One of the things that I think was crucial to dealing with SIBO, or any chronic illness, is getting enough rest to give the body time to heal. I had been thinking of writing this post last week and then I listened to this podcast with Meghan Telpner on the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast and decided that she said it all better than I could. I’d recommend anyone dealing with a chronic illness listen to what Meghan has to say.
In my case I was used to living a pretty fast paced lifestyle. If I wasn’t at work coding or managing a team at what was the world’s biggest and craziest software company I was out running, hiking, climbing, fishing, biking, etc… basically anything that would keep me in motion. So getting SIBO was a huge shift for me and hard to accept that I had to slow down and get some real rest. Dr. Bowen told me again and again, my new “job” was to relax and heal, not be be doing all the time.
This was complicated by the fact that at times my gut was such a mess a few hours after dinner that I simply couldn’t sleep due to discomfort. My gut usually hit its worst around 10 and stayed bad until about 2 or 3 in the morning so I’d end up getting a ‘good’ 2-3 hours sleep and the rest was restless if I slept at all. When I was at my worst I knew that sleep was more important than anything else so I got my MMJ card and used a combination of high CBD cannabis to help reduce inflammation with some strong Indica strains to kill the discomfort, give me couch lock and put me to sleep. I later found this was slowing my motility even further but at the time the trade-off was worth it, my body needed to get some sleep to just stop burning itself up.
As time went on I experimented with other sleep aids. I found that I really needed to change my sleep habits and lifestyle things to help the most. I wanted nothing to do with prescription sleep aids which really knock you out instead of making you sleep and, as I found out years ago, can become addictive in very short order and withdrawal from them is no picnic. I began wearing my blue blocker glasses a few hours before bed which helped a lot. I used binaural beats from an app on my phone, self-hypnosis apps or listened to The Sleep Tapes by Jeff Bridges to help me get to sleep when I was having issues. I tried various supplements too – melatonin, 200mg of Zen and Cortisol Manager. Recently, again thanks to Ben Greenfield, I found out about Doctor Parsley’s Sleep Cocktails and used one of these last night to see how it worked. I figure if Doc Parsley can put Navy SEALS out with this stuff and got them off prescription sleep meds with it then it must work. I quickly fell asleep last night and slept for 9 hours so it obviously worked once.
On top of getting enough sleep I had to find ways to rest during the day too so that my parasympathetic nervous system could take over a bit and let me heal. That first year we spent a lot of time in the afternoons sitting or lying out in the yard by the river watching the birds and the sky for hours at a time. This was very nourishing for me and I often fell asleep out there for a brief time. I took up my meditation and chanting practice again which was also a huge help, it gave me time to just sit every single day and not be doing. As an added benefit the act of chanting really helps stimulate the vagus nerve which probably needs some work in every SIBO patient since it is a key component to the gut motility and is often not functioning at proper levels when the gut is compromised. I learned about the wonders of a hot bath with Epsom Salts which helped get rid of some of the gut cramping and also got me some extra magnesium which I was in need of. The other thing that helped the gut symptoms was a castor oil pack and a heating pad, there were many afternoons or evenings where I would just lie on the couch with these to try and settle my gut.
When I was finally well enough to “exercise” I didn’t jump back into running, I took up walking and very light bicycling. I started out very slow and just worked my way up, taking short and flat walks or rides at first then longer flat walks and finally some easy hikes. I went fishing but not the all day adventures I used to do, I went to a local river or in my backyard with my tenkara rod for an hour or less and then I came home. It was enough to get out in nature but not burn myself out. I still think spending time in the rivers fishing tenkara that first year had a huge part to play in my healing and I never was out more than 90 minutes on any given day.
Pushing through will do no good. Your body has to rest to recover and resting can be as challenging as the illness for many Americans who are used to such a fast paced lifestyle and the last of emphasis on just taking it easy and enjoying life. We all could use a little change of attitude and maybe a change of latitude to help accomplish this and give our bodies time to heal fully.