Undigested emotions can directly impact how we digest food. It can slow things down, create inflammation, and contribute to overgrowth. Most people address motility, inflammation and overgrowth with diet and supplements, not realizing they’re often downstream symptoms of something deeper.
We all know about physical digestion, but you don’t have to understand it to do it. Your body just knows how.
But we digest more than just food. We digest experiences, emotions, and information. When there’s undigested emotion, it affects us physically.
Digestion is the process of taking something in, transforming it to extract what’s useful, and letting the rest go. When we hold on to what should be released, problems begin.
If we don’t break food down and eliminate it, things don’t work properly. Toxins build up, microbes overgrow, and everything starts to feel heavy and sluggish.
The same thing applies to emotional digestion. Unlike physical digestion, emotional digestion is much harder to do, because no one teaches us how to process what we feel. So instead, we hold onto it, not realizing how problematic it is for our health.
We store emotion as tension and contraction in the body. This can drive cortisol up, disrupt breathing, and keep the nervous system in a fight or flight state. It can disconnect us from the body and send the mind into loops of overthinking, doubt, and rumination.
Many of us walk around with what I call emotional constipation.
We freeze emotional experiences in the body, tightening our ribs, backs, jaws, shoulders, and hips. When we physically harden and brace towards life, things don’t flow in our bodies. Often stomach acid and motility are affected. This is a common root causes of small intestinal bacterial overgrowth.
If you’ve ever been in a yoga class and suddenly started crying during a hip opening exercise, you’ve experienced emotional release. You just may not have understood what was happening.
You don’t need to know exactly what’s stored in the body to release it. You just need to understand the value of doing it, so your attention can focus on something that will move your health forward when nothing else has worked.
Releasing stuck, blocked and repressed emotion (that we are often not aware of) can speed healing faster than any protocol.
What About Talk therapy?
Talk therapy is the norm for processing (digesting) trauma, stress or overwhelm. Talking it through is better than keeping it inside, but talk therapy engages only the mind. Emotions live inside the body. Often in the subconscious. Talk therapy will contact those emotions with luck only. And it may take many years.
Analyzing your experience won’t get to the emotional core. Often won’t release the stored tension in the body.
A lot of emotional holding or trauma in the body often disconnects us from our bodies and we live mostly in our heads. So talk therapy may be a tempting solution since the head is so active but it leaves an important part of you out.
Somatic therapies are more effective for emotional work. I’ll give you examples below.
Trauma through this lens
Trauma can be described as undigested experience. What happened was too overwhelming to digest. So we stored it away for later. But later never comes. We don’t make the space for it or give it the attention it needs.
Trauma doesn’t have to be a big, dramatic experience. It’s just something that overwhelms your capacity to deal with it (digest it) in the moment.
When we’re very young, we don’t have a lot of capacity to process painful or difficult experiences, so these emotions get filed away. This happens before we can make sense of what’s safe or dangerous.
Many of us have emotions from childhood stuck in our body, and they influence stomach acid, breathing, cortisol, thyroid function, and motility. And your body may compensate for these weakness for a long time, but when a big stressor hit, your resilience drops and symptoms appear.
Emotional digestion is not taught in medical school, so doctors don’t address it. They treat symptoms with solutions that may help but never touch the deeper cause. That is why we keep relapsing.
This is something that I have learned through my work with clients. I have been trained to see the emotional constipation sitting underneath their symptoms. And this is often in their blind spot. I help them see it and we work on it together.
Just as you support your physical digestion, you can’t ignore your emotional digestion and expect to feel fully well.
When the deeper emotional layer is not addressed, the body stays vulnerable. When stress hits again, symptoms resurface. You are back to where you began.
Emotional work is both easy and hard
Emotional work simply takes awareness and attention on what is stored inside you. Deciding that this is a priority is easy.
The hard part is working with emotions. They were held in for a reason. It can feel uncomfortable, intense, and sometimes overwhelming to digest them.
This work takes commitment, compassion, and support. It’s challenging to do it alone, we need the support of a skilled guide because it can be destabilizing.
How to move emotion
Working with moving emotion requires consistency, not perfection (which is a trauma response in my opinion). Here are just a few ideas to get started there are many more.
1. Hypnosis (an effective tools I use)
Hypnosis is a powerful ways to access what’s stored beneath conscious awareness. You don’t have to “figure it out” or analyze it. Hypnosis allows the body to access what’s been held and process it safely without the conscious mind judging or interfering. You release the emotion organically without forcing it.
This is helpful if you tend to overthink, overanalyze and struggle to feel without overwhelm.
2. Letting the body lead (instead of the mind)
Emotions don’t move through thinking. They move through the body’s innate intelligence. This can look like letting yourself cry without stopping it, feeling sensations without shutting them down, staying with discomfort for a few minutes instead of distracting. This allows you to rebuild the connection with you body.
3. Breath and awareness (simple but not easy)
Slowing down your breath and bringing attention into your body starts to soften what’s held. Not forcing but noticing where you feel tight, numb or stuck.
There are many types of breath work to do that release emotion but simply pausing a few times a day to notice your breath and posture will start to shift things. Shining the light of awareness on it helps your body reorganize into a healthier pattern.
4. Gentle movement
Sometimes the body needs slow intuitive movement to release like walking, stretching and even crawling.
Many modalities help move emotions, like yoga, Feldenkrais, chi gong, somatic release exercises like TRE and many more. Somatic exercises and therapies work directly with the body to create emotional release.
5. Being witnessed (this is huge)
A lot of emotional holding stays stuck because it was never seen or felt safely. Working with someone who can guide you, hold space for you and help you stay with your experience is key. This goes beyond talk therapy (less analytical and more experiential).
I lead my clients through a somatic inquiry process that helps them release slowly and safely. This is a process of relaxing first, then speaking freely with an attention on body sensations. There will be parts of your body that light up when you talk about something. Simply bring your awareness there for it to release.
This work starts with seeing its value
We have not been taught that our emotions affect our health so profoundly or that we don’t fully digest some of them.
I wrote a Substack post on this topic, if you want to explore it further here.
The reason many people struggle to heal for years is not because their body is broken. It’s because their body is carrying too much. And they address surface symptoms, without trying to lighten their load. The load of all that undigested emotional experience.
If this idea of emotional constipation resonates with you, pay attention to that. It may be your body pointing you somewhere important. And it could also be a cause of physical constipation.
If you want to explore this further, we cover it in Brain, Body, Biome.
