The Link Between IBS, Stress, and Your Gut Microbiota
🕒 ~20 min read
Quick peek? Here’s what you’ll want to know:
Whether you’ve been officially diagnosed with IBS or you’re still searching for answers, living with constant bloating and abdominal pain can feel isolating, overwhelming, and exhausting.
This guide helps you understand the role stress and your gut microbiota play in IBS symptoms and digestive issues in general.
If you suffer from IBS, positive change is possible… often with smaller steps than you think. Focusing on one of the eight steps can create meaningful improvements in your symptoms.
Ready to take your first step? Download your free 7-Day Food & Observation Journal and start noticing how your meals, stress, and habits impact your digestion.
If you’re looking to understand how stress, your gut microbiota, and daily habits affect IBS (and discover simple, achievable ways to improve digestion), this blog will guide you step by step.
📌 Keep reading - or save this post for later when you’re ready to explore practical strategies, try small changes, and start feeling more in control of your gut health.
Living with constant bloating and abdominal pain can feel isolating, overwhelming, and exhausting. And whether you’ve been officially diagnosed with IBS or you’re still searching for answers, it often adds up to the same thing. Your digestive symptoms are taking over your life, and it feels like there’s no clear path to feeling better.
I get it. I’ve suffered for years myself, and I’ve spent over a decade helping clients just like you get to the root of digestive issues and finally feel better than they have in years, sometimes decades.
Maybe, just like my clients, you’ve spent years asking yourself:
Why am I bloated…again?
Will I ever get rid of this abdominal pain?
Will I ever be able to go about my day without constantly worrying about the closest bathroom?
I’m here to tell you there is a better way to live. I found a way, I’ve helped others find a way, and I’m writing this guide specifically to help you find your way too.
This guide is meant to shed light on what can feel like a complicated and frustrating condition. One of the most important things to understand about IBS and digestive issues in general is the role stress and your gut microbiota play in digestive wellbeing.
Here, you’ll find insights into what IBS really is, its connection to stress and your gut microbiota, the ways your body responds to stress, what can cause imbalances in your gut microbiota, and practical steps to support better digestion, reduce stress, and balance your microbiota… a true win, win, win situation.
Your goal today is simple: learn a little about your body, use this guidance as a stepping stone, and open yourself to the possibilities of a real path to better digestion.
What is IBS?
So what exactly is Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS)? IBS is a functional bowel disorder, which means your gut doesn’t work quite the way it should, even though standard medical tests often come back normal. Clinically, the definition evolves every few years and is currently based on the Rome IV Diagnostic Criteria.
Older definitions included abdominal discomfort, bloating, and distention. Today, a formal IBS diagnosis requires recurrent abdominal pain at least once per week for three months, plus two or more of the following:
Pain associated with a change in stool frequency
Pain associated with a change in stool appearance
Pain related to defecation (aka pooping)
IBS is also categorized by bowel habits:
IBS-C: constipation
IBS-D: diarrhea
IBS-M: a mix of both
IBS-PI: post-infection
Sometimes a visit to your doctor reveals an IBS diagnosis, and other times you leave with more questions.
With this more specific definition, only about 4-5% of the U.S. population meet the official criteria. That may sound small, but it still amounts to 26-39 million people, and women are affected twice as often as men.
It’s important to note that the current criteria exclude abdominal discomfort, bloating, and distention. So if you feel bloated or uncomfortable without explicit abdominal pain, your symptoms may fall under “idiopathic” digestive issues - a fancy way of saying “we don’t yet know why it’s happening.” Even for those with a formal IBS diagnosis, there’s no single root cause. Standard medical approaches often focus on symptom management with medications rather than addressing the full picture.
Whether or not you’ve been diagnosed, 61% of Americans experience weekly digestive issues. Which means you are not alone in your struggles. And the good news is, there are ways to understand and improve your digestive health.
Even without a single root cause, multiple factors contribute to IBS, including six key areas that can influence your symptoms: abnormal gut motility, visceral hypersensitivity, altered brain-gut function, inflammation, intestinal permeability and microbiota imbalances. Understanding these can help you take practical steps toward feeling better.
