Has Antacids, Senna or Imodium become your regular go to?

We are all a bit shy about talking about our bowels. Bowel noises and flatulence have us colouring up and running for the toilets. The thing is, you eat, then it’s got to be processed and waste has to go somewhere. And cortisol can do a real number on this amazing system, not only disrupting the flow with some nasty and very uncomfortable issues from one end to the other, but it also messes up the production and processing of essential nutrients. And that’s before you get into the gut-immune processes.

And we try to ignore these issues, blaming the spicy meal, the wine, the late night, and even if you have tackled it with your GP, you’ve probably been told it’s IBS and that’s where it was left.

So somewhere between the antacids in your desk drawer and the Imodium you keep in your bag just in case, it became normal. Not fine, just normal. And that is a distinction worth paying attention to.

Your gut was not designed for this

The digestive system works best in what the body considers a safe moment. Rest, digest, process, absorb. That is the mode it was built for and it is extraordinarily good at it when it is allowed to run properly. The problem is that mode and the mode your body goes into under sustained demand are not just different, they are directly opposed.

When the brain perceives that demand is exceeding your capacity to meet it, it redirects resources. Blood flow shifts away from the digestive system toward the heart, the lungs, the muscles. The processes that were quietly getting on with breaking down your lunch get deprioritised because, as far as your survival system is concerned, digesting a sandwich is not the immediate priority. Outrunning a threat is. The fact that the threat is a 9am board meeting rather than something with teeth makes no difference to the biology.

In the short term this is manageable. Your system catches up, digestion resumes, nothing is permanently disrupted. But when the demand never fully clears, when the body stays in that redirected state day after day, the digestive system starts to show the strain in ways that are hard to ignore and very easy to misattribute.

From one end to the other

Chronically elevated cortisol disrupts digestion in several very specific ways, and it is worth knowing what they actually are rather than just accepting them as your lot.

Acid production changes. The stomach becomes either overactive, producing too much acid and leaving you with reflux, heartburn, and that burning sensation that has you reaching for the antacids, or underactive, which means food is not being broken down properly before it moves on. Either way, something that should be straightforward stops being straightforward.

Gut motility changes too. The speed at which food moves through the digestive system is regulated partly by the same nervous system that your cortisol response is disrupting. Too fast and you are intimate with every toilet in the building. Too slow and you are bloated, uncomfortable, and wondering why nothing is moving despite eating reasonably sensibly. Sometimes it alternates between the two, which is precisely the pattern that gets labelled IBS and sent home with a leaflet.

And then there is the absorption problem, which is the one that rarely gets mentioned. When the gut is under chronic demand, the processing of nutrients, the vitamins, minerals, and compounds your body needs to repair, restore, and function at the level you are asking it to function at, becomes compromised. You can be eating well and still running on empty because the system responsible for getting the goodness out of the food and into your body is not working as it should.

The gut-immune connection

There is one more layer worth understanding, and it is the one that connects all of this back to how you feel in a broader sense. The gut is home to a significant proportion of your immune system, and chronic disruption to the gut environment, the kind that sustained demand and elevated cortisol produce, has a knock-on effect on immune function, inflammation, and even mood. The gut and the brain are in constant two-way communication, and when one is struggling the other tends to know about it.

This is not a small thing. It goes some way to explaining why people under sustained pressure seem to catch everything going, why they feel a low-level flatness that is hard to put into words, and why the tiredness they carry has a quality that is different from simply not having slept enough.

The part that gets missed

The antacids work, up to a point. The Imodium does what it says on the box. The Senna moves things along when nothing else will. None of that is wrong and none of it is something to be embarrassed about. But they are all addressing the output of a system that is struggling, not the reason it is struggling in the first place.

If the reason is that your body has been running in sustained demand for long enough that the very processes designed to keep you well have been chronically deprioritised, then managing the symptoms is as far as those solutions will ever get you. The system underneath keeps producing the same results because nothing about the system has changed.