Getting the Guts to Be Resilient

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“The oak fought the wind and was broken, the willow bent when it must and survived.” ― Robert Jordan, The Fires of Heaven

Most of us know a person who always seems unflappable in the face of stress. While the rest of us are anxiously buckling under the pressure, this person manages to go gracefully with the flow. It’s not just a mental issue: if you’re familiar with stomach butterflies, you know anxiety often extends to your gut.

Amazingly, there’s a defining difference between the microbes that live in an anxious gut and those that live in a resilient gut. A recent study by Arpana Gupta, Desiree Delgadillo, and colleagues at UCLA found that just by looking at gut microbes, they could predict whether or not a person was resilient to stress. “When we looked at highly resilient individuals, they had more bacteria related to reduced inflammation and a healthy gut barrier,” says Gupta.

This comports with over a decade of stress research out of University College Cork by John Cryan (also a collaborator at UCLA Health) and Ted Dinan showing a significant correlation between gut microbes and stress resilience. Cryan says, “It is clear that stress, including stress in early life, can alter microbiota composition and this can have marked consequences on physiology in adulthood.”

The gut-brain axis

This is the gut-brain axis in action, and it is a two-way street, with the brain affecting the gut and vice-versa. When we eat, we feed our gut microbes too. What we swallow can change the entire ecosystem of our personal collection of microbes, called our microbiome. This suggests that we might be able to improve our resilience to the bombast of modern life with simple changes in what we eat.

Gupta concurs: “The easiest way to impact your gut microbiome is through diet. I believe we can support this gut-brain connection by following a balanced, diverse diet that’s rich in fiber, probiotics, omega-3 fatty acids, and antioxidants, while at the same time minimizing the consumption of highly processed foods, added sugars, artificial sweeteners, and excessive alcohol.”

A well-balanced microbiome produces substances like butyrate that heal and nourish the cells lining the gut. Butyrate can also reach the brain where it improves mood, cognition, and resilience.

Your diet affects your brain

As weird as it seems, your diet can affect the structure and function of your brain. Gupta and others have found that less resilient people have a swollen amygdala—a part of the brain involved with regulating emotion—which can lead to depression and anxiety. Eating probiotic foods like yogurt can actually reduce this swelling and normalize mood and cognition. That is literally food for thought.

Your frontal lobes, where you plan your next move, also play a large role in how you respond to stress. As Gupta puts it, “When a stressor happens, often we go to this aroused fight-or-flight response, and this impairs the brakes in your brain. Think about the cognitive part, or the frontal part, of your brain being like the brakes. The highly resilient individuals had really efficient brakes, and less of this hyper-stressed response.”

The rest of us are already on the edge from crappy guts and inflammation. Add in the drama of modern politics, bad bosses, and poor healthcare, and it’s no wonder we crack under pressure. Many of us start the day in a panic, while others can make it to lunch before the stress causes their head to explode—or at least swell up.

Not so for the resilient folks. "The highly resilient individuals in the study were found to be better at regulating their emotions, less likely to catastrophize and keep a level head," says Delgadillo.

Being anxious about life isn’t just annoying; stress is a major killer. Gupta says, “Stress is linked to the onset and progression of several diseases. If we could increase resilience, then that could help prevent a number of illnesses.”

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Dealing with stress

Much of the stress in our life is external and hard to change, like global warming and air pollution. But many of our stressors are our own doing. Smoking (our own personal air pollution) stresses our system, as does over-drinking and under-exercising. Quitting nasty habits is a great way to start the healing process.

The next step is changing our eating habits. The magic of the gut-brain axis is that we can easily convert our gut from inflammatory to resilient with just a few alterations to our diet.

Sadly, there are many ways to strike out when it comes to altering our diets. Americans typically get half of their calories from processed food. What does this “processing” do to the food? Among other things, it removes the fiber, creating fluffy white concoctions that are easy to flavor and color. After all, the thinking goes, humans can’t digest fiber anyway. That’s true, but your microbes utterly depend on fiber, and the standard American diet (SAD) is starving them. That’s strike one.

The advent of refrigeration meant less reliance on fermented foods (with a lengthy shelf-life) that used to be a large part of our diet. Sure, we still have sauerkraut and pickles, but these are often pasteurized, eliminating the useful probiotics. The loss of probiotics in our diet is strike two.

In their zeal to addict us to their factory-made foodstuffs, manufacturers have added sugar to literally everything. That feeds pathogenic microbes and encourages inflammation. That’s strike three. The modern world seems out to kill us. No wonder we’re skittish.

What to do

Here are three things you can do today to become more resilient:

1. Eat more fiber. That means veggies like onions, broccoli, beans, lentils, and artichokes. Berries are also full of fiber.
2. Eat ferments. The list is long and delicious: yogurt, kimchee, kefir, kombucha, pickles, sauerkraut and more. Make sure they have active cultures. That means you will find these in the refrigerator section of the store.
3. Try probiotics and prebiotics. Probiotics are beneficial bacteria that create a healthy gut environment. Prebiotics are basically fiber that feeds the probiotics. Blends are best, because when it comes to your microbiome, diversity is key.

These are not difficult chores, but it can be hard to change bad habits, even if they are killing you. Take it slowly: Your gut doesn’t like surprises. But if you ease into it, you should see clear improvement, and you’ll become more resilient to the frenetic world we live in.