches to life are tuned into approval or input from the outer world, rather than feeling safe and accepted and ‘at-home’ within their own body and feelings.

Growth occurs when we can see that our own approval is the one we need to seek. We will feel better about ourselves when we do work that we value and when we meet our own goals. If we aren’t doing very well at meeting our own goals, then it is also reasonable to want to do better - but for our own reasons, not for boss’s or mother’s approval or for a gold sticker on the teacher’s (someone else’s) sticker chart. We need to make our own metaphorical or literal sticker chart and learn to value our own wins, small and large.

Feeling not good enough can leave someone feeling not good even during huge wins - if some external being isn’t being effusively congratulatory enough. It can be easy with a negative mindset to never feel that any level of congratulations is ‘enough’ because the lingering childhood feeling of not being enough is still there, and it can set up a sabotage of the congratulator - internal thoughts: “That person must not be very good because they think I am okay and since I know I am not good enough, they must be no good” → circular false logic sabotaging the relationship or project.

Jumping out of a circular rut can be difficult, having other people share how they did it can help show us the way.

• Empaths are Stuck in Childhood (The Cure), Aaron Doughty, (Youtube).

People who are constantly tense or worried about life are very likely also going to have an unhealthy microbiome and poor digestion leading to GI discomfort and likely nutrient deficiencies which over time might increase mental illness symptoms.

Improving health does need a ‘bottom-up’ approach — physical, working with muscular patterns, and actively experiencing life; and a ‘top-down’ approach — cognitive, working with self-talk patterns, and educationally learning more about life norms that we had missed out on as children.

Feelings of not being good enough are in our instinctual wiring - being more dominant in social animal groups helps with survival and having offspring. Being lower in hierarchy might mean less food and less chance of mating. A sense of fairness is also hard wired in most animal species and human cultures. Improving our skills ideally should lead to better survival.

The older view of “equal opportunity” was about allowing an equal right to try - and equal right to compete for the job or school, based on merit, on realistically being good enough to do the work. Having been awarded a trophy for participation or attendance doesn’t really solve the needs or fool anyone later in life who needs a skilled person to do a real task. Children and adults do need challenges, just not too hard, achievable challenges that require some effort and stretching of current skills.

Social comparison though can become unrealistic. Is having the same shoes or fingernail polish really going to improve your life? Is hanging around people who care intensely about that sort of thing really going to improve your life? Or be the life that you want to be living? What sort of life do you want to be living? Have you ever asked yourself that or have social expectations led you into a patterned life that isn’t really challenging you or giving you a sense of joy or purpose?

Move away from seeking to impress and instead seek to make a connection - on that job interview or first date. ~ Ron Siegel, PsyD

The idea of ‘Inner compassion’ rather than ‘self compassion’ may be easier for some people to accept. ~ Ron Siegel, PsyD

Just because we heard negative things, doesn’t mean we have to keep repeating them to ourselves for the rest of our lives. If you wouldn’t continuously taunt someone else about their foibles, then why do it to yourself? . . . old habits die hard everywhere not just in New York City.

Substituting new things, practicing new things is the easiest way to stop doing old things. Will power is a myth or a not realistic strategy. Give the brain new habits to build and the old habit pathways will slowly be dismantled out of disuse. Our body protects and repairs what is being used, so stop using negative habit pathways and start using positive habit pathways and with a little time and good nutrition the body can build the new routes and unbuild and reuse the old routes.

The horse knows the way home - to find the stable with food. Driving home without thinking about it is learned memory pathways - those can be unlearned and rebuilt with practice of a new pattern. Adequate cannabinoids are needed for the brain restructuring though. Nutrients matter, so do thoughts, so do feelings, so do stored muscle memories, and so does our microbiome community in addition to our family and friends.

Disclaimer: This information is being provided for educational purposes within the guidelines of Fair Use and is not intended to provide individual health care guidance.