The Gut-Nervous System Connection Every High-Achiever Needs to Know

This morning, I spoke with one of the yoga teachers who teaches at my studio. Aside from teaching yoga, she is a high-achieving woman, working as a chief marketing officer.

We were discussing a leadership/mindfulness event that we’ll be offering at my studio, and we segued into talking about other high-achieving women, who seem to all have a slightly “activated” nervous system. They’re people (me included) who struggle to be still, who have a mind that’s always “on,” and on the plus side — usually are goal-oriented, directed, and driven.

You might be like, why are you telling me this? Let me explain.

Our conversation then segued into talking about her bloating and gut issues that she has been experiencing.

These two parts of the conversation were not initially connected, but I immediately wanted to share with her the true depth of the connection.

Your gut is your second brain — you already know this. What you may not have fully known is that your baseline nervous system is partly formed by your gut, and the general health of your gut is partly formed/influenced by your nervous system.

So if you fit into the category of a high-achieving, driven, type A person, you’re actually more likely (statistically!) to struggle with gut issues.

And contrary to western medicine, it’s not a case of symptom → cure. If you are currently struggling with obvious gut issues like bloating, constipation, stomach pain, diarrhea, or less obviously but still gut issues like eczema, rosacea, brain fog, or acne, you can’t just treat the symptom. For example, you can’t just drink coffee to try and rid yourself from brain fog, if the source of the brain fog is related to your gut health, and by default, is also related to the overall state of your nervous system.

I hope this isn’t too complicated to explain! I’m trying to make it as simple as possible.

Basically: Your gut and nervous system are deeply woven together. If you are experiencing a symptom of the body or mind that you can’t easily explain, it very well may be caused by either one (and thus, both) of these bodily processes.

So let’s talk about it.

Okay so first, a quick myth-bust: your nervous system is not purely automatic. Yes, it’s autonomic — aka you don’t consciously decide to speed up your heart rate or slow your digestion. But your baseline — where your NS defaults to when nothing’s happening — is something you’ve been building since before you were born.

In utero (!), through childhood, through every friendship, every interaction at school, and every feeling that pops up when you don’t feel safe. Your nervous system has a history. It’s basically been in training this whole time, whether you clocked it or not.

I have an awesome science-backed nervous system regulation guide for $29 that has loads of 5* reviews, get yours here.

So what does a “type A,” high-achieving, can’t-sit-still nervous system actually look like on the inside?

If you score high on the personality trait neuroticism (the Big Five trait, associated with being “type A” and is usually the personality trait that is studied in research), your baseline NS tends to sit in sympathetic dominance. Translation: fight-or-flight is your resting state, not your emergency state. You see how this could be problematic right?

Here’s what that actually feels like:

• High interoception — you’re hyper-aware of every internal sensation, which sounds like a good thing (body awareness! yay!) until it means you’re scanning for threat 24/7.

• Quick to intellectualize and/or repress emotions — feeling something → immediately turning it into a thought you can analyze, rather than just letting it move through you https://emilinalomas.substack.com/p/maybe-youre-too-self-aware

• A brain that’s always “on” — never bored, never quiet, never done. You probably don’t have lie-ins (“once I’m up, I’m up” vibes), and may struggle to get to sleep due to a racing mind.

• Physical tension — jaw (TMJ), shoulder pain, stomach feels like a rock.

And here’s the part most people never connect: this isn’t just how your NS is making you show up in the world. Being super “on” simultaneously and mechanically reroutes your gut function. And this – is no bueno.

The gut-brain connection isn’t a marketing phrase — it refers to an actual nerve, the vagus nerve. This nerve runs from yoru brainstem down into your gut.

Fun fact: it’s a mixed nerve, made up of roughly 80% afferent fibers and 20% efferent fibers — meaning it’s carrying way more information up from your gut to your brain than it is carrying commands back down. Your gut is talking to your brain more than your brain is talking to your gut.

When your sympathetic NS is activated (stressed, wired, “on”), your vagus nerve — the one responsible for “rest and digest” — gets sidelined. And that has knock-on effects that show up in your body in a few very specific ways:

When your sympathetic NS is activated, it releases noradrenaline at nerve endings throughout your GI tract — and that noradrenaline directly blocks the acetylcholine release your gut needs to contract and move things along (sympathetic activation as part of the acute stress response leads to the secretion of noradrenaline at peripheral sites including the GI tract, which inhibits intestinal motility through inhibition of acetylcholine release).

Chronic tension is a physiological brake on your gut motility and gastric emptying. That’s why you get bloated.

Your sympathetic nervous system’s job during a perceived threat is to get blood and energy to your muscles so you can run or fight. Digestion is not on the priority list. Your NS thinks you’re about to die! Don’t waste resources on digestion, right!?

