What If the Problem Isn’t Where It Shows Up?
What IBS led me to understand about the gut-brain axis, leaky gut, sleep, mood, skin, and energy
For years, I thought I had several different things going on with my body. I knew I had IBS. Then there was the sleep that never seemed to be enough, no matter how many hours I got. My energy would be good for a few days and then disappear again. My mood was ever changing. My skin was changing, my hair was changing, and inflammation seemed to come and go without giving me any clue what had set it off. I had a list of things I just didn't understand.
I treated each one as its own problem because that was how they appeared. If my gut was bothering me, I worked on my gut. If I wasn’t sleeping, I looked for something to help me sleep. I tried to manage stress as though it belonged in a completely different category, and I certainly wasn’t looking at my skin and wondering what it might have to do with any of the rest of it.
I would get one thing settled for a while, then something else would start bothering me. Sometimes the same thing would come right back. I kept changing foods, adding supplements, adjusting routines, and trying to remember what I might have done differently on the days I felt better.
Maybe you know what that is like. You aren’t ignoring your body. You are paying very close attention to it. You just cannot find the thread that connects what you are noticing.
I could not find that thread either.
The doctors I saw were symptom focused. They ran tests, looked at the results, and treated what they could see. The trouble was that I would go in feeling as though several things were connected and leave with help for one of them. That might bring some relief, but it did not explain why the rest kept happening.
At the same time, I had started coming across the term leaky gut. I knew I had IBS, but I wondered if there might be more happening underneath it. I had no way to confirm that leaky gut was what I was dealing with, and honestly, I did not understand enough about it to know what addressing it would even look like.
It began as curiosity. I wanted to get closer to the root instead of continuing to chase one problem at a time. The more I explored, the more confusing it became. One article made leaky gut sound like the explanation for everything. Another made it sound as though it did not exist. I would read that the microbiome affected nearly every part of our health, followed by something warning that microbiome support was mostly hype. Adrenal fatigue was real, except when it wasn’t. Every answer seemed to open the door to three more questions.
I did not need another collection of opinions. I needed to understand how the pieces fit together.
That is part of what eventually led me to become a Certified Mental Wellness Coach through Marietta College. I would love to tell you that I pursued the certification because I already knew exactly how I wanted to help other women. That was part of it, but it was not where it began.
It began with wanting to understand my own body and be able to use my voice to explain what I was learning and confirming. I wanted to know more about nutrition, the microbiome, neurochemistry, the stress response, and the way our bodies produce and use energy. Most of all, I wanted to understand why something happening in one part of the body could seem to show up somewhere else.
That was when the gut-brain axis stopped being another term I had read and became a way of seeing the whole picture.
The gut and the brain are in constant communication. They talk through the vagus nerve, the nervous system within the digestive tract, the immune system, and our hormones. The brain sends signals to the gut, and the gut sends signals back. It is a two-way conversation happening all day, whether we are aware of it or not.
That helped me understand why stress could send me running to the bathroom, but it went much further than that. What was happening in my gut could also influence how my body responded to stress. The communication did not travel in only one direction.
The serotonin piece surprised me too. Most of the body’s serotonin is produced in the digestive tract. That serotonin is used differently from serotonin in the brain, so it is not as simple as the gut making serotonin and sending it straight to the brain. What mattered to me was finally seeing how closely gut function, the microbiome, the immune system, and the nervous system are tied together.
I had spent years separating digestion from mood, stress from sleep, and skin from everything underneath it. My body had never separated them that way.
Once I understood that, leaky gut began to make more sense too. The lining of the intestine is supposed to be selective about what passes through it. It lets nutrients cross while helping keep other material where it belongs. When that barrier becomes more permeable than it should be, it is called increased intestinal permeability. That is what people are usually referring to when they say leaky gut.
I still could not go back and prove that this had been part of my own experience. What I could do was understand why I had been curious about it and why the idea had felt relevant. The gut lining does not exist on its own. It interacts with the microbiome, the immune system, what we eat, medications, illness, and the stress our bodies have been carrying.
That does not mean every skin change, tired morning, or difficult mood begins with leaky gut. I would never reduce a woman’s whole health story to one explanation. It does mean the condition of the gut can be part of a much larger conversation than digestion alone.
Then there was the adrenal conversation. The adrenal glands produce cortisol, one of the hormones that helps us respond to stress. Cortisol is not bad. We need it. It helps us wake up, meet a challenge, and respond when something requires our attention. Ideally, the stress response rises when needed and settles when the demand has passed.
