At a Glance
This article explains how emotional stress directly influences digestion through the gut–brain axis and nervous system. It outlines how fight-or-flight and shutdown states disrupt normal gut function, why unprocessed emotions often appear as gastrointestinal symptoms, and how schema, compassion-focused, and polyvagal therapies help restore physiological safety and ease in the body.
Your Gut Tells Your Psychological Story
Have you ever felt your stomach tighten before your thoughts have caught up? Perhaps you first feel the knot in your stomach, the nausea, the loss of appetite, or the waves of bloating before you even realise you are overwhelmed. During periods of stress, anxiety, grief, uncertainty, or emotional strain, the gut is often the first place to react. It is where the body speaks when the mind is not yet ready to form words. It can feel worrying when digestion changes suddenly, especially if nothing about your diet has shifted. Many people fear that something is physically wrong. But in many cases, the gut is not malfunctioning. It is responding. The gut-brain connection, also known as the gut-brain axis, is a complex and evolutionary system. We see instances of this in our everyday lives, from emotional eating when sad or social anxiety and stress affecting your stomach, often leading to IBS.
I am Dr Sonney Gullu-McPhee, an HCPC & BPS Registered Chartered Clinical Psychologist and ISST Certified Advanced Schema Therapist with postdoctoral training in DBT, Compassion-Focused Therapy, EMDR and somatic approaches to stress and trauma. I work with individuals whose emotional experiences affect their physical health, particularly through the gut.
If you recognise yourself in this experience and want support in regulating your nervous system, processing emotional stress and easing the long-term effects of stress on the digestive system, you are welcome to contact me to book a session.
In this blog, I explain why the gut becomes more sensitive when you’re stressed, the gut-brain connection and how therapy can help restore a felt sense of safety and ease within the body.
The Gut–Brain Connection
Your gut and your brain communicate constantly through the vagus nerve, a major branch of the parasympathetic nervous system. Importantly, a majority of the signals along this pathway travel from the body to the brain. In other words, the body informs the emotional experience more than the mind controls it.
This understanding comes from Polyvagal Theory, developed by neuroscientist Dr Stephen Porges. His research showed that the nervous system shifts depending on whether the body senses safety, stress, or overwhelm. Crucially, “threat” is not only physical. Emotional experiences such as feeling unsupported, misunderstood, criticised, overwhelmed or alone can activate the same physiological responses as real danger. The gut reacts immediately because digestion depends on the nervous system being in a state of safety.
Recent research from Stanford and UCLA (2024–2025) also shows that the gut microbiome plays a central role in nervous system reactivity. When the microbiome is disrupted by antibiotics, prolonged stress, sleep disturbance or unresolved emotional strain, the gut becomes more sensitive, and stress responses become stronger.
Your gut is not simply digesting your food. It is responding to your life. The knot in stomach feeling is not imagined but a real by-product of stress affecting stomach and gut health.
How Stress Impacts Digestion
When you feel emotionally grounded, supported and connected, the nervous system rests in a regulated state. Digestion flows with ease because the body is not preparing to defend itself. Blood flows to the intestines, the muscles in the gut contract in an organised rhythm, and nutrients are absorbed efficiently. This is the physiology of safety.
However, when something feels emotionally difficult, whether that is a demanding week, unresolved conflict, grief, loneliness, self-pressure, or simply life feeling heavier than your capacity, the nervous system can shift into a fight-or-flight state. The breath shortens. Muscles brace. The body prepares to protect itself. Digestion is deprioritised because survival takes precedence. The gut may speed up, tighten or become inflamed. The long-term effects of stress on the digestive system can lead to symptoms like bloating, reflux, urgency, or nausea.
If the emotional and psychological overwhelm continues for too long, the nervous system may shift into shutdown, a state of withdrawal and conservation. This can feel like emotional numbness, exhaustion or a sense of flatness. In the gut, this often appears as constipation, slowed digestion or heaviness. This is not a weakness. It is protection. The gut-brain connection is constantly working and responding to protect you from real or perceived danger.
