Did you know that your child’s stomach aches might have more to do with their mind than their meals?

In this episode of the Where Parents Talk podcast host Lianne Castelino speaks with Dr. Ali Navidi, licensed clinical psychologist and CEO of GI Psychology, about the link between the gut and the brain — and what every parent should know.

Dr. Navidi explains how gut–brain disorders such as irritable bowel syndrome IBS, functional abdominal pain, and dyspepsia can begin in early childhood, how anxiety and stress can fuel digestive symptoms, and why clinical hypnosis and CBT are proven tools to help kids heal.

Learn when to seek help, how to support your child’s emotional and physical well-being, and why building safety and routine can make all the difference.

Takeaways:

• Understanding the connection between gut health and emotional well-being is crucial for children and teens, as hormonal changes and anxiety can exacerbate GI disorders.
• Parents should be proactive in maintaining routines for their children, as consistency can foster independence and discipline, while avoiding the pitfalls of anxiety-driven behaviour.
• Open communication about feelings and body awareness is essential in helping children articulate their emotional health, particularly in relation to physical symptoms they may experience.
• Effective treatments for gut-brain interaction disorders include cognitive behavioural therapy and clinical hypnosis, which empower kids to manage their symptoms and improve their mental health.

Links referenced in this episode:

• whereparentstalk.com

Companies mentioned in this episode:

• GI Psychology

This podcast is for parents, guardians, teachers and caregivers to learn proven strategies and trusted tips on raising kids, teens and young adults based on science, evidenced and lived experience.

You’ll learn the latest on topics like managing bullying, consent, fostering healthy relationships, and the interconnectedness of mental, emotional and physical health.

Foreign.

Welcome to the Where Parents Talk podcast. We help grow better parents through science, evidence, and the lived experience of other parents.

Learn how to better navigate the mental and physical health of your tween teen or young adult through proven expert advice. Here's your host, Lianne Castelino.

Welcome to Where Parents Talk. My name is Leanne Castellino. Our guest today is a licensed clinical psychologist and CEO of GI Psychology.

Dr. Ali Navidi is also a leading expert in gastro psychology, a specialized field at the intersection of gastroenterology and mental health, which examines how the brain and gut interact. He works with children, adolescents and adults using clinical hypnosis and cognitive behavioral therapy to support his patients.

Dr. Navidi is also a father of two teens and he joins us today from Burke, Virginia. Thank you so much for making the time, Yann.

I'm excited to speak with you as a journalist, I'm excited to hear what questions you've come up with. I can't wait.

Well, and it's such an interesting topic that I'm not sure how many parents have on their radar. And we're talking about the, the, the relationship between the gut and, and the brain.

So could you take us through in sort of everyday terms what that means, especially for children and teens?

Yeah, I think, I think a place to start is that these kinds of GI disorders, and it's kind of an umbrella term of different disorders called disorders of gut brain interaction, these disorders are extremely common. We see them very frequently.

And, you know, if you're a parent with a kid, it's very likely that at some point your kid is going to have, have one of these disorders. And the most common of these types of disorders is, or the most is irritable bowel syndrome.

But as a parent, you know, kids develop these, and sometimes it's transient and sometimes it lasts longer. So I think it's good for every parent to at least have kind of a knowledge of what these are and how they work.

So along those lines, and generally at what age could these types of disorders begin for a child?

Yeah, so, I mean, they can potentially begin very young, as young as, you know, 2, 3, 4. Typically, if we have, if we have disorders that young, that's going to be more working with the parents as an intervention.

But you might look at, you know, kind of bedwetting and toileting issues when they're really young, and then that can kind of transform over time to potentially when they're older, constipation or frequent diarrhea or stomach pain or nausea. So it can start really early.

You talked about irritable bowel syndrome being one of the conditions associated with this. What are some other common ones that parents may need to know about?

So irritable bowel syndrome would be where there's pain associated with constipation or diarrhea. Functional dyspepsia would be another one where the child is feeling bloated, uncomfortable, there might be a lot of gas.

It might feel like their food is taking a long time to digest. And sometimes you might even see some weight loss. There's a really common one just called functional abdominal pain.

