{"id":7833,"date":"2026-07-14T10:54:17","date_gmt":"2026-07-14T10:54:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scienceinhealth.com\/?p=7833"},"modified":"2026-07-20T11:13:18","modified_gmt":"2026-07-20T11:13:18","slug":"gut-brain-connection-bloating-anxious-thoughts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scienceinhealth.com\/de\/2026\/07\/14\/gut-brain-connection-bloating-anxious-thoughts\/","title":{"rendered":"Naturopath: 90% of Serotonin is Made in The Gut: How Are Bloating and Anxious Thoughts Connected (And The 15-Min Habit That I Recommend)"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The surprising gut\u2013brain connection that changed the way I approach both digestive symptoms and anxious thoughts – and the 15-minute method I now recommend in some cases.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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For years, I kept seeing the same pattern.<\/span><\/p>

Someone would come to me because of bloating. Someone else because of anxious thoughts. Another reason was that both were convinced they were dealing with two completely unrelated problems.<\/span><\/p>

At first, they looked that way to me too.<\/span><\/p>

The more sufferers I worked with, the less convinced I became that they actually were.<\/b><\/p>

After 15 years in functional medicine – and my own experience with chronic gut problems I couldn’t explain – I started noticing something that neither the GI specialists nor the therapists seemed to be addressing.<\/span><\/p>

Both sets of symptoms often seemed linked to the shared underlying processes.<\/span><\/p>

For years, I couldn’t fully explain why. Eventually, I found a framework that explained much of what I was seeing. And it changed the way I approach both.<\/b><\/p>

I’ll show you exactly what I mean.<\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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What I Kept Seeing – And Couldn’t Explain<\/h2>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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I came to functional medicine after watching many clients continue to struggle despite conventional medicine.<\/b><\/p>

I trained as a nurse. I worked in hospitals for years. Every day, I watched the overlapping pattern: a client with persistent bloating and cramping was sent home with an antispasmodic and a leaflet about fibre. The same client, a year later, is now also on an SSRI for anxious thoughts. Two health professionals. Two diagnoses. These issues were often managed separately rather than together.<\/span><\/p>

I realised this wasn’t happening because those health professionals weren’t good at their jobs.<\/span><\/p>

It was happening because our healthcare system divides the body into separate specialities. The gut belongs to one clinic. Anxious thoughts belong to another. But your nervous system doesn’t recognise those boundaries.<\/b><\/p>

In fifteen years of practice, I have worked with thousands of sufferers – many arriving with a folder full of test results, a list of supplements already tried, and a similar quiet frustration: <\/span>nothing is working, and nobody can tell me why.<\/span><\/i><\/p>

I developed my own chronic gut problems too – bloating, SIBO, food intolerances that made every meal feel like a gamble. Conventional medicine offered me much the same as it offered my clients: manage the symptoms, adjust the diet, and try this supplement.<\/span><\/p>

What I wanted to know was why. That question changed everything.<\/b><\/p>

I see a similar pattern constantly.<\/span><\/p>

The woman who has spent three years on elimination diets and still cannot eat a normal meal without bloating, while also taking antidepressants for anxious thoughts that nobody has connected to her gut. The man who does breathwork every morning for his racing thoughts and takes antispasmodics every evening for his cramps – two separate routines, one underlying cause nobody has named. The person whose tests show nothing, whose gut “looks fine” on paper, whose anxious thoughts are “manageable” – and who knows, quietly, that none of that is true.<\/span><\/p>

One client described it in a way I haven’t forgotten:<\/span><\/p>

“I feel like I have two broken things that nobody can explain. My stomach is always upset. My brain is always worried. The GI health professional says it’s probably stress. The therapist says it’s probably my digestion. So I’m just going in circles.”<\/span><\/i><\/p>

She was right because nobody had shown her the system connecting both.<\/b><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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The Fact That Changed the Way I Look at Both<\/h2>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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Here is something most health professionals – even functional medicine practitioners – rarely explain clearly.<\/span><\/p>

And when I first encountered it, it reframed everything I thought I understood about the relationship between digestion and emotional health.<\/span><\/p>

Around 90% of your body’s serotonin is produced in the gut rather than the brain. <\/b>However, this gut-produced serotonin mainly regulates digestion and does not cross the blood-brain barrier. Instead, the gut influences brain function through multiple communication pathways, including the vagus nerve, immune signalling, hormones, and the gut microbiome.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Most people have heard serotonin described as the “happy chemical.”<\/span><\/p>

This doesn’t mean gut serotonin directly controls mood, but it highlights how neurologically active the digestive system is.\u00a0<\/b><\/p>

That’s the question worth considering for a moment.<\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Why This Fact Is Often Misunderstood<\/h2>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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One important clarification before going further – because this is where a lot of wellness content gets it wrong.<\/span><\/p>

This doesn’t mean serotonin simply travels from your gut into your brain. It doesn’t.<\/b><\/p>

In fact, gut-produced serotonin mainly regulates digestion itself – gut motility, secretion, and sensory signalling within the intestinal wall. It cannot cross the blood-brain barrier.<\/span><\/p>

So why does this statistic matter?<\/span><\/p>

Because it tells us something important about how central the gut is to the body’s overall communication system.<\/b><\/p>

The digestive system is one of the body’s largest neurochemical and signalling hubs. It is constantly exchanging information with the brain through immune pathways, hormonal signals, the microbiome, including the vagus nerve, one of the major communication pathways.<\/span><\/p>

In other words, the statistic isn’t important because serotonin travels to the brain. It’s important because it reminds us how neurologically active the gut really is.<\/span><\/p>

That nerve – the one carrying all of this gut-brain communication – turns out to be an important part of understanding why bloating and anxious thoughts so often travel together. And why addressing it may be the thing most therapies have been missing.<\/span><\/p>

This is why researchers increasingly describe the gut and brain as part of an interconnected system.<\/span><\/p>

And this is why, when that neural pathway breaks down, what shows up in the gut and in the mind are often reflections of the interconnected underlying disruption.<\/span><\/p>

A large-scale genetic study from Cambridge and Oxford – analysing more than 50,000 people – found that irritable gut and anxious thought disorders share several biological pathways, including altered gut-brain communication, nervous system regulation, and immune signalling. Rather than one directly causing the other, the two often coexist because they influence each other.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

Which means every person treating bloating and anxious thoughts as two separate problems may be overlooking shared mechanisms contributing to both symptoms, while missing the actual cause entirely.<\/b><\/p>

And here is what makes this even harder to recognise.<\/b><\/p>

When this gut-brain neural pathway breaks down, the mental symptoms are rarely just “feeling a bit anxious.” They tend to be specific. Persistent. And rarely connected to the gut by the person experiencing them:<\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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