If you think that there couldn’t possibly be a link between your sleep and your IBS, you may be surprised to hear that you are incorrect.
Ideally, it’s reassuring to know there are so many areas of your health that can are connected to your gut. If gives you more strategies that could potentially help you.
With gut issues, we must look far and wide for what might be contributing to our pain. Getting the rest and recovery you need is related to your gut’s ideal functioning.
Today’s episode we’ll talk about the how and the why of proper rest for your IBS.
Find the full transcript for this episode and other resources at HealingHerIBS.com/13.
How Lack of Sleep Can Affect Your IBS
Within the IBS healing space a lot of focus is put upon diet and supplements. Thankfully though, more and more people are understanding the connection between stress and gut health.
Proper rest and recovery is one theme that isn’t often discussed. But sleep is super important for healing and if you aren’t sleeping well, this fact alone could be keeping you sick.
How are you sleeping now? Are you getting enough good recovery at night?
Sleep is tied to IBS in so many different ways. I think the first most important connection that can be overlooked is that sleep is the time when our body rests and recovers and heals. If you are working on improving your diet and your stress, the time you dedicate to sleeping is the time when those strategies can be put into effect.
The Gut-Brain Axis has an essential role in this as well. When our guts are disturbed, that can affect our sleep and when our sleep is poor, that can affect our guts. There’s this circular rhythm between our guts and our brains that can work for us and against us when it comes to healing.
Insufficient rest can make your IBS symptoms worse whereas good shut eye can be a restorative space that allows your gut and brain to calm and heal.
My Sleep Story and IBS
When my IBS first started, it was very soon after my son was born. I had had an emergency c-section and a very traumatic birth and both my son and I were very rattled by the experience. We had a lot of issues during that time.
I was breast feeding and he refused a bottle. He usually refused to sleep unless he was physically touching me. That meant that I couldn’t really put him down in a crib, because he would wake up immediately. We co slept even though that was never my intention. It was just a necessity for survival at that time.
He also spent a lot of time sleeping on top of my chest during the day. I spent the first year of his life living with a lot of anxiety and stress. I was barely sleeping because I had a newborn and the entire childbirth experience shook me. I realize now I was hormonally out of sorts during the postpartum period as well.
Looking back and knowing what I know now, it’s not a surprise at all to me that I developed IBS. I had had a traumatic experience that I had no time to process or recover from and my body and mind were not able to rest and heal because of my newborn baby’s needs superseded my own. And then just all the anxiety I felt surrounding it all.
Sometimes our lack of sleep is just not in our control. It wasn’t in mine, and I can see now how recovering my sleep quality when my son was older was a huge turning point in my healing and sanity.
Do you see any connection between your IBS starting and what was going on for you and your sleep at the time?
It’s so powerful to reclaim our capacity for rest and to put ourselves first as soon as we possibly can. So much of IBS healing has to do with treating your body with the attention and care your body is crying out for.
When I had to care for my baby, I couldn’t care for myself as I needed to and that had a huge negative impact on my health.
What can you do though now to get the deep rest your body needs?
Top IBS Sleep Strategies
The how of getting better sleep is always an intricate issue, and yet it can be simple depending on where you are at with your sleep.
For some it means deciding and committing to prioritizing your sleep above a lot of other things.
It means:
- Aiming to go to bed and get up at the same time everyday
- Having a bedtime routine that helps you wind down
- Avoiding screens before bed
- Controlling alcohol and caffeine intake, which can affect sleep
For others who are already doing these essential things, aiming to get good quality sleep can be trickier. You may need to work on lessening anxiety and improving stress management as possible.
You also may want to consider eating a bit more carbs at dinner which can help with blood sugar regulation at night, avoiding a cortisol spike in the middle of the night which can wake you up and disrupt sleep.
There are also many supplements and sleep supporters that can also be helpful once the basics of a good sleep routine have been attempted. We’ll discuss these on another episode, so look out for that in the near future.
For now, I encourage you to get down to the bare basics of a good sleep rhythm and see what essential pieces of the puzzle you could improve upon which might help you reach your sleep goals.
Thank you for listening to today’s episode, I hope it was helpful to you.