Your Body’s Stress Response
Before we dive into the six factors, it helps to understand how your body responds to stress. Stress has been part of human life for as long as we’ve existed. While the sources of stress have evolved (think traffic jams instead of saber-tooth tigers), our bodies respond in much the same way.
Anytime your brain perceives a threat (extreme cold, illness, a work deadline, an argument, or even negative self-talk) your body reacts as if your life is in danger. This internal response is called the General Adaptation Syndrome, a model created by Hans Selye, the father of stress research. It unfolds in three distinct phases:
1. Alarm Phase
This is your body’s immediate reaction to a stressor. Your primitive brain doesn’t know the difference between encountering a bear in the woods and a looming deadline. So your body responds the same for everything: heart rate, blood pressure, breathing, and alertness all increase, while other functions (like digestion) slow down. You’ve just entered fight-or-flight mode.
2. Resistance Phase
After the immediate stressor passes, your body works to adapt and return to a safe state. During this phase, it helps you maintain balance, fight infections, navigate emotional crises, or perform physically demanding tasks. Once the stressor dissipates, your body eventually returns to baseline, feeling healthy and energized. But if stress doesn’t truly go away, your body cannot fully recover and eventually reaches the exhaustion phase.
3. Exhaustion Phase
You reach this phase only when stress continues without relief and your body can’t fully recover. Without full recovery, exhaustion starts to negatively affect the function of your organs and systems, including digestion.
When stress keeps piling up, your body can’t fully recover. More than just overwhelming, your whole body reaches exhaustion.
This three phase model is a simple way to understand your body under stress. When you dive deeper into the physiology, you find complex coordinated processes going on behind the scenes.
Your hypothalamus, pituitary and adrenal glands all work together to regulate your long-term stress response. This is called your HPA axis. When you perceive a threat or stressor it triggers a cascade of hormones. First, your adrenal glands release epinephrine and norepinephrine to kick things into gear. This creates the increased heart rate, blood pressure, breathing, alertness… that fight-or-flight mode.
At the same time, your hypothalamus releases corticotrophin-releasing factor (CRF), which signals your pituitary to release adrenocorticotrophic hormone (ACTH), which then triggers your adrenal glands to produce cortisol. You’ve probably heard of cortisol and your adrenal glands, but as you can see, they are only one part of your stress response.
The more frequent or prolonged your stress, the more all of these hormones are produced, increasing the risk of dysfunction anywhere along the HPA axis. This stress loop can even increase intestinal permeability (also called leaky gut) creating a cycle of inflammation and more stress.
Understanding your body’s stress response - and the unique stressors that affect you - is such an important first step toward better digestion because stress influences each of the contributing factors to IBS.
Looking for a simple way to manage stress and feel more grounded? Read my blog, Breathe Through the Change, and discover how mindful breathing can help you stay centered, calm your nervous system, and improve digestion.
Your Unique Stressors
There are many types of stressors that can impact your body. At the same time, your journey is unique. Your body, your life circumstances, and how you experience the world all shape the stressors you face. Some stressors are common to many people, while others are deeply personal. Let’s explore the kinds of stressors that might be showing up for you and affecting your digestion.
Nutritional Stressors
Foods that lack quality nutrients and increase inflammation like ultra-processed foods, highly refined carbohydrates, artificial ingredients, excess sugar, and trans fats
Other foods that may be inflammatory to you, including food allergens or sensitivities
Eating too quickly or mindlessly, which reduces nutrient intake and disrupts digestion
Physical Stressors
Environmental toxins, such as heavy metals, plastics, and industrial pollutants
Inflammation caused by processed foods or food sensitivities
Blood sugar imbalances
Exercise extremes, either too much without proper recovery or too little movement
Poor sleep quality
Illness or injury
Typical Life Stressors
Work deadlines
Financial pressures
Relationship challenges
“Full-plate syndrome,” when you keep saying yes and piling obligations on without making room for self-care and rest
Mental stress from toxic beliefs, negative self-talk, depression, or anxiety
All of these stressors, along with how you perceive them and how you manage them, determine your overall stress load.
The higher your stress load, the more likely stress will influence your digestion and gut health. In fact, a high stress load can affect all six key factors of IBS.
Sugary treats like donuts may seem like a quick boost to get through a meeting, but they add another layer of stress on top of deadlines, endless obligations, and everything else on your plate.
