IBS interacts with Social Anxiety Symptoms
Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) and Social Anxiety Symptoms very often go hand in hand, with one set of symptoms worsening the other set of symptoms. IBS exists on its own as a medical condition, but for a very significant number of people the symptoms of IBS get triggered by the fear of having symptoms in public, instead of being triggered only by trigger foods or random fluctuations.
Gastrointerologists (the physicians who specialize in the workings of our digestive system) often refer their patients to work with me in counseling on anxiety issues. Sometimes my patients are surprised that the physician is refering them for counseling for a physical problem. The patients who are surprised are typically the ones who have the lowest insight into the psychological triggers of IBS symptoms.
Here are the most common psychological triggers, which you may not recognize in yourself until you do some careful analysis of the situations when your symptoms are more frequent:
- Feeling socially “trapped,” where going to the bathroom would interfere with the fun of the group or when running to the restroom would cause a significant degree of attention to be turned toward you.
- Heightened anxiety in situations where your brain unconsciously expects that the symptoms are more likely to return because of a past negative experience in the same or similar situation. For example, that last time you were in a movie theatre you had a bad episode of cramping or diarhea and people asked you why you were gone so long when you came back to the movie, tripping over everyone’s feet in the dark.
- Situations that your mind has unconsciously analyzed and recognized as potentially harmful to your social status or ability to manage the symptoms without attention. For example, you may never have had the symptoms on an airplane before, but your mind recognizes the high stakes of being confined to your seat during turbulance, and your stomach starts churning and gurgling in reaction to the unconscious or conscious realization that this would be a bad time to have the symptoms flare up.
So What can you do about it? You can fight back via the same principles that work every time for every form of anxiety. You go through a system for getting very specific and detailed about the triggers of the anxiety reactions you have, then you systematcially desensitize yourself to those triggers by using proven principles for turning the brain’s automatic reaction toward something helpful instead of something alarming.
One of the keys that I want to share with you now is that you can’t stop thinking about a fury black gorilla by trying not to think about it. The brain doesn’t work that way. So don’t “try harder” to not be scared or to “stop the thoughts.” Instead, you’ll need to develop what we call “valued directions” which are a set of mental focus points that end up distracting you and causing you to forget the gorilla. You can learn this system by downloading a copy of the Social Anxiety Secrets ebook on my website.
Whatever you do, don’t let IBS symptoms and social anxiety symptoms ruin your life because you just waited for them to go away. Take action. Reach for the best life you can.
Dr. Snyder
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