The link
Why stress lands in your stomach
The gut and the nervous system are directly wired together, which is not a metaphor and is often the missing piece.
4 minSource: Narrated

What is going on
The gut has its own dense network of nerves and a direct line to the brain. Stress measurably changes how quickly things move and how much sensation registers.
That is why symptoms can be entirely real without a structural cause, and why being told nothing is wrong is both true and unhelpful.
What tends to help
Eating sitting down and slowly, which sounds like advice from a magazine and is one of the few things people consistently notice.
Not eating in the middle of the worst part of the day where that is avoidable.
Anything that lowers the baseline: sleep, movement, and the short practices in the mood section.
Talking therapies have reasonable evidence for gut symptoms driven this way, which is worth knowing rather than treating as a last resort.
The gut is one of the few places in this stage where small, ordinary changes to what you eat reliably show up within weeks.
General information, not medical advice. Narrated never diagnoses.
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Fiber, and why going slowly matters
The most useful change for most guts, and the one most often abandoned in week one because it was done too fast.
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