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Ep53 What…Bacteria Affects my Mood?

Hello and Welcome to the Way of the Emotional Warrior Podcast. My name is Kai Ehnes and today we will be answering the question…

Can bacteria really affect my mood?

Have you ever wondered why your mood can shift instantly? I mean here you are, moving right along in your day to day and out of nowhere your mood shifts. Often, it is a bad mood vs a good one.

So why does this happen? One possible cause apparently is bacteria. Specifically, your gut bacteria. Your gut is a biome and usually is healthy and diverse with good and bad bacteria. Somehow, these little passengers can affect various parts of our system, including our moods. Science is showing that they impact neurodegenerative disease, depression, among others.

Have you ever had a gut feeling or that you felt punched in the gut by something someone said? The gut has neurons, cells similar to those in our brain. These neurons are why the gut is often called the little brain. Interestingly, it “thinks” acts/reacts faster than the brain in between our ears.

A study conducted at Kyushu University in Japan, investigated “psychobiotics” or mood microbes to see if they could alter, more likely improve mental health.

Reserachers use mice and the ones who were “germ free” produced two times the amount of stress hormones when under stress than normal mice.

Let’s put this into perspective. Science has shown that a healthy gut biome allows us to deal not only better with stress but that altering the gut biome can help with the treatment of mental health.

This obviously has numerous parts for people. Think about the impact of diet, nutrition, exercise, feelings and emotions we push into our gut by nor processing them correctly. Think about it, whether food or feelings they have to be processed somewhere. If not, they get stored.

The research suggests that the vagus nereve, an information superhighway connecting the brain and gut gets impacted. Fiber is not properly broken down. Even the immune system can get impacted as well as mRNA which impacts how your DNA functions.

Why is any of this important?

Emotional Warriors can control their moods. Of course mood shifts, even swings, but emotional mastery leads one to understand how to deal with it in order to not get pulled out of balance to varying extremes.

If one of the culprits of our mood imbalance is the gut biome then it makes sense to take the necessary steps to maintain a healthy gut environment. Part of the issue is that we have become afraid of germs and therefore do what we can to minimize them but it turns out that we need germs to maintain a healthy gut biome.

According to Professor Ted Dinan at Cork University Hoispital. Diets low in fiber can have a negative impact on gut health.

I think that is amazing that more complex mental issues and simple mood swings can be affected by the state of our gut. Scientists are finding that patients with diseases such as Parkinson’s and depression have unique biomes that are out of balance. They even transplanted samples of these biomes to mice and found that the behavior transferred right with it.

Part of the life of emotional mastery is to know what impacts our emotions. It certainly makes sense that if our gut biome is that important to our well being, we owe it to ourselves to take a look.

Do some research to what foods and supplements help to maintain a healthy gut biome. Not only you but those around you will thank you.

Eat your fiber😊

Good luck.

~Peace