effort to restore your faith in your gut, we are harking back to the wisdom of the ages.
| CENTERED | UNCENTERED |
| Relaxed | Anxious |
| Effortless | Struggle |
| Focused | Scattered |
| Functional | Dysfunctional |
| Aware | Confused |
| In control | Out of control |
The Breath Connection
Everyone knows that the gut is the center for the ingestion and digestion of the essentials for life—food and water. But the gut is also the center of our breathing apparatus. Sure, the lungs are what fill with air, but the abdominal muscles are what provide the strength of the bellows that keep us alive. If you watch a baby breathe, you will see her belly expand and deflate. That is natural deep breathing. Asian medicine acknowledged this truth by naming the energy that flows from the center after the breath. Chi, ki, and prana all literally mean “breath.” Actors and singers around the world are taught to breathe from the gut. They know that you get more air that way and need to pause for a breath less often. Breathing from the chest is a human invention that takes in less air. Gut breathing is deep breathing, while chest breathing is shallow.
Breathing is one of the few bodily processes that run automatically when we are not paying attention, but yet we can take control of our breath when we want to. This is useful because our rate of breathing correlates directly to our state of mind. Deep breathing makes us calmer and more centered, but when we are uncentered, confused, and anxious, our breath rate and pulse both become more rapid. This breath connection is evident in the case of Carol.
Carol Gets Calmed
Carol was a senior executive who suffered from a long list of medical conditions—constipation, bloating, fatigue, poor concentration, and much more. She sought the advice of many doctors but to no avail. She felt hopeless, and she blamed herself for her condition. “I am a mess. My gut is a mess,” she said. “After I eat, I bloat so much, I look six months pregnant. I am so sensitive to everything—if I could just get calmed!”
She was finally referred to Dr. Plotnikoff, who had Carol keep track of her diet and symptoms for two weeks. When she began to read her notes to him, she was so scattered and nonlinear that her efforts to please even sent Dr. Plotnikoff off center. He was too distracted by her frenzied effort to hear what she was trying to say.
After ten minutes, he realized Carol was so agitated that he needed to interrupt. He sensed that she needed to focus. He moved on to the physical exam and told her he wanted to check her pulse. “I took her right hand in mine and placed my left hand over her right wrist to feel her pulse. I noticed that she closed her eyes. I felt her pulse for one minute. Her hand was not cool or damp, as I had expected. Her pulse was a very reasonable seventy-four beats per minute. I switched to her left hand for another thirty seconds.”
The energy in the room changed significantly with that simple act of checking her pulse for a minute and a half. They were both able to center. He asked what she was feeling, and Carol reported a sense of calmness and hope, of actually feeling better. He then led her in some breathing exercises focused on breathing into her center. She left the clinic having discovered one approach for centering and grounding herself.
The Emerging Science of the Gut: The Intestinal Brain
Western science has increasingly come to consider the gut as much more than just a digestive tract. In the last twenty years, scientists have researched the neuralhormonal complexity of the gut, and more and more are now referring to it as the second brain. The intestinal nervous system (or enteric nervous system) is composed of a cluster of more than 100 million neurons. It has receptors for more than thirty neurotransmitters—the hormones such as epinephrine, serotonin, and dopamine that allow a neuron to send a message to another neuron. In fact, more than 90 percent of the serotonin receptors and more than 50 percent of the dopamine receptors are in the gut.
Of course, the brain in our head is vastly more complex and has a thousand times more neurons than the intestinal brain. However, like the main brain, the intestinal brain receives, organizes, and transmits information. That means that both brains allow rapid and coordinated responses to changes in the environment, and both brains can regulate our internal organs.
The intestinal brain has two main connections to the main brain: a calming route along the vagus nerve and an energizing route along the spinal cord. Both connections operate automatically as part of the autonomic nervous system. When your body/mind is balanced and centered, the calming and energizing parts of your nervous system are likewise balanced. They are complementary. But when these two systems are out of balance, the result is often major intestinal problems like pain, bloating, diarrhea, or constipation.
When your body/mind is balanced and centered, the calming and energizing parts of your nervous system are likewise balanced.
For chronic intestinal problems in which all the life-threatening diseases and maladies have been ruled out, one major cause of dysfunction is that your two brains have somehow gotten their wires crossed. They have become conditioned—just like Pavlov's dog—to react to a threat when no threat exists. That's why it can't be fixed by a pill. The problem is not a disease but rather something closer to a computer virus. It is a system gone awry. The problem is not in your head; it's in your wiring.
Imagine a feedback loop that is out of control—such as a sound system in an auditorium when someone talks into the microphone and you hear a squealing feedback sound. The problem in this loop is that the microphone is oversensitive and picks up not just the normal voice but also the amplified voice over a loudspeaker. Then the microphone sends the amplified voice back through the amplifier and out the speaker again, only louder and more shrill than ever. In a fraction of a second, the shrieking sound gets so loud, it hurts your ears. The speaker has to stop because nobody can hear her anyway, and then you have to turn down the microphone or move the loudspeaker farther away to interrupt the feedback loop.
In the case of an attack of digestive distress, instead of an oversensitive microphone you have a hypersensitized amygdala—a primitive part of the main brain that decides whether a threat exists. It can take a small, harmless sensation and encode it as threatening. This sends a danger signal to the gut, which reacts by tensing up and causing distress. The intestinal brain sends these amplified distress signals back to the amygdala, which totally freaks out and sends more emergency signals back to the gut, so then the gut goes bonkers as well. The feedback loop has gone berserk and keeps accelerating, but instead of a terrible noise in an auditorium, you get awful pain and distress in your gut.
Sally Sees a Tums
Sally was a young professional who suffered from IBS and had recently gone through a painful diarrhea and constipation cycle. She was on her way to a date and stopped in a convenience store for lip gloss. While there, she saw a shelf of Tums and other digestive remedies. Almost instantly she felt a minor rumble in her abdomen. What just happened?
The main brain and the intestinal brain just
