Healing Irritable Bowel syndrome

Are you someone who experiences digestive discomfort, like abdominal pain, diarrhea, constipation, bloating or gas?

Does abdominal discomfort send you running to the washroom at
inconvenient times? Keep you from doing your favourite things or achieving your goals, because of stress and worry about your symptoms?

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If so, it’s possible that you’ve gone to the doctor for a battery of tests, and; barring any other diagnoses, have been (or will be) told that you have irritable bowel syndrome.

The diagnosis of IBS can feel frustrating because it’s often portrayed as having stress related causes, also known to some people as being “all in your mind”.

However, a stress related disorder doesn’t mean that the symptoms are imaginary or that it’s all in your mind. The symptoms are very real. The bloating, cramping, constipation, diarrhea, non-stop or sudden running to the washroom … can have a significant impact on you every day and affect your quality of life.

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What is really going on in your body is a series of miscommunications between your brain and your gut.

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For more information about irritable bowel syndrome check out my blog post here: 

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A randomized, clinical trial published in the Journal of Alimentary Pharmacology & Therapeutics
(https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27397586/ ) in 2021 showed that gut directed hypnotherapy
had the same effect as a low FODMAP diet on functional, gastrointestinal symptoms, and
demonstrated better psychological outcomes than diet alone.

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A gut-directed hypnotherapy approach over the course of 6 – 8 sessions can help by:

• decreasing sensitivity to physical sensations in the gut (the feelings of discomfort decrease in severity)

• increasing the relaxation response; strengthening the calming signals coming through the vagus nerve

• disconnecting any unhelpful connections in your brain & nervous system between digestion and stress/activation

• changing the subconscious messages that are activating the stress response

• altering brain to gut messages affecting movement of the smooth muscles of the digestive tract, elimination and other gut functions

• sending signals of safety from your brain through your vagus nerve to reduce inflammation, improve digestive motility and calm your nervous system

• identifying and resolving past experiences & emotions that may be triggering the stress

• significantly improving physical and psychological symptoms, with results that have been demonstrated to last over five years in 81 per cent of cases (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14570733/ )