A Surprising Path to Resilience: Your Gut

Recently, attention has increased on the gut microbiome—the balance of "good" versus "bad" bacteria in your gastrointestinal tract. Now, research from UCLA published in Nature Mental Health suggests a meaningful connection between the health of your gut microbiome and emotional regulation.

The explosion in studies involving mental health disorders and the gut microbiome has been an exciting development over the past decade in psychological research. Just 20 or 25 years ago, the idea that your intestinal bacteria—which are affected by your diet—could play a significant role in the development of depression, anxiety, and other mental health disorders would have sounded somewhat unrealistic, if not totally outlandish. Now, it is taken as fact that the interplay between your gut microbiome and your brain is crucial when it comes to psychological well-being and that, in fact, it plays a role in some of the most prevalent mental health disorders. Serotonin, for instance, one of the primary neurotransmitters involved in mood and behavior, is synthesized in the gut even more so than in the brain and is likely heavily influenced by the bacteria that make up that environment.

While all of this research has been intriguing and can lead to groundbreaking developments within mental health disorder treatment and prevention, less attention has been devoted to the gut microbiome as it relates to positive psychology. In other words, what can the gut microbiome tell us about flourishing and optimal mental health rather than just treating disorders and imbalances? That's where the latest research from UCLA comes in.

For this study, rather than looking at participants who were suffering from psychopathology like anxiety disorders or depression, researchers sought out healthy people who were particularly resilient and who showed signs of coping even better than the average person. The idea was that profiling what a particularly resilient person looks like in terms of their gut health could potentially lead to better interventions to help others arrive at that high level of functioning—a particularly exciting development in a world full of people reporting particularly high levels of stress. Chronic, intense stress, as much research has shown, can contribute to both physical disease and further mental health problems, creating a vicious cycle.

The current study, led by senior author Arpana Gupta, Ph.D., co-director of the UCLA Goodman-Luskin Microbiome Center, is believed to be the first of its kind. In it, 116 people were surveyed about their resiliency. People with the highest ratings of resilience were less depressed, less anxious, and less prone to judgment, and they had more brain activity (as measured by fMRI) in areas associated with cognition and emotional regulation.

Stool samples were also collected, and this is where the gut microbiome comes in: the highly resilient people exhibited signs of a particularly healthy gut barrier with low inflammation. It was striking to have evidence in both the fMRI and the stool samples that highly resilient people had significant differences in their biological makeup, representing both the brain and the gut. And it lends further evidence to the idea that variations in gut health can be associated not just with diagnosable health issues but with more dimensional aspects of emotional well-being. It appears that particularly highly functioning people—at least in terms of resilience—may be outliers in their own right.

Of course, this study cannot establish causation. Might people already be highly resilient and have guts that eventually develop certain characteristics because of that resilience? Might people with healthy guts be more likely to enjoy good mental health not directly from their microbiome itself but because they are less likely to suffer from other health problems or gastrointestinal distress? Might people prone to eating certain diets that are good for the gut have certain demographic characteristics more highly associated with resilience?

Further research can work on elucidating this. But for now, this study seems to be a potential additional reason that being mindful of your gut microbiome can pay off. Eating food high in fiber, seeking out fermented foods, and trying to limit highly processed, artificial foods, sugars, and alcohol might help you feel better and face the next stressor.