How Busyness Affects Your Irritable Bowel Syndrome

How many times a day do you say you are busy?
Do you have any idea what you are doing by repeating that so much? You are forming pathways in the brain that create a habit, and then you don’t know how to stop saying it. Even when you may not be busy, you will still be convinced you are and will continue bragging about it.

Busy is a New Status Symbol

Scientific studies at Harvard University have revealed why you like to tell everyone how busy you are. Apparently, when you brag, you experience the same pleasure that you get from food and money. Bragging about being busy is a new status symbol.

It is incredible how much of your busyness in unnecessary as you try to multi-task and flit from one thing to another never quite concluding anything by the end of the day. Endless meetings with no outcome, half-finished emails and projects. The ever-growing to-do list that has little crossed off. You allow yourself to be constantly interrupted by colleagues or children, by emails, texts and social media pings. By bedtime, you are exhausted but can’t think of anything pleasurable that has happened, anything tangible that has been achieved, any reason for that day to have existed.

So what do you do? You collapse in front of the TV.

We Don’t Live Forever

We don’t live forever – that’s an indisputable fact. Every day lost can never be recovered. It’s gone. Our life is a day shorter. Time is finite. And yet still we make the same choices day after day after day. We seem to have no real perception of the scarcity of time because we never use it any differently.

Is this why we do it, waste our lives in the trivial clutter of everyday life – so we don’t have to actually make a decision to create something useful in our lives?

  Perhaps what David says would be a good start towards change.

What does all this Busyness do to our IBS?

• We need to eat 5 small meals a day to ensure that we don’t eat too much at once but do get enough nutrients. If you have a day filled with meetings, what is the first thing to be left out? Meals. And so you get hungry, and hunger is the greatest enemy of an IBS sufferer. The next meal will be too big and will probably consist of fattier, more carb-laden foods because our primitive instinct is to get quick energy (sugar/carbs) to take care of the present desperation and then to store energy for the future (fat and protein). Unfortunately, not only do most of us not live active enough lives to use up all those stored calories, but the fats and carbs will trigger our IBS symptoms.
• We eat in a hurry or while working or during a vital conversation. Many workers today don’t even leave the office but eat at their desks, so there is no division between work and mealtimes. They eat under stress with tense muscles and hence a tense gut. Several things happen for those of us with IBS. Our gut cramps up, we gulp in air through talking while eating, and we eat fast. None of that leads to the relaxed meal times that we need if we are to stay symptom-free. Always stop all activities and go to a different setting in order to eat your meals in a mindful way so that you don’t accumulate gas in the gut which will cause cramping. Even the right low Fodmap foods are not going to save you.
• You feel you have no time to prepare non-trigger foods and prefer to eat out or buy ready-made processed foods. Research is ongoing in this area but the very fact that they are conducting studies into the effect of additives, both chemical and natural, on IBS means that they suspect they are onto something. Many of us with IBS could already have told them that. You have to become a label reader. Only buy products with ingredients that you recognize as food. Eat food that is as close as possible to its origins. I buy rice crackers that have brown rice and oil as the only two ingredients. The next packet along on the supermarket shelf has twenty different ingredients for similar rice crackers. Choose wisely. If you are too busy for all this, then you are going to suffer.
• When you are busy, you are stressed, and stress is a major cause of IBS symptoms. It doesn’t matter how strict you are about your low Fodmap diet, you will get bloating, cramping and unpleasant elimination issues. Our faulty brain to gut connection mucks up our very best efforts to eliminate our symptoms. Relaxation techniques are essential to control our stress but there is a certain level of busyness that doesn’t allow time to put these techniques into place. We need space in order to train ourselves to use them so we can implement them at will. New pathways in the brain need to be formed and that takes time.

Free Life Balance Challenge

In 10 days’ time, starting 18^th February EST you can finally do something about balancing your lifestyle to support your IBS.

JOIN the free Life Balance Challenge HERE.

This 2-week challenge will give you step-by-step instructions on how to get all the necessary pieces in place for a balanced life so that you can keep your IBS under control.

This free challenge will dig deep into why you need balance in your life and separate out the various elements you have to put in place to make sure that your irritable bowel syndrome is not aggravated by a hectic, out of control lifestyle. You will be sent six challenges over the two weeks in the form of videos and downloadable worksheets with homework and then you will update us with your results in our private Facebook group.

No Procrastination Allowed

We are all brilliant at putting off what we know we need to do, so stop the procrastinating and make 2016 your best year ever with no regrets that once again you failed to live life to the fullest because of your crazy schedule which aggravates your IBS.

My clients are always so surprised at the part that lifestyle has in their symptoms.

Judy Kemp said:
“Stress was a major problem which I hadn’t realized. The introduction of exercise, relaxation, changing my sleep pattern, along with a focus on myself has helped me immensely to regain everything that I.B.S. had taken away from me.”

 And Margaret Kneeland said:
“I realized during the program that my highly stressful lifestyle was causing me to trigger my IBS.”

Hurry on over and Join HERE.