Does your body ever receive alerts in the form of an urge to go to the bathroom suddenly when you come across a bad happening or hear sad news? Do you ever feel a quickening heart rate or sweaty palms before a presentation or exam? These are some ways your body uses to make you alert when you’re going to be anxious or nervous. The specific need to poop in stressed situations refers to anxiety poop. It affects a lot of people. It seems that when you’re anxious, nature calls you. This happens because stress causing events or incidents directly affect your digestive system i.e your stomach specifically. This leads to several digestive conditions like nausea, constipation, diarrhea and vomiting. This shows that your brain is strongly connected with your gut. Your body shows a reaction in the form of anxiety poop when you experience extreme stress.
So, this is natural and you don’t need to be embarrassed about it. All humans have to go. This is actually quite normal that your emotional abnormalities affect different parts and systems of your body.
So, whenever you feel nervous and experience an anxiety poop, try to write down the circumstances that have triggered the sensation in your body. If you write it down, you may find out that the coordination between your mind and gut causes the feelings of poop, constipation or other gastrointestinal conditions when you suffer from a stressed situation.
This article will help you find the ways to soothe your stomach at the time of stress and you may learn how to get your anxiety poop under control.
How Does Anxiety or Nervousness Affect Your Body?
It is a natural phenomenon that in a stress condition, your body adopts a “ fight-or-flight” mode. This mode activates your brain to rehearse stress hormones that make your body alert and convey the message of being alert to all parts of the body. The stress hormones affect the systems of your body including the digestive system and makes your gut shift swiftly into stress mode. This sudden shift induces some abnormal changes in your body including inciting a surge in energy like rise in blood pressure, increased heart rate and heightened alertness. In this way your body prepares itself to fight against the stress situation. This energy rise helps your body in generating power, readiness to fulfill the capital needs that may help you get through stressful situations so that you can move away from danger.
Why Do You Feel Anxiety Poop?
Your brain and gut belong to two different systems of the body but their connection is very strong and they have an undeniable link. That’s why stress and anxiety directly impact your digestive system. Adrenaline hormone is the driver at the back of this link. It sends a message to your gut. It is similar to a communication source. For example a telephone wire connects one system to the other. Here the neurons and hormones male a connection between your brain and gut. Adrenal glands are part of your endocrine system that produce important hormones which are necessary for the regulation of various body functions.
Therefore, when you experience a stressful situation like preparing for a presentation or a big interview or feeling nervous about your first date, your hypothalamus (a part of the brain that controls the production of certain hormones) sends an impulse towards your adrenal glands. In response, adrenal glands release some hormones including serotonin, adrenaline and cortisol. Your intestines have more ability to absorb serotonin than your brain. That’s why serotonin play a very important role in the intestinal tract similar to its function in brain. Running of all these hormones work like an alarm system that makes your gut jump into action. Your stomach starts turning and stimulating your intestines leading to production of contraction waves in the colon. That’s why the grumbling often gives the feelings of butterflies in your stomach and sometimes,it causes a constellation of symptoms such as cramps, abdominal pains, nausea, constipation and gas ablation.
But here the question arises: what makes you go to the bathroom? This abnormality in hormones creates an actual need to poop that often doesn’t come from the stress or anxiety but caused after the phase of stress. This is like a compensatory reaction that helps your body to recover from adrenaline rush. The pooping relaxes you and everything which was held is released. This counter response actually promotes sweating, diarrhea, pain, nausea and even flushing.
According to studies, the sudden urge to go to the bathroom for poop is not a sign of being stressed or anxious but it indicates that your body is coming to its original phase after experiencing a stress situation. It is actually a cleaning process of your body after experiencing anxiety or stress. And after your body comes to normal conditions, it gives the all-clear to let go. Therefore everything that was up now as rehearse leads to making everything relaxed and re-opened.
How to Help Soothe Your Stomach?
Anxiety poop is an incredible feeling that makes you relax after experiencing a situation where you were feeling anxious and nervous. Here are some things you can do to reduce the effects of anxiety on your digestive system including anxiety poop.
You can start by focusing on your diet. Add some favor gentler foods to your diet and avoid the foods that cause trouble in your digestive tract.
Food To Be Added
Adding these foods can help sooth your stomach and calm your anxiety:
- Caffeine-free teas like turmeric, chamomile and peppermint teas.
- Gluten-free grains like quinoa, buckwheat and oats.
- Probiotic-rich foods like kefir, Greek yogurt and fermented foods including miso, tempeh and sauerkraut.
- Brassicas like kale and broccoli.
According to a 2018 study, adding gluten-free and plant-based foods to your diet with mindfulness strategies and regular physical activity can help you improve symptoms of anxiety and depression. The results of an experiment to find out the effects of anxiety on your digestive health also showed that cutting out alcohol, refined sugar and caffeine also helps release your depression.
A recent 2025 review has claimed that probiotics are good for reducing anxiety and also improve the general gut health.Such effects are also useful for your mental health.
Foods To Be Avoided
Certain foods increase the effects of anxiety on your digestive system. Therefore, it is necessary to cut out such foods from your diet. About doing such foods can help combat the effects of anxiety on your gut health. Limiting some common inflammatory foods is the first step you should take.
