alt Hacker NewsI got into bicycle touring a few years ago, and it’s an ultra-endurance activity which means burning 3- 4 times as many calories as I would on a sedentary day. My training rides were all local weekend overnighters in preparation for the big 1000 mile challenge ride, and they were no big deal.
On the big ride, about 3 days in I started experiencing bouts of intestinal distress which would put me into some of the blackest moods I can recall experiencing as an adult. My whole thought process broke down and I became ruthlessly nihilistic about everything. I was ready to tell my partner to go fuck himself, chuck my bike off a bridge and take an uber to the nearest airport.
But then when the intestinal distress subsided I came back to my senses and I was like “WTH was that all about?” It happened several times, to varying degrees of intensity over the 10 day tour. My eating strategy improved and I bought some cannabis which helped my manage the issue and I was able to complete the tour.
That was a few years ago and I’ve never experienced the black mood again. It has prompted me to believe that the mind-gut connection is much stronger than we might have been giving it credit for, and if you suffer from mood or cognition issues, big or small, you may want to investigate whether your guts and gut flora might be playing an influential role.
What you experienced was the gut-brain axis failing under extreme metabolic stress in real time. 3-4x caloric demand and your enteric nervous system was under enormous strain dysregulation of serotonin production, inflammatory signaling flooding the vagus nerve upward into brainstem arousal states, directly degrading the prefrontal predictions that normally keep your self model coherent and future oriented. the nihilism wasn’t a psychological response to difficulty it was your predictive hierarchy collapsing from the bottom up, the higher level model of who you are and why this matters losing the competition against overwhelming lower level distress signals. The fact that it resolved when the intestinal distress subsided is actually clear indicator that mood and cognition are downstream of gut state more than we like to admit. our gut makes a like 80% of our serotonin or something