At the same time, conditioned learning occurs in your limbic brain; the next time you eat pizza and get that familiar burning pain, you're just a little more likely to automatically react with anxiety, anger, frustration, or despair. It's a difficult cycle, one that increases your suffering.
Avoidance Increases Anxiety
In your body's understanding, the twinge of pain in your gut has taken on a whole new meaning. Instead of merely being useful information, this sensation has become mislabeled as a serious danger to be avoided. Yet this false threat has the power to take away simple everyday pleasures like pizza parties.
Tensing and resisting actually make distress worse.
Susan was learning how to go spelunking in a practice cave with narrow, hard-to-navigate crawl spaces. At one point, she got stuck in a particularly narrow space and panicked. “Oh my God, I'm stuck,” she shrieked. “No, you're not,” called back her instructor. “Just relax, Susan. You are never stuck. If you tense up, your body will naturally get bigger and you'll be even more stuck. If you relax, your muscles will go loose and your body will naturally find a way out.” Tensing and resisting actually make distress worse—in spelunking and in your gut! Likewise, learning to relax your gut helps to activate your body's natural healing powers.
Learning to Listen
Let's do a simple exercise to prepare you for listening to your gut. At this stage, don't worry about interpreting symptoms. In this exercise, you are going to observe your gut sensation and not judge or fight it.
The next time you notice a gastric symptom (gas, bloating, constipation, gurgling, churning, and so on), take one slow breath every three seconds. Allow your breathing to become easy, relaxed, and calm. Then mentally scan your gut.
Ask yourself:
When I get this sensation, what is the thought I become aware of?
What is the emotion I begin to feel?
What is the sense I have of myself at this moment?
As you learn how to notice and respond to your gut's messages, you will become less alarmed and upset by your gut's sensations. Instead, you will begin to befriend them. For this self-assessment exercise as well as for activities you'll work on throughout Trust Your Gut, you will need a diary dedicated to tracking your work. The CORE program will help you improve your self-awareness and self-observation—on mental, emotional, and physical levels. In other words, CORE will help you change your relationship with your body and how you react to its signals.
You Can't Change It If You Don't See or Feel It
It's human to avoid anything painful or upsetting. No wonder Prilosec sells so well—it's much easier to shut down gut communication altogether than to listen to it. Millions try to avoid their gut sensations; many others just feel a sense of defeat and hopelessness. Feeling anxiety, frustration, or worry in reaction to a gut symptom need not be judged. If you attach an emotional value to this sensation, don't fight it; just notice it.
These sensations are important forms of communication, and we need to listen. Nobody appreciates it when they don't feel heard or understood. After all, many clinical studies have shown that the act of being listened to is one of the most important aspects of the healing encounter between doctor and patient. So it stands to reason that it's also important that you learn to listen to yourself—to the signals from your own gut. That's not so easy when you've ignored, suppressed, and rejected messages from your gut for a long time.
A Breakdown in (Gut) Communication
The gut's ability to communicate to us has been understood as normal for thousands of years all over the world. References to the importance of the feelings of the gut can be found in the Bible as well as in traditional Japanese medicine. But when did gut communication break down in the Western tradition and become seen as symptoms—something abnormal? When did we start to shut down or dismiss these crucial internal lines of communication?
To answer, we need to go all the way back to ancient Greece during the days of Plato and Aristotle. These early philosophers were part of a movement to use reason to rule our life instead of being guided by our emotions or superstitions. Plato placed such a high value on reason and mathematics that he considered them to be the highest forms of knowledge, closer to the mind of God and the higher unchanging realm of pure ideas. Emotions yielded insignificant information about the ever-changing world of everyday existence. Aristotle, one of the founders of Western science, agreed on the value of reason over emotion. Even lower in esteem than emotions was the body, which was considered a crude vessel that imprisoned the soul.
By the 1600s, many influential philosophers, most famous among them René Descartes, argued that the mind and the body were separate substances, dual realities. The mind was eternal and invisible—known only by our own consciousness. Our body was considered to be merely a complex machine. And so began medicine's distrust of the body's knowledge and the body's wisdom.
These philosophers did not have the advantage of our 21st-century technology like functional MRI scanners that allow us to actually look into the brain and literally see the chemical reactions taking place. Scientists can now observe which genes get turned on and turned off by emotional response. Human beings can now measure scientifically the interactive effects of mind and body upon each other. However, hundreds of years ago, the mind was viewed as nonmaterial, considered only within the domain of religion. Somehow the mind was less real because you can't see it or put it in a wheelbarrow. Not so with the body. This was viewed as tangible, material, real—within the domain of science. The mind was split off from the body. Though this happened hundreds of years ago, these ideas shape how we view health, illness, and our relationship with our body today.
The Industrial Revolution disconnected us even further from our natural ability to communicate with our body. New inventions allowed us to predict, measure, and control aspects of our life that were previously impossible. Manufactured chemicals were produced on a mass scale for many uses. Germ theory and vaccinations helped contain life-threatening diseases like smallpox. Scientists looked at the body as if it were only a machine, an orientation that led to many scientific advances, such as organ transplants.
This great medical progress was a double-edged sword. Although we learned that it was possible to treat and eliminate many diseases, we increasingly came to believe that painful or unusual bodily sensations should be eradicated. Accepting and listening to sensations seemed pointless. Likewise, we rejected any connection between mind and body. How could a nonmaterial thing like the mind affect a material thing like the body? Such a crazy idea violates the laws of physics. After all, no matter how hard we think, pray, or believe, we cannot get a frozen car to start on a winter morning. Mind has no effect on machines.
Ignoring Feelings
Machines have no feelings, but people do. We can be happy, sad, frustrated, joyful, and more. We can experience emotional pain and emotional pleasure. Because we are geared toward pleasure, we developed psychological defenses against emotional pain. This is a normal way to cope with the difficulties of daily life. As children, we learn these natural ways of forgetting, avoiding, denying, or minimizing painful or difficult feelings. Nevertheless, we actually do experience our emotions in our body: tightening in the forehead, tensing the jaw, heaviness in the chest, rumbling in the stomach. So when we avoid feeling something emotionally uncomfortable, we also have to fight the sensations in our body—wherever we feel emotions. That's why the word feeling refers to emotions as well as to physical sensations. An ignored emotion that manifests as physical discomfort is like a secret kept from the mind but not from the body.
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