Stooges show that if you experience anxiety poop, you should limit these foods:
- Foods with added sugar.
- Spicy foods.
- Processed foods.
- Caffeinated beverages.
- Refined carbohydrates.
- Alcohol.
- Soda and Uruguay drinks.
These foods contribute to increasing inflammation that promote digestive problems such as bloating and diarrhea. Experts recommend that drinking more liquids like electrolytes can help replace the minerals that are hushed to deplete during high stressed phases of life. You can restore some essential minerals like sodium and potassium through beverages and foods containing electrolytes.
In addition,electrolytes levels also become low in the body due to over sweating and diarrhea in stress situations. But you can replenish them by increasing the intake of water-containing fruits and vegetables like peaches, tomatoes, and cucumbers along with supplemented beverages.
Mindful Eating
According to a 2017 review, mindful eating is an effective way to improve your digestive health. The researchers have suggested in the review that mindful eating helps reduce the effects of anxiety on your digestive system and gut health. So try mindful eating practices to have a healthy gut.
Create a Soothing Environment
Prefer to make your environment calm and soothing especially when you’re eating. Try to remove electronic devices from the dinner table and put your phone in another room. Don’t litter things around the table and keep your table clean. Don’t put any items on those that are not related to eating. People who work from home often forget and neglect these points. Therefore, they often experience digestive problems like anxiety poop.
Prefer your choice in food and use the utensils that are special to you. Decorating the table with flowers, lighting up a candle and listening to a soft misc while eating can help create a soothing environment that may help lower your anxiety and make your meal healthy and peaceful.
Eat Slowly
Eating slowly and chewing the food carefully is the best technique that makes it easiest to digest. Slow chewing breaks down the food into digestible particles and helps focus on the food you’re eating. This focus makes you calm and peaceful.
Experts suggest that eating means chewing your mouthful bite around 25 times, taking deep breaths during chewing and putting your fork and knife down while you chew.
Meditate
Meditating before a meal helps calm your nervous system. The calmness helps in getting prepared for taking a meal. Incorporating some guided meditation and breathing exercises before meals can help lower your anxiety levels leading to a soothing sensation during eating.
Engage Your Senses
Your senses contribute a lot in making your life easy. For example when you focus on the taste of toy food with the help of your taste sense, you start mindful eating. This further stimulates the secretion of saliva into your oral cavity leading to make it easier to digest and pass the food towards the stomach.
In addition, the taste of food helps you appreciate it more precisely and increases the sense of gratitude in you. These things help lower your anxiety levels.
If you want to appreciate the sourness, suck on a fresh lemon, similarly if you want to feel the bitterness, put a small piece of dark chocolate in your milk and let it melt. In this way you can identify different flavors emerging from your food.
Avoiding sour, sugary, spicy and caffeinated foods can help you reduce the symptoms of certain digestive problems. You can also try some herbal infusions and teas to soothe your digestive anxiety.
Activities to Reduce Anxiety
Some common mindfulness practices help lower your anxiety levels during a stress situation. These include:
- Morning walk.
- Yoga.
- Cuddling with a pet.
- Moderate exercise.
- Taking a warm bath.
- Journaling.
- Listening to music.
- Creative activities like knitting, painting, and baking.
Prioritizing activities that bring smoothness and calmness to your mind can help you feel relaxed. So try these activities when you feel anxiety poop frequently.
When to See A Doctor?
It is common that everybody poops and everyone experiences stress or anxiety at one pit if they lie. So, there’s no shame for having bowel movements after experiencing mental stress. However, when bowel movements become a sign of a more dangerous thing, you should speak to a professional healthcare provider. So when you feel any gastrointestinal symptom that is new to you and affecting your lifestyle, visit your doctor. Try to see a gastroenterologist for exact evaluation of the condition and detecting the cause of frequent anxiety poops. Your doctor may also guide you how to mitigate the symptoms of anxiety poop.
Although different systems of your body are interconnected, this is not a weird thing to feel rumbles due to stress. However, it can be hard to determine what is a sudden cause of rumbling in your gut. So, if you’re feeling following symptoms accompanied by anxiety poops, make it sure that you will see a gastroenterologist immediately:
- Blood in your stool
- Pale-colored stool.
- Floating stool.
- Black-colored stool.
- Sudden or unexpected weight loss.
Experts suggest that feeling things like fecal urgency, bloating, gas, sensation of incomplete evacuation are the signs of serious digestive problems. So it is best to see a doctor.
In addition, you are the only one who can listen and understand your body better than clothes. Therefore, any symptom that is making you uncomfortable and disturbing your life activities is a symbol of something worse. So, when you fail to resolve such problems on your own for some time, contact your healthcare provider.
Conclusion
Your body responds to certain high stress situations through anxiety poop. This is natural and common. So you need not worry or be ashamed about it. Here’s a good news fur you that it can be managed through some changes in diet, lifestyle and incorporating mindfulness techniques to your routine life.
However, having persistent symptoms of diarrhea or constipation is the induction of serious digestive problems. To resolve such health problems, you must visit your healthcare provider immediately. So they can make attempts to diagnose the action condition and find the exact causes to treat it carefully.