Real life does not always give it much time to settle.
The body responds not only to an immediate threat, but also to the pressure of poor sleep, ongoing conflict, grief, pain, inconsistent nourishment, and years of pushing through because life still has to be handled. Sometimes there is no clean line between one stressful season and the next.
I had heard the term adrenal fatigue, and once again, I found myself in the middle of an argument about language. Adrenal fatigue is not recognized as a medical diagnosis. The symptoms women are describing when they use that term, however, should not be brushed aside. Waking up tired, struggling through an afternoon crash, feeling wired at night, or never quite returning to baseline can be very real experiences.
My training helped me understand that the stress-response system is more complicated than tired adrenal glands. The brain, pituitary gland, adrenal glands, nervous system, and hormones all participate. You may hear this discussed as the HPA axis or stress-response dysregulation. The terminology matters, but so does listening to the woman who says she no longer feels like herself.
Cortisol also interacts with sleep, immune activity, the microbiome, and the intestinal barrier. There was the thread I had been looking for. Not one tidy explanation for every symptom, but a connected system.
That changed the questions I was asking. Instead of only asking what might help me sleep, I began thinking about what my body had experienced throughout the day. When my skin changed, I still cared about what I put on it, but I also thought about nourishment, stress, inflammation, and my gut. Mood was not something I needed to force into submission. It was part of the conversation too.
I want to be careful when I tell you what changed for me, because I am not saying I found one answer that fixed everything. I did not wake up one morning with a healed gut and a completely different body. What I noticed happened gradually.
My IBS became more manageable. It was not gone, but it stopped deciding as many of my days. My mood felt steadier. My sleep began to improve, and my energy became more consistent instead of lifting for a few days and disappearing again.
I also began noticing changes in my skin and hair. Some things improved, others took longer, and there were still setbacks. Bodies do not always give us a straight line we can point to and say, “There. That is when everything changed.”
Sometimes I could only see the difference by looking back over several months. I would realize I was not thinking about my stomach every time I left the house, or that a difficult day did not pull me under the way it once had.
Happy Juice became part of how I support that gut-brain connection each day. The combination of gut support and mental wellness support made sense to me because it reflected so much of what I had been studying. It was not asking me to think of my gut over here and my mood somewhere else.
It was not the only change I made, and I would never pretend that it was. What I ate mattered. Movement mattered. Sleep habits mattered. The clean eating I began during what I think of as my Instant Pot year was part of this long before I had the language to explain why. Consistency mattered too, probably more than my old habit of trying something intensely and then moving on when it did not change everything at once.
I still tend this connection. Some days I do that better than others. Stress can still show up in my gut, and a bad night of sleep can still affect how I feel the next day. The difference is that I understand more of what my body may be responding to, and that helps me decide what it needs next.
I think often about the woman I was when all of this began. She was trying very hard to listen to her body, even though she did not yet understand its language. She kept looking for the root because treating each thing separately never quite explained the whole of what she was feeling.
If I could sit with her now, I would tell her that her curiosity was worth following. I would tell her that sleep is not always only about sleep, and skin problems do not necessarily begin at the surface. I would tell her that what she is feeling is not simply all in her head, but her brain is part of a much larger conversation happening throughout her body. Most of all, I would tell her that her symptoms are not as random as they seem.
There may not be one answer that explains everything. There may be medical conditions that need their own care, and symptoms that deserve a closer look. But the body is connected, and learning to see those connections can change where you begin.
If you recognize some of yourself in this letter, the Stress Signal Assessment can help you look at where your system may be carrying the most pressure right now. It takes about three minutes, and it may help you see a pattern you have not noticed before.
And if you are curious about the gut-brain support I use every day, you can also learn more about Happy Juice. Both are simply places to begin. You do not have to understand the entire conversation before you start listening to what your body has been trying to say.
Maybe the problem isn't what it seems.
If Happy Juice is the part of this story you’re curious about, I have a simple page that explains what it is, what’s in it, and why I still use it.
Until next time —
Nelea R. Lane
a/k/a The Happy Juice Chick Founder The Stress Less Era
Available by Text: 936-209-7222
This is part of the Letters from the Stress Less Era series, where I write about what I’ve lived, what I’ve learned, and what it can look like to find your way back to yourself.
Rate your wellness habits. Your mood, your energy, and your sleep are shaped by habits you barely notice. This three-minute check-in identified what's already working — and the one or two habits worth your attention first. No account needed. Results on screen right away.
Comments