Stress and the Six Key Factors of IBS
Now why would stress affect your digestion in the first place?
It helps to look at your nervous system. Your body has two main branches of the autonomic nervous system: the sympathetic and the parasympathetic. Your sympathetic nervous system is the fight or flight mode you just learned about. Your parasympathetic nervous system is the opposite, your rest and digest mode.
These two systems work kind of like a tug-of-war. When your body is under stress and moves into fight or flight mode, it pulls you out of rest and digest. When you’re in rest and digest mode, you can step out of fight or flight to feel calm and grounded, sleep better, and digest your food efficiently and effectively. There are always nuances, of course. You can increase focus or energy without going fully into fight or flight mode. But the more your body perceives stress and reacts to it, the less time you naturally spend in that restorative rest and digest state.
And when your body doesn’t spend enough time in rest and digest, everything from digestion to pain sensitivity can be affected. In fact, stress influences all six key factors linked to IBS: altered brain-gut function, abnormal gut motility, intestinal permeability, visceral hypersensitivity, low-grade inflammation, and microbiota imbalances. These factors also interact with each other, creating more complexity.
Let’s take a look at each.
1. Altered Brain-Gut Function
Your digestive tract has its own built-in nervous system called the enteric nervous system, or ENS. Your ENS communicates with your brain through your vagus nerve, creating a constant back-and-forth conversation so you can move food through your system, release digestive juices at the right time, and interpret sensations in your gut.
When this communication works smoothly, you’re absorbing nutrients well, eliminating waste regularly, and not experiencing pain during the process. Your ENS thrives when your parasympathetic nervous system is active, which is that calm rest and digest state.
But when you have a high stress load, your sympathetic nervous system steps in. Fight or flight mode takes priority, and rest and digest gets pushed aside. This shift alters the communication between your brain and gut, affecting everything from motility to pain sensitivity, and sets the stage for other IBS-related factors.
Curious how balancing your nervous system can improve digestion and emotional wellbeing? Read my blog, How a Balanced Nervous System Supports Better Digestion, for practical tips to help your body shift into rest-and-digest and feel more grounded.
2. Abnormal Gut Motility
The rate at which food moves through your digestive system is called gut motility. Ideally, your digestive tract moves food through at a steady pace, roughly 18-24 hours from eating to elimination.
But when stress takes over and your body stays in fight or flight mode, it disrupts brain-gut communication and your ability to regulate movement through your digestive tract. Things then slow down, speed up, or even go in fits and starts. This can show up as constipation, diarrhea, or a mix of both.
Serotonin, a key neurotransmitter that most people associate with mood, is also crucial here. About 90% of serotonin is produced in your digestive tract, helping to control gut motility. When you have a high stress load, it can interrupt serotonin production, creating another pathway for motility issues… and more digestive symptoms.
3. Intestinal Permeability
Your intestinal lining is made up of a very thin layer of cells that act like a selective gatekeeper, letting nutrients and fluids in while keeping harmful substances out.
When stress hormones are high, particularly CRF, it can damage that protective barrier and let the gates swing open. The intestines become more permeable, also known as “leaky gut,” allowing larger particles (like undigested food, toxins, or pathogenic microbes) to slip through and trigger your immune system. This immune response leads to inflammation, which puts even more stress on your body.
Over time, this cycle of more stress, intestinal permeability, and inflammation amplifies your digestive symptoms and gut sensitivity.
Powering through with caffeine and long hours might feel productive, but that added stress fuels inflammation and weakens your gut lining, contributing to more IBS symptoms.
4. Low-Grade Inflammation
Any time your immune system reacts, whether to a foreign invader or a compromised gut barrier, inflammation follows. If you also have intestinal permeability, specialized immune cells in your gut, called mucosal mast cells, are part of this response. These cells release compounds that increase inflammation and promote more digestive symptoms, leading to abdominal pain and discomfort.
On top of that, chronic stress alone can increase the activity of mucosal mast cells and other pro-inflammatory markers, creating a feedback loop: more stress leads to more inflammation, which leads to more stress and inflammation. The inflammation loop also impacts brain-gut function, gut motility, intestinal permeability, and visceral hypersensitivity.
