Understanding & Resolving The Effect Of Stress, Anxiety & Emotions On Your Gut - by Michelle White | Happy Inside

COURSE

Understanding & Resolving The Effect Of Stress, Anxiety & Emotions On Your Gut

With Michelle White | Happy Inside

There are emotional, psychological, and behavioral factors that activate or contribute to gut disorders, including IBS, and although widely acknowledged, these factors are rarely discussed or given solutions. You’re not alone in your experience with gut symptoms. I’m right here with you to share the 11 years of clinical experience as a specialist/gut-focused psychotherapist to guide you back home from all the places you’re grasping to or are lost in, as a result of your gut symptoms. Your gut is biologically wired to be affected by stress, and it’s likely that no one has yet shared this with you. So let’s take all the unnecessary pressure and blame off you by learning about and acknowledging this connection, and ensuring it no longer continues to impact you. Your gut, via your nervous system, is highly reactive to your emotions and thoughts. At present it’s reactive to the very real stress, anticipation, worry, fear, frustration, and overwhelm these gut symptoms have on your life. I hear you, and I want you to know there’s something we can do about this. It is my pleasure to share these insights and skills with you through this course, so that you have every chance of feeling happy inside and out.

AnxietyStress & AnxietySciencePsychologyMindfulnessOpen AwarenessStress

Meet your Teacher

Michelle White | Happy Inside
Sydney NSW, Australia

Michelle White of Happy Inside is a specialist and gut-focused embodied psychotherapist, attending to the psychological, emotional, and behavioural aspects of gut disorders and chronic illness: old wounds, life misalignments, stress, anxiety, and fear, especially around symptoms, the hypervigilance, limitations, restrictions, and impacts these ailments have on your life.

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10 Days

4.3k students

4.8 stars

19 min / day

Anxiety

English

Lesson 1

The Relationship Between Your brain, Nervous System & Gut

Your gut is biologically wired to be affected by stress via your nervous system. Knowing and understanding this connection not only takes the pressure off you, but means you are then in an empowered position to work with it. This first lesson is a comprehensive introduction to this connection which is the foundation of all the following lessons. I also share with you what gut-directed imagery is, how it works, and why it’s beneficial for you to get started today.

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Lesson 2

Your Body Is Highly Responsive To Your Thoughts

What you think, consciously or unconsciously, activates a response in your body. In this lesson I facilitate this very concept to enable you to experience it in real time, and therefore build an awareness and capacity to observe when your thoughts are affecting your body or exacerbating your symptoms.

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Lesson 3

The Softening Of Acknowledgment & Validation

You are struggling. This experience is really hard and we can’t deny it - we don’t want to. We want to do the exact opposite, which is to acknowledge your thoughts and feelings and experience for the struggle that it is. You absolutely deserve to be seen and heard, so in this lesson we cultivate self-compassion, kindness, and gentleness because as you’ll find out, it activates a softening in us, and whenever we soften, so does the tension and symptoms.

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Lesson 4

Interpreting The Body Signals With Curiosity Rather Than Fear

Fear narrows our attention, inhibiting our capacity to observe objectively. When we are paying attention to our body with fear, our nervous system is on high alert. We are hypervigilant and experience visceral hypersensitivity. Because your gut is reactive to your nervous system state, the fear and hpervigilance activate and exacerbate gut symptoms, which is the exact opposite of what you’re trying so desperately to achieve. Being able to observe the body signals with curiosity deactivates the stress response, ensuring your symptoms aren’t exacerbated. In this lesson, I show you how.

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Lesson 5

Embody Your Whole Self - Body, Mind & Emotions

Now that we have learnt how to observe body signals with curiosity, we are going to explore the 3 main aspects of you: body, mind, and emotions. Very commonly we spend the majority of our time in our mind. We detach from our emotional selves and don’t want to be in our body when it’s uncomfortable. If you don’t do emotions, they will do you in the form of physical symptoms. In this lesson we explore and integrate the 3 aspects of you. By integrating especially the emotional aspect, we negate the need for the body to get involved and eventually symptoms stop presenting themselves physically.

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Lesson 6

Create Your Internal Environment

Your body, and in particular your nervous system, is highly responsive to you. The body is your vehicle, and you are in the driver's seat. Therefore, your body is dependent on you for its environment. One of the greatest resources we have to calm our internal world is our breath. We can speak directly to our nervous system through the breath. When gut symptoms are exacerbated by stress, we know the nervous system is overactivated, so we use the breath to regulate it.

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Lesson 7

Safety Behaviours

Safety behaviours are anxiety behaviours. They are very effective in the short term which is why we use them, but they reinforce the original anxiety which is unhelpful in the long term. You might recognize safety behaviours as decisions you make around your symptoms, to prevent or manage them. In today’s lesson we learn about safety behaviours, how to recognize yours, and how to reduce the anxiety that’s causing them in the first place.

