April is both the awareness month for Stress and IBS, so as your resident massage & colonic hydrotherapy practitioner, you can bet this one slaps hard for me.
By now I think we are all pretty well acquainted with stress. A build up of challenging feelings relating to relationships, work, the heaviness of global events accumulate inside the internal stress bucket (or window of tolerance) and sometimes spill over. That spill over can manifest as a racing heart, an exhausted but busy brain, tearfulness, aches and pains – particularly in the shoulders, the hips, or the jaw (hands up TMJ girlies) and in unpredictable or chaotic bowels (perhaps including abdominal pain, bloating, constipation and/or diarrhoea).
That last one – the unpredictable bowels – those are all symptoms of Irritable Bowel Syndrome aka IBS (not to be confused with Inflammatory Bowel Disease, that’s for another day.)
For folks who are stuck in chronic states of stress, IBS can develop and become their new normal. That was me: years of stress living in my body became IBS, an embarrassing and awkward set of symptoms that limited my daily choices and enjoyment of my life as a young person.
Enough to be a serious pain in the (sorry) but not enough to get me digging deep in my pockets for a solution when every NHS test, ultrasound and colonoscopy came back ‘normal’. As far as I knew, there was no treatment for IBS except to get on with it.
Nobody explained the stress cycle loop to me once – best illustrated IMO by Nerva below, and expanded in this blog:
It was through learning to regulate my system that made things bearable, and later thanks to the knowledge I gained studying Colonic Hydrotherapy I now live a reasonably normal – albeit highly sensitive – life.
Today I love welcoming in folks who have struggled with IBS. Most of the time they come to me as the end of the road, and it’s a privilege to explain, sometimes for the first time, that in IBS there isn’t an issue with your bowel so much as your nervous system and being stuck in fight or flight.
Colonic Hydrotherapy can address one part of the puzzle – the symptom (e.g. bloating/constipation) – but there’s still work to do with the whole person, which can look like addressing sleep, relaxation, movement. As somebody working in the complementary therapies space I also love to recommend treatments like massage, acupuncture or reflexology, which naturally encourage the part of the nervous system to dial down fight/flight and activate rest and digest.
If you’re not sure which of these treatments is best suited to you, book in a free no obligations call with me here.
We begin with a consultation, finding where you’re at and seeding the basis of your treatment plan.
Book here or pop me a reply if you’re curious but you have questions.
Share this blog with a friend who has IBS!