The sympathetic NS exerts a predominantly inhibitory effect on GI muscle and provides tonic inhibitory control over mucosal secretion, while also regulating GI blood flow via vasoconstriction — so if your NS thinks it’s perpetually being chased by a tiger (even if the “tiger” is your inbox), your gut is perpetually being told: not now.

This is why you may have sudden food intolerances, stomach pain after eating, or even (after multiple years), you may start to have unexplained vitamin deficiencies. Basically your gut stops being able to absorb the nutrients from your food because it’s perpetually inhibited.

This is the wild part. The bidirectional part.

It’s not just “stress hurts your gut.” Your gut composition appears to shape traits like neuroticism, too.

Rsearchers have identified specific gut bacteria that show a causal relationship with neuroticism, providing evidence for a gut-microbiota-mediated pathway in how this trait develops, not just the other way around.

So for example: A 2021 study of Korean adults published in the Journal of Personalized Medicine found that people scoring high in anxiety and vulnerability — two facets of neuroticism — had significantly lower gut microbial diversity than those scoring low, with specific bacterial groups tracking each facet.

And a 2023 study published in Brain, Behavior, and Immunity took this even further, mapping what they called a “brain-gut-microbiome signature” of neuroticism — involving emotion regulation, reward, and cognitive control brain networks, plus a gut metabolite tied to dopamine synthesis, inflammation, and anxiety.

In their sample, this signature was accurate enough to predict food addiction in high-BMI individuals with 89% accuracy.

Let that sink in for a sec — your gut-brain signature could predict a behavior.

So what am I actually saying here?

I’m saying poor gut health can make type A behaviors tip into something more extreme — the super neurotic, super anxious, can’t-turn-it-off version. If you get to the point where you literally cannot sit still, you cannot relax for even a second, you can’t enjoy vacations, you start feeling irritated by everything, you feel hyper-vigilant — it may not be a simple case of “oh I’m type A” — it may be no, you’re a type A person with serious gut issues.

Everything is always about finding balance — homeostasis.

Your gut microbiome needs a balance of bacteria, too much of one type and you have dysbiosis.

Similarly, your nervous system needs peaks and troughs of sympathetic and parasympathetic arousal, too much of one and it’s dysfunction.

And finally, your capacity to enjoy life requires your ability to oscillate between periods of being goal-oriented, focused, driven, and meticulous, and periods of being relaxed, easy-going, laissez-faire.

A healthy body and mind requires BALANCE. Let me help you find it.

If you’ve read my substack before, you know I hate the conventional nervous system advice of just meditate bro. Especially for people higher in type A traits, that type of advice is supeeeer unproductive.

What you need to do is give your NS and your gut evidence, over and over, that you’re safe — because that’s the only thing that actually shifts a baseline.

A few places to start:

• Extend your exhale. Longer exhale than inhale (try 4 in, 8 out) is one of the fastest ways to directly stimulate your vagus nerve and pull yourself out of sympathetic dominance. Do it before meals, not just before bed — it primes your gut to actually digest what you’re about to eat.

• Eat like your gut is listening (because it is). Fiber and fermented foods aren’t just “good for digestion” in the vague wellness-brand sense — they’re feeding the exact bacterial diversity the research above ties to lower neuroticism and anxiety facets. Your literally eating to change your personality can you even believe that :’) science is so cool.

• Notice the intellectualizing. If you catch yourself turning a feeling into a five-point analysis before you’ve actually felt it — good job, you noticed! That’s all you need to do for now. Don’t fix it, don’t analyze it, just feel it. Let it flow.

• Stop treating rest as a reward you haven’t earned yet. Your NS doesn’t know the difference between “I’m resting because I finished my to-do list” and “I’m resting because I’m choosing to.” It just registers: are we safe right now, or not.

Look, being type A is my superpower. It’s probably yours too. But if you’re struggling with an issue that you can’t seem to put your finger on — your body is trying to communicate with you. Your gut, most likely, is trying to communicate with you.

None of this advice is trying to change your personality; it’s about trying to fix the extreme version — the version where your body is so stuck in “on” that it’s not just costing you your calm, it’s costing you your gut, your sleep, your ability to actually enjoy the good things when they’re happening. That version isn’t a personality trait. That’s a nervous system (and a gut) asking for help.

If you want a more structured way to work through this — daily practices, not just “here’s the science, good luck” — that’s exactly what I built REGULATED for.

I also have a really exciting live course coming up – a 28-day gut reset. We’ll move through these 28 days together, with live coaching calls, advice, and guidance from me — a gut health nutritionist :) Join the waitlist here.

Emilina x

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