What that means is that there's pain in the abdomen and there isn't a clear physiological reason for it, a clear structural reason. All these categories of disorders are similar in that way, meaning your child is having some kind of GI issue. You know, you're.

You're concerned about it.

You take them to the doctor, they run some tests, they ask some questions, and at the end of it, they say, nope, everything looks good, but the child is still having problems. And. And that's a real problem for people because what do they do at that point?

Especially if the problem's been going on for a significant period of time? And so there aren't really good drug options for these disorders.

There aren't good dietary changes, especially not that I would recommend for children and adolescents. We want to avoid dietary restriction at those ages, if possible.

But maybe, I don't know, maybe I should back up, because I don't know if we've really even fully talked about how these disorders work. Go for it. They're called disorders of gut brain interaction. And this was a new name that started in 20, I think 17.

Before that, they were called functional GI disorders. And the idea was that the function was disrupted, but there's no physiological problem.

What we've come to understand over time is that these are disorders of the nervous system, of the interaction between the central nervous system, which includes the brain, and the enteric nervous system, which is actually part of the GI system. So the GI actually has its own nervous system. And when they interact, that's what's called the gut brain axis. That's the.

The interaction between the brain and the gut. And.

And what we know is that something has gone wrong in the way that these two parts of the body are communicating with each other, and that's leading to this spiral that that is causing symptoms.

Dr. Navidi, what made you decide to focus on this very specialized area of clinical psychology?

Yeah, I wish I could say I had. I Had this master plan. It really was, I was in, I, I was interested in psychology and I was interested in clinical hypnosis.

And I, and I learned as much as I could about using hypnosis clinically to help people.

And I, I took a training on how to use it for gi, but I never really actually expected to use, wasn't really on my radar until I had a patient come in that had ibs. And I was mostly treating usually kids and adolescents. And that's most of my career, that's who I've treated.

So I used clinical hypnosis and it worked just so amazingly. And so then I wanted to learn more and I treated more patients with it.

And then the gastroenterologist discovered me in my area and started referring more and more patients to me. And before I knew it, that was the majority of my patient load.

And then I was just frustrated because there was no one else with this expertise in a very busy metropolitan area. And so I decided to start this bigger practice called GI psychology. And the mission really is to just make these treatments more available.

So I guess that's a long way to say how I got there.

Yeah, no, it's really interesting.

And you talk about many of your clients or most of them being children and teens and I wonder, could you take us through how GI gut brain related issues manifest differently in kids versus adults?

Yeah. So the good news is one of the main differences is that kids are easier to treat. Adults have had these problems longer.

It's, it's built more into their neurology, into their identity. It's harder for them to change. And that's shown in the research.

By the way, there's a tremendous amount of research showing that GI focused CBT and clinical hypnosis are extremely effective for these disorders. I'm Talking about over 40 years of research, hundreds of studies.

Anyway, what's shown in the research is adults have around a 70% effectiveness rate, meaning they're going to reach their treatment goals about 70% of the time, which isn't bad, but kids have about 80%, they're going to respond. I found that to be very true in my practice. Kids were very responsive to treatment.

I think the basic lesson is if you're getting the impression that your child has one of these disorders, sooner rather than later is always better. The faster they're seen, the easier it is to treat.

So then at what point should a parent. Because I think we've all heard a child over the years talk about waking up in the morning and not, you know, having A tummy ache and whatever.

So how do they differentiate between maybe something that's not serious to something that requires medical intervention? At what point? Point. What are the signs that they should be looking for?

Yeah, and I'll. And I'll probably leave out some. So I think the safest.

The safest route is if you're getting new symptoms that your child has never displayed before and they're persistent. Right. Not just maybe once, but days. They're occurring for days.

You know, go to your pediatrician, get checked out, and what they're going to do is they're going to rule out a bunch of danger signals. So I think one of them, it would be like blood in the stool. Another would be pain that wakes them up at night, that would be another one.

And I think there's a few others. So that's why I'm saying go to your pediatrician, get checked out.

And if they feel it's needed, they might refer you to a gastro, a pediatric gastroenterologist. And they, depending on the situation, the symptoms, they might do different types of testing.

But if that testing comes back and they say, good news, we haven't found anything wrong, it looks like you have. And they might say functional abdominal pain, they might say functional nausea or irritable bowel syndrome or whatever.