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Lesson 8

Stop Striving & Just Be

I know you’re tired and need a rest. You’ve been working overtime to seek and gather more information and be hyper vigilant to your symptoms to find any way to minimize them. It’s exhausting. When you’re afraid and unwell and desperately seeking answers, it’s hard to slow down. There’s so much outwards grasping that not only exacerbates stress, anxiety, and physical symptoms, it also has a high risk of us abandoning ourselves in the process. In this lesson we pause to give you the time and space to just be with yourself in a safe and comfortable way.

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Lesson 9

Don’t Blame The Food

If you notice that your gut symptoms reduce when you’re relaxed or on holidays, or they get worse with stress, then you already have evidence that stress is a contributing factor to your gut. Because our digestive tract processes food for us, it can be automatic to blame food for gut symptoms. We know that food is only one contributing factor and that stress in all forms makes the microbiome hostile, which gives rise to unhelpful changes in the healthy balance of your gut flora. If your gut health is compromised by stress, then it makes sense that digestive processes will also be compromised. To minimize constantly eliminating foods from your diet, attending to any stress-producing causes of your gut symptoms will improve your microbiome and increase the capacity of your gut to accept and process a wider variety of food. In this lesson we learn to decipher stress-related gut symptoms from the rest. Your capacity to determine when this is happening puts you in an empowered position to actively reduce that stress in the moment to minimize any ongoing symptoms.

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Lesson 10

Future-Affirming Actions

When you’re not feeling well or you’re overwhelmed, the focus is often on what you don’t want to be happening, rather than what you do want. We bring awareness to this and take intentional actions to move you to where you want to be. I know you want to feel better, and I want that for you too.

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4.8 (106)

Recent Reviews

Lucie

December 29, 2024

Thank you so much for this new perspective . My view is slowly becoming one directed to who I am when I live open to my capacities to choose. I choose, calm and peaceful breathing. I choose thoughts of compassion and comfort towards myself first in order to soothe my symptoms of brain- gut reflux . I take away the responses of breathing, affirming and embracing myself , self awareness and feeling of how I am changing to the reality of peaceful, confident and easy-going me .

Michelle

December 18, 2024

Thank you

Jeannie

December 5, 2024

Informative , supportive, and inspirational! I have learned so much- and am hopeful once again : )

Karey

October 12, 2024

This is a marvelous resource for people with any gut symptoms. I am a pelvic floor PT specialist and Icwill be referring my patients to this course and to the imagery meditations. Thank you.😊

Audrey

July 19, 2024

Thank you so much.

Kate

May 28, 2024

Thank you 🙏 for this course. It is full of compassion and new ways of looking at things. I found it so compelling. I will be listening again. ❤️

Beth

March 19, 2024

I came to this course after completeing the Nerva app initial 6 weeks plus continuing maintenance. Nerva helped me a lot. AND I wanted more of the mind emphasis of the mind-gut nervous system. I need to calm my mind and let gut will follow. This course helped to fill in what I was looking for. It outlines the mental emotional end of the mind-gut nervous system which is my primary source of gut distress. Michelle’s information and delivery of that information is exactly what I needed. Thank you Michelle

Juli

December 9, 2023

I found Michelle’s course extremely useful and will continue to use her meditations regularly and repeat the lessons. I look forward to completing my list of essential joy producing activities and implementing them more frequently into my life. Thank you, Michelle for gently pushing me onto a better positive pathway.

Tammy

November 2, 2023

Awesome information! So enlightening that the problem is not always diet!

Amy

October 13, 2023

Michelle, this course was phenomenal. I’ve tried so many things to relieve my gut symptoms and your approach is spot on. Lesson 8 was particukarly illumuniating. I really appreciate you sharing your wisdom and experience here with all of us.

Cathi

October 12, 2023

Excellent course! Thank you!

Melinda

October 1, 2023

Excellect I would like to repeat The course

Anne

September 15, 2023

Thank you for bringing this course into being, it has given me so much information and inner work that I have neglected for too many years and I value you giving the opportunity to contact you for consultation. You have given me a new way of looking at my life .

Sean

August 31, 2023

Best course ever, so helpful

Susie

August 20, 2023

Very informative and helpful. I often felt that you hit the nail on the head and described me and my symptoms perfectly. I’ve already made some changes and noticed real progress, the future is brighter! Thank you!

Jill

July 20, 2023

Finally someone who gets it.

KindredKarly

May 19, 2023

Beautiful course! So informative and thorough. Thank you!

Linda

April 1, 2023

Excellent experience. So helpful and felt so supportive. Thank you so much for your work and your compassion ❤

Katie

February 26, 2023

Such a great course, really gets into the thought processes that so directly affect the gut. Thank you so much x

Gail

November 22, 2022

I enjoyed this course because I felt seen and heard regarding my gut health. Thank you ! I might take it again !

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