5. Visceral Hypersensitivity
Visceral hypersensitivity is just a fancy way of saying heightened awareness of sensations in your abdominal region. So, if you are more sensitive to those sensations, normal digestive processes and even a small amount of bloating can feel uncomfortable or painful.
Stress can intensify this sensitivity. Chronic stress triggers inflammation and activates immune responses, including the mucosal mast cells you just learned about. These inflammatory signals make your gut more reactive, so ordinary sensations can feel more uncomfortable and painful.
Serotonin also plays a role. Beyond mood and gut motility, this neurotransmitter helps regulate how your body perceives pain. So, when a high stress load reduces serotonin, it can increase your perception of pain, especially in your abdomen. Just another vicious cycle: more and more inflammation, more and more digestive discomfort.
6. Microbiota Imbalances
Lastly, your gut is home to trillions of microbes, a whole community that helps you digest food, communicate with your brain, support immunity, and influence mood and stress responses. When this community is out of balance, a state called dysbiosis, it can create a domino effect throughout your digestive system.
Stress plays a big role here, too. High stress levels can disrupt the balance of your gut microbiota, favoring microbes that increase inflammation or interfere with neurotransmitter production, including serotonin and dopamine. This can make your digestive symptoms worse, influence motility, alter pain perception, and even feed back into more stress.
Because your microbiota interacts with all the other key factors - brain-gut communication, motility, intestinal permeability, inflammation, and visceral sensitivity - keeping it balanced is essential for supporting better digestion and reducing IBS symptoms.
Your Gut Microbiota
Many microbes call your gut home, and your microbial community looks different than mine, or even your best friend’s. Your community includes helpful species (probiotics), residents that quietly live within you (commensal microbes), and others that directly cause problems (pathogens). In a balanced environment, each group is kept in check. That healthy population can help you better access nutrients from your food, support your intestinal wall, regulate your bowel movements, and influence immune activity. Some microbes even produce neurotransmitters that affect both your digestion and mood. It’s a busy, active world working on your behalf every day.
Who lives in your microbial community matters, because they communicate with the rest of your body. Your microbiota interact with your enteric nervous system, immune system, sympathetic “fight or flight” nervous system, parasympathetic “rest and digest” nervous system, and even hormones. This intricate communication network is known as your Brain-Gut-Microbiota (BGM) axis. It functions as a constant conversation between your gut, brain, immune system and nervous system.
So, depending on who is most active in your gut community, your microbe inhabitants can either support or provoke your stress response. And when stress becomes an ongoing part of your life, your microbial community becomes imbalanced, creating a state called dysbiosis.
Want to learn more about the microbes living in your gut? Check out my blog, The Role of Gut Microbiota in Digestion, Mood, and Overall Health and learn how to nurture a balanced, supportive gut community.
Friendly neighbors make a community thrive, just as a balanced gut microbiota supports digestion, immunity, and overall well-being.
Microbiota Dysbiosis
In a healthy gut, your microbial community works together to support digestion, immune function, and stress responses. If something disrupts your community and allows helpful species to decline, opportunistic microbes to take over, or pathogenic species to thrive, your gut community is now in a state of dysbiosis. There are many things that can cause this imbalance, including excessive stress.
In fact, animal studies have shown how closely stress and your gut microbes are connected. When stress levels are high, it promotes microbes that increase inflammation and interfere with neurotransmitter production, while reducing beneficial microbes. What’s even more amazing is if helpful microbes were introduced to the gut of study subjects, it helped calm an exaggerated stress response. This shows a bidirectional pathway: stress can change your gut microbiota, but your gut microbiota can also influence how your body reacts to stress.
For people with IBS, this connection matters because dysbiosis influences all six factors. An imbalanced community will affect gut motility, inflammation, intestinal wall integrity, pain perception, and the communication between your gut and brain.
Microbiota Dysbiosis and the Six Key Factors of IBS
Understanding how an imbalanced gut microbiota affects your body can shed light on why IBS feels so complex. Your gut community influences so many interconnected factors, and each factor influences your gut community. In fact, there is a consistent pattern for IBS sufferers. Research shows people with IBS often have fewer helpful microbes, more opportunistic or inflammatory species, and less microbial diversity and stability overall… aka microbiota dysbiosis. In some cases, this imbalance shows up even before IBS symptoms appear.
