When you have a gut problem, you’re very often going to come up against frustration.

Frustration of constantly trying things – food, supplements, protocols, appointments – and still your symptoms persist. Or maybe they get better for a while, but then things go back to the way they were. Frustration of always having to be near a toilet, of getting diarrhoea when you try to leave the house, of not being able to move your bowels without laxatives, of going from place to place only to keep hearing ‘we don’t know’.

Frustration generally occurs when we feel blocked from achieving a goal or outcome. For example, if the outcome you want is a life not dictated by the toilet and it’s not happening despite all your efforts, it’s only natural to feel frustrated, demotivated and overwhelmed.

These feelings can’t be avoided. All we can really do is work out how to catch and pull ourselves out of them before it all turns into a downward spiral and we give up altogether.

I think there’s two ways you can go about this. The approach you take will depend on your energy on the day and which feels more aligned for you in that moment.

The Frustration Motion System – catch the sign that negative emotions are arising, shake them off, shift your perspective.

The first way is a soft and gentle approach. Do some yin yoga, stretching, meditation, a walk in nature, deep breathing, journaling or anything that’s going to help you calm the nervous system. You might like to write out all the things you HAVE achieved so that you can look back and see how far you’ve actually come.

The purpose of this approach is to soothe and settle your emotions, gently let them move through you and let your body process them so that you can then open up to receiving emotions of hope, gratitude and joy instead.

The second approach is the complete opposite and involves physically shaking off the emotion. You could put on some music and dance, do a workout, go for a run, scream, punch the air, a pillow or literally just shake your body!

The purpose of this approach is to physically move the emotion through your body and allow it to be released.

This often works well when you’re really feeling the anger and the thought of sitting down to meditate makes you want to scream!

This is like dogs shaking off stress and nervousness. Ever noticed a dog shaking itself even though it’s not wet? Dogs are incredibly sensitive to their environment and absorb emotions easily. You may have even seen a dog shaking itself after being patted by a human. When a dog is feeling stressed, it shakes it off. We can learn a lot from dogs!

Whichever approach you decide (or even both!), it’s important to do something, because otherwise emotions do get stored in the body and this has negative consequences on your gut and causes congestion in the liver and kidneys. You can probably feel it in yourself when you’ve got a build up of emotion happening – this does need to be released otherwise our organs suffer (including our brain) which has a domino effect on our happiness and wellbeing.

I’d love to hear how you shake off frustration, anger and negative emotions! Leave me a comment below to let me know 😊