Why Emotional Stress Shows Up in the Gut
The gut contains its own neural network, known as the enteric nervous system, which processes emotion at a faster and more primal level than conscious thought. This means the gut often reacts before you know how you feel.
If you grew up in environments where emotional expression was not supported, where vulnerability felt risky, or where you learned to stay strong and composed no matter how you felt internally, your nervous system may have learned to internalise emotional pain. When emotion cannot be expressed, shared or held by another, the body holds it. The gut becomes the place where unspoken experiences live, and you may begin to suffer from long-term effects of stress on the digestive system, leading to conditions such as IBS.
The gut responds when something in you feels alone. It responds when something has gone unseen for too long.
It speaks in sensation because it does not have language. It says, in its own way: something inside me needs care.
The Polyvagal Perspective – Returning the Body to Safety
The knot in your stomach feeling you experience will not calm down through logic. It calms when the nervous system experiences safety. Not imagined safety, not forced calm, but the genuine physiological sense that there is nothing to defend against in this moment.
Safety is communicated to the nervous system through breath, posture, tone, warmth and presence. A slower exhale changes vagal tone. Warmth softens the muscles of the digestive tract. Eating without rushing allows the body to move out of defence. Being with someone who feels emotionally steady signals to the nervous system that it is not alone.
Regulation does not happen through effort. It happens through being met.
How Therapy Helps the Body Feel Safe Again (Schema, Compassion and Polyvagal Integration)
When someone comes to therapy with long-term effects of stress on the digestive system, we are not simply trying to eliminate discomfort. We are understanding how the nervous system learned to protect you.
In Schema Therapy, we explore the patterns and emotional themes that developed in early or repeated relational experiences, such as over-responsibility, fear of burdening others, perfectionism, emotional invisibility, or appearing strong while suffering silently. These patterns are not flaws; they are adaptations. In therapy, we help the body slowly learn that it no longer needs to brace in the same way.
Compassion-Focused Therapy helps you develop a steadier internal voice. One that reduces self-criticism and fosters emotional warmth. This is not just psychological. When the tone of your inner world becomes kinder, the nervous system shifts out of threat physiology, and the knot in stomach feeling resolves.
Polyvagal-informed and somatic work supports the body directly. We help your nervous system learn how safety feels, not just how it is talked about. Breath, imagery, relational attunement and gentle interoceptive awareness allow the gut to release its defensive holding patterns.
Together, these approaches help your body trust that it no longer needs to protect you through tension, urgency or withdrawal. This is where digestion and emotional life begin to flow again.
A Practice to Support Digestion and Emotional Safety
Want to manage the gut-brain connection and avoid the long-term effects of stress on the digestive system? Before your next meal, pause. Sit down. Place your hand gently on your belly or your chest. Breathe slowly, allowing the exhale to last slightly longer than the inhale. Notice whether your shoulders soften. Notice whether your stomach loosens even just a little.
This is not a technique. It is a message to the nervous system: You are not in danger right now.
Repeated over time, the body learns.
If Your Gut Has Been Struggling for a Long Time, Seek Therapy
Stress affecting the stomach does not mean you are weak or failing. It means your body is holding feelings and histories that have not yet had room to be processed. Your gut is not the problem. It is the messenger. And it has been protecting you.
During my therapy for stress, anxiety, trauma, grief, and gut-body healing, I support adults experiencing stress-related gut symptoms, anxiety held in the body, trauma responses, emotional overwhelm, grief, burnout and chronic patterns of coping alone. This will help to recalibrate the gut-brain connection.
Our work is gentle, relational, and paced to your system, allowing us to address the long-term effects of stress on the digestive system. We help your body regain a sense of safety, so your gut no longer must speak so loudly.
If this resonates, you are welcome to reach out for a free 15-minute consultation to see if we are a good fit.
I offer in-person therapy in Petersfield, Hampshire, and online therapy across the UK.