What Does the Phrase "Nervous Stomach" Mean?

The term "nervous stomach" describes a variety of symptoms you may experience in your gut when you are nervous or stressed out. In this video, gastroenterologist Roshini Raj, MD, explains how our brain-gut connection can lead to these symptoms.

Transcript

00:00

The term nervous stomach means how you feel in your stomach

00:09

when you're anxious or stressed out. And those feelings could be different between people. One person may feel nauseous, another person

00:15

may feel they have to urgently go to the bathroom or have diarrhea. Or someone else may just get butterflies in their stomach.

00:22

We all have neurotransmitters, those same chemicals that are in our brain, acting on our intestines. But for some people, that gut-brain connection

00:29

can be very strong and really oversensitive. So a nervous stomach, while it's normal for all of us to get a little anxious in our stomach

00:37

at certain times, someone who has a nervous stomach, they have it way too often.