Gut Health

Why Stress Causes Diarrhea (And how to stop it from ruining your day)

Have you ever had diarrhea strike on the morning of a big meeting… or before a first date… or when you're looking at your checking account? As if you didn’t have enough to worry about, now you’re trapped in the bathroom, probably running late, and anxious about when the next episode will hit.

If stress gets you right in the gut, you’re not alone, and you’re certainly not crazy. Stress alone can cause diarrhea, not to mention a whole host of other GI (gastrointestinal) problems.

So before the next stressor strands you in the bathroom, get the lowdown on how stress causes diarrhea… and what you can do to make it stop.

What You Need to Know About Diarrhea

Talking about diarrhea usually falls into the “no thank you” category, but here it’s a must. Before you can get your stress diarrhea under control, you need to know how diarrhea works.

When you eat something, your digestive system breaks it down and absorbs nutrients, other healing components (like antioxidants), and liquid. Whatever is left over – the waste – gets transformed into poop. 

Diarrhea happens when that process hits a snag, usually one of two things:

  1. The food moved through too quickly before your body had a chance to pull out all the liquid
  2. Your GI (gastrointestinal) system added extra fluid, usually caused by some kind of infectious bacteria or virus

Either way, your poop ends up loose and watery… a classic case of diarrhea. And when that’s not the result of something like IBS, stomach flu, or food poisoning, there’s a fairly high chance that stress is driving your diarrhea.

upset stomach

How Stress Causes – and Worsens - Diarrhea

Diarrhea seems like it all takes place in your gut, but it also involves your brain. 

Your brain and your gut communicate constantly in a permanent two-way conversation called the gut-brain axis, or GBA. And through the GBA, each affects the other’s activities and performance.

In fact, your gut works like a “second brain.” Your GI tract contains oceans of nerve cells – hundreds of millions of them. It’s like an offshoot of your nervous system. And when your main brain feels stress, it sends distress signals directly to your gut as part of a normal stress response.

When you get stressed out, your body can’t tell the difference between a fender bender, a missed deadline, or an animal attack. All it knows is that your brain sent out the “fight or flight” message. So your body responds with a preprogrammed set of physical reactions, like increasing your heart rate and sending more blood to your arms and legs (so you can fight or flee). 

But the threat reaction that matters most here is that stress speeds up the contractions in your colon. That makes food move through much faster… and