Stress also creates a compounding effect on your microbiota and IBS symptoms. Stress changes your gut population, and an imbalanced microbiota can overactivate your stress response. Together, both situations increase inflammation, leaky gut, pain sensitivity, and dysfunction in gut motility and your gut-brain connection.
Let’s take a look at each factor and how dysbiosis affects each.
1. Altered brain-gut function
Remember your Brain-Gut-Microbiota (BGM) axis? Your microbiota are part of the ongoing communication between your gut and brain, helping regulate your mood and digestion. Certain probiotics can even encourage serotonin production, which supports gut motility, stress management and pain perception. When your microbiota population changes, so too does your gut-brain communication. A healthy community supports healthy communication. But an imbalanced microbiota disrupts the conversation.
Want practical ways to support a healthy gut microbiota and improve digestion and energy? Read my blog, How to Support Your Gut Microbiota, for tips to nurture your gut community naturally.
Stress creates a compounding effect on your microbiota and IBS symptoms. It changes your gut population, which then fuels more stress… and more digestive symptoms.
2. Abnormal gut motility
To effectively and efficiently move food through your digestive tract, your gut relies on signals from both your microbes and neurotransmitters. A healthy population of beneficial microbes supports this process, through their ability to increase serotonin production and other byproducts, like short-chain fatty acids. If your gut community is out of balance, these signals can get disrupted. Certain species, like methane-producing microbes, can even slow down movement through your digestive tract. And these types of microbes have been seen in patients with IBS-C who are prone to constipation.
3. Intestinal permeability
Changes in your microbiota can also influence your gut lining. Certain species found in an imbalanced gut community may degrade the protective mucus layer of your intestines. As that barrier weakens, your immune system becomes more reactive, which increases inflammation and creates more damage to your gut lining. The more imbalanced your gut microbiota, the greater the risk of intestinal permeability or leaky gut.
4. Low-grade inflammation
On top of potential leaky gut, certain microbial species can independently increase intestinal inflammation. And when they dominate an imbalanced gut community, they can trigger inflammation and weaken your gut lining, setting up a self-perpetuating cycle… more inflammation, more damage. Over time, this low-grade inflammation can make pain more noticeable, change your bowel habits, disrupt gut-brain communication, and promote even more imbalance.
5. Visceral hypersensitivity
With persistent low-grade inflammation, your perception of pain can change. Normal everyday sensations in your gut go from manageable and unnoticed to stronger and more reactive… just from a simple change in perception. Microbiota dysbiosis then adds more fuel to the fire until the increased sensitivity intensifies any bloating, abdominal discomfort and other IBS symptoms.
6. Microbiota imbalances
By now, you can see that your gut microbiota isn’t just a bystander. It’s deeply involved in every part of your gut health. Changes in motility, low-grade inflammation, intestinal permeability, visceral hypersensitivity, and altered gut-brain communication all interact with your microbial community. When any of these factors are disrupted, they can change your microbiota population, and an imbalanced microbiota can, in turn, worsen each of these same factors.
And don’t forget… stress is playing a role here too. Chronic and excessive stress shifts your gut microbiota out of balance. At the same time, an imbalanced microbiota affects your mood and stress response, making everyday challenges feel harder to manage. The two keep feeding off each other: stress creates more microbial imbalance, and an imbalanced microbiota creates more stress.
It all leads to an escalating cycle: one disruption compounds the next, making your digestive system more sensitive, reactive, and prone to IBS symptoms.
But understanding this connection between stress, microbiota dysbiosis and IBS symptoms is empowering. You can break that cycle with simple tools that bring stress and your gut community back into balance.
Making Positive Change with IBS
If you suffer from IBS, positive change is possible… often with smaller steps than you think. Focusing on one area - whether it’s managing stress, supporting your gut microbiota, or becoming more aware of your triggers - can create meaningful improvements in your symptoms. Because each step you take compounds to support your gut, your stress response, and your overall well-being.
That’s why practical, achievable steps matter. The easier it is to implement change, the faster you’ll find relief.
Here are 8 simple steps to begin.
1. Manage Stress
Stress affects every factor in IBS, from gut motility to inflammation. So the simple act of practicing some stress management techniques can improve IBS symptoms.
