Why You Feel Almost Every Emotion In Your Stomach

September 13, 2026•8 min read

You already know you feel things in your stomach. The email you haven't opened yet sits there. So does the phone call you're putting off, and the dread before a meeting, and the sinking when somebody says "have you got a minute". You'd probably say you've got a nervous stomach and leave it there, because everybody says that.

Here's the part that doesn't get said. Ask yourself where you felt it the last time something went well, and there's a decent chance you'll come up with very little. This week's research is about that gap, and it's a more interesting one than it looks.

This week's research: where people feel their feelings

A team led by Kato Dens at KU Leuven in Belgium, publishing this year in the journal Neurogastroenterology and Motility, took 43 adults who met the standard diagnostic criteria for irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) and 54 adults without it, and asked all of them to do something unusual. Each person was shown blank outlines of a human body on a screen and asked to colour in where they felt sensation increasing and where they felt it dying away, one emotion at a time, through thirteen different emotional states plus a neutral one for comparison. The tool's been used before in emotion research, and what it produces is a heat map of a feeling: where in your body anger happens, where shame happens, where joy happens.

Three things came out of the comparison.

First, the IBS group reported more abdominal sensation than the control group across emotional states generally. Not only the unpleasant ones. Across the board.

Second, and this is the finding I keep coming back to, their abdominal response during the positive emotions was blunted. The belly was louder in general and quieter for the good things specifically.

Third, their body maps distinguished less clearly between one emotion and another than the control group's did. Anger and anxiety and disappointment produced pictures that looked more alike.

Put those together and you get a description of something researchers call interoception, which is your sense of your own internal state: hunger, heartbeat, breath, the feeling of your own gut. What this study describes is interoception with the volume turned up and the tuning gone soft. The gut's talking constantly, and it's saying roughly the same thing whatever you happen to be feeling.

Now the limits, because they're real. Forty-three people and fifty-four is a small study. It's a case-control comparison, which means it photographs two groups and compares them; it isn't a trial and nobody was treated. The maps are self-reported drawings rather than anything measured from the outside. And it can't tell you which way the arrow points: whether living with IBS gradually blurs the maps, or whether people whose maps were always blurrier are more likely to develop IBS. A companion editorial in the same journal, by Thakur and colleagues, makes the case that these altered maps are a reasonable target for brain-gut behavioural work, which is an argument rather than a finding, and worth reading as one.

Why this matters for you. If you've ever been told your symptoms are anxiety, you'll know how wrong that felt, and this study quietly explains part of why. Your gut is where a great deal of your emotional life is being registered, loudly and without much detail, so the signal arrives well before any label for it does. That describes a physical system, and it says nothing at all about your character. We looked at a close cousin of this in What Shame Does To IBS, And How To Loosen Its Grip, where the feeling and the gut were also difficult to pull apart.

Turning the volume down, and the tuning back up

IBS is classified as a disorder of gut-brain interaction, and that's a precise description rather than a softening. Your gut and your brain are in constant two-way conversation, along the nervous system, through hormones, and through the immune system. In IBS that conversation has become oversensitive: ordinary gut activity that someone else wouldn't notice arrives loudly and gets processed as pain or urgency. Researchers call the gut end of that visceral hypersensitivity and the brain end central pain processing. Both are physical and measurable.

What this week's study adds is the second dial. Most of the conversation about IBS is about volume, about how loud the signals are. This is about resolution, about how well you can tell one signal from another. And a system that's loud and low-resolution has an obvious cost: everything coming out of your middle reads as roughly the same alarm, so there's nothing to do with any of it except brace.

The blunted positive finding is the one worth sitting with. It suggests something's been lost as well as added. Somewhere along the way the belly stopped reporting the good stuff, and you probably never noticed it going, because nobody misses a signal they weren't waiting for.

This is where my own work sits, though I want to be careful about the join. This was a study of how people are, not a study of any treatment, and it doesn't show that therapy changes anybody's maps. What it does is describe a target. My method is cognitive behavioural hypnotherapy, which brings three things onto the same maintaining cycle. There's cognitive behavioural therapy, working on what you predict about a sensation and what you then do about it. There's mindfulness, which is training attention onto specific sensation in a specific place, which is precisely the resolution problem this study describes. And there's gut-directed hypnotherapy, which uses focused attention and imagery aimed at the gut itself, to settle how loudly those signals are being read. Gut-directed hypnotherapy carries a strong recommendation in the 2021 British Society of Gastroenterology guideline for IBS, and the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) lists it as an option for IBS that hasn't responded to pharmacological treatment after twelve months, where the picture's described as refractory. What none of that tells you, and I can't either, is what it would do for you specifically.

Your top tip this week

Go and find the good one. The next time something ordinary and pleasant happens, and I mean genuinely ordinary (the first mouthful of a hot drink, somebody being kind on the phone, sitting down after standing for too long), stop for about twenty seconds and ask where in your body you can feel it. Chest, throat, shoulders, hands, stomach, anywhere. Don't hunt for a big feeling and don't worry if the answer's faint or nowhere at all. The size of it doesn't matter. The looking is the whole exercise, because on this week's evidence the reading that's gone quiet in IBS is the pleasant one, and attention is the only instrument you've got for it. Most people spend years scanning their middle for trouble and never once scan it for anything else.

The takeaway

On this evidence your stomach is doing a great deal of the feeling for you, loudly and without much detail, which is why so much of your day seems to arrive there first. Calling that an overreaction misses what's going on. It's a system with a volume problem and a tuning problem, and tuning is the sort of thing attention can work on.

Wherever you are right now

If you haven't had a firm diagnosis yet, that's the first step and it's worth taking before anything else. A positive diagnosis from your general practitioner (GP) rules out what needs ruling out, and it's the gate the recommended support sits behind.

If you were diagnosed a while ago and you're still struggling, you're the person the guidelines had in mind. If you've ever been sent away with "it's just stress", this study's a useful thing to have read, because it describes a physical mechanism rather than a personality.

If you're a GP or a gastroenterologist reading this, the referrer brief for gut-directed hypnotherapy, with the guideline positions set out honestly and their limits stated, is available on request.

If you'd like the science in plain English once a week, plus one thing to try, join Gut Feelings at mindyourguts.co.uk/free-relaxation-page. The free relaxation recording comes with it.

About Mind Your Guts

Mind Your Guts is the Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) blog written by Kathryn Dunn, a cognitive behavioural hypnotherapist based in York and working online. One piece of gut-brain research each week, in plain language, and one thing worth trying. More at mindyourguts.co.uk/gut-feelings.

Twelve Minutes of Calm. A free relaxation recording, about twelve minutes, for the times you want to feel calmer. It is a general relaxation recording rather than a treatment for anything. Download it at mindyourguts.co.uk/free-relaxation-page and you will also join Gut Feelings, my weekly email, which carries each new post to your inbox along with a bit extra.

Hypnotherapy works alongside conventional medical care, never in place of it. This blog shares research for general information and is not a substitute for medical advice. Always consult your GP or another relevant health professional. If your symptoms are new, changing, or accompanied by warning signs such as bleeding, unexplained weight loss, or persistent pain, please see your GP.