Take Action: Add one of your favorite stress-reducing practices today: a short walk, journaling, playing music, talking to your best friend, or a 5-minute meditation.
If you’re looking for practical tips to bring more mindfulness into your day, check out my blog, The Gift of Being Present: How Mindfulness Supports Your Mind, Body & Gut.
Gentle movement or mindful practices like yoga can reduce stress and IBS symptoms.
2. Move Your Body
Physical activity can support healthy gut motility, reduce stress, and even improve pain. Choose what feels good. There is no wrong answer; every bit of movement counts.
Take Action: Incorporate 20-30 minutes of movement you enjoy, like walking, dancing, yoga, or strength training, most days of the week.
3. Take a Breath
Intentional breathing encourages your rest-and-digest state, helping your body shift away from fight or flight. This can calm your nervous system, reduce stress, and support digestion.
Take Action: Try box breathing (inhale for a 4-count, hold for 4, exhale for 4, hold for 4, repeat) for 2–5 minutes daily, especially before meals or during stressful moments.
4. Support Your Microbiota
A balanced gut microbiota supports digestion, reduces inflammation, and positively affects your mood. Probiotics and prebiotic-rich food help feed and maintain a healthy gut population.
Take Action: Include probiotic-rich foods (like yogurt, kefir, sauerkraut, or kimchi) and fiber-rich foods to allow your helpful microbes to thrive.
Including a variety of probiotic-rich foods, like fermented veggies, can help rebalance your microbiota, improve gut-brain communication, and support digestion.
5. Choose Food Wisely
What you eat influences who lives in your gut community and, in turn, your IBS symptoms. Choosing foods that feel good in your body can reduce bloating, discomfort, and dysbiosis.
Take Action: Swap a high FODMAP food for a low FODMAP food and see if your digestion and symptoms improve.
Looking for an easy way to spot high and low FODMAP foods? Download my free FODMAP Food Guide for a simple, printable cheatsheet you can use at meals and on grocery trips.
6. Find Supplemental Support
Certain targeted supplements - probiotics, herbal blends, and digestive enzymes - may help manage IBS symptoms and support a healthy gut environment.
Take Action: After consulting with your healthcare provider, try a multistrain probiotic or digestive enzyme and track how your body responds. Even better, discuss your symptoms and goals with a nutritionist or supplement expert to find the right fit for you.
Looking for practitioner-grade supplements tailored to gut health? Visit my Fullscript dispensary for curated options to help improve IBS symptoms and support your gut with confidence.
7. Observe Patterns
A simple Food & Observation Journal can help you identify patterns and triggers, from food and lifestyle choices to stressors, that may be contributing to your IBS symptoms.
Take Action: Keep a simple daily log of meals, stress levels, and symptoms for a few weeks to start connecting the dots.
Looking for a tool to connect the dots between your habits and IBS symptoms? Grab my free 7-Day Food & Observation Journal and begin observing how food, stress, and lifestyle impact your digestion.
8. Enlist Professional Help
Support from the right professional could make all the difference. Whether you work with a holistic nutritionist like me, a therapist, a gastroenterologist, or your primary care physician, personalized guidance can help you find lasting relief.
Take Action: If your symptoms aren’t improving with the first seven steps, reach out to a nutrition or healthcare professional to build a plan tailored to your unique triggers and goals.
Looking for personalized guidance to improve your digestion? Schedule a private nutrition consultation with me to create a plan tailored to your unique triggers and goals.
Experiment with any or all of these steps and find what works for you… there is no wrong answer. Every positive change you make adds up to better digestion and overall health.
Final Thoughts: Every Step Counts
IBS can feel complicated, but understanding the connection between stress, your gut microbiota, and the six key factors - gut-brain communication, gut motility, intestinal permeability, inflammation, pain sensitivity, and microbial balance - gives you real insight into what’s happening in your body.
Relief from IBS doesn’t come from perfection. It comes from tuning in to your body, noticing what helps, and staying curious along the way. Whether managing stress, supporting your gut, or observing your patterns, each step you take adds up. Over time, these small, intentional choices can create real, meaningful change in your digestive symptoms, stress levels, and overall well-being.
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