They say, that's the time to get some help. That's the time where, you know, someone like myself or my clinic can help.

When we talk about kids, teens, tweens, what are you seeing in terms of trends, if any, in your own practice as to how these different conditions are appearing, manifesting symptoms? Are there any current trends that you're observing?

Yes.

So when you look at these disorders, disorders of gut brain interaction, when you look at them, there's certain trends that have always been true, which is kids that have anxiety disorders, kids that have a history of trauma, kids that have had or have an eating disorder, and then kids that are on the autism spectrum tend to develop these disorders much more often.

Now, the trend has been, especially after Covid, but even before that, there's very, very clear trends for increases in anxiety among kids and adolescents. And because of that, we're seeing more of these GI problems.

So that's certainly been the trend, because if you increase anxiety, then you're also almost by the nature of the problem, you're increasing these GI problems as well.

Can you take us through, in layman's terms, what that connection is for our viewers and listeners to better understand if somebody is predisposed to any of those conditions? That you outline there, then they could.

Be.

Experiencing gut brain interaction issues more predominantly than others. Why is that?

You know, I think. I think what we're coming to is, in layman's terms, I can say it in kind of one word, safety.

When people, when kids, when teenagers feel unsafe about their body in some way, and I can give you a relatively common example that I've seen clinically. So I had a child come to me. I think she was around 10 years old, and I guess at some point she got food poisoning.

And she was someone who kind of runs on the anxious side just in general in her life. She got food poisoning, woke up in the middle of the night just vomiting. And you could imagine for a kid that's. That's very disorienting. It's scary.

You know, they're alone in the dark and they're feeling terrible and they're throwing up. Anyway, the food poisoning passed and she was fine, except she kept having stomach pain and it didn't go away.

So, of course her parents go and they get her checked out and, you know, they can't find anything physically wrong, so they send. Send her to me. But I can tell you, I think I know exactly what happened.

She had such a traumatic experience with that waking up and vomiting that she essentially developed a phobia to vomiting. And so then what happens is her brain automatically is constantly scanning her gut in a very anxious way. We call that hypervigilance.

She was scanning, and then if she noticed anything wrong, her brain was freaking out and catastrophizing. Oh, my God, am I going to throw up? What's happening here?

This is bad, you know, and so all of that anxiety is getting transmitted down into her gut and actually causing more symptoms. It was causing that pain was the anxiety that was getting transmitted down.

Then there's one more factor that's very powerful for parents to understand who have kids with these disorders. That's this concept called visceral hypersensitivity.

It's the idea that when the brain is primed to see danger in the gut, like this patient I was telling you about, what it. What it can actually do is take normal sensations from the gut and amplify and distort them. And what that means is you could take a feeling of.

Let's say. Let's say you ate a little too much, your stomach's feeling kind of full, It's a little uncomfortable.

For someone with visceral hypersensitivity, that's. That could be agonizing pain.

And so now they've got pain and then they've got this anxious brain that's freaking out about the pain, that's sending signals back down into the gut. They're causing more symptoms, and it's this spiral that kind of gets out of control.

So in the example you provided, Dr. Navidi, how did you go about helping that young patient, that 10 year old?

Yeah. So there's two modalities of treatment that have shown in the research to be effective.

GI focus, cbt, cognitive behavioral therapy, and clinical hypnosis.

And to maybe oversimplify things, we can say that we used the cognitive behavioral therapy to change that pattern of hypervigilance and catastrophizing, because that's one of the things you can do well with CBT is change patterns of thinking, especially dysfunctional ones. So we're shifting that pattern of hyper vigilance and catastrophizing to more healthier, more adaptive ways of thinking.

Then we can, using hypnosis, directly reduce that visceral hypersensitivity. Imagine like you're, I don't know, listening to some music and someone just like, pumped up the volume really high.

And what we're doing with hypnosis is we're turning that volume back down to a healthy level.

When we talk about clinical hypnosis, that can sound alarming to some people for multiple reasons, certainly intimidating. What misconceptions or what kind of feedback do you get from your patients when you talk about clinical.

Clinical hypnosis, you know, when they don't really understand it in terms of how it can help them?

Well, what I like to say, you know, right off the bat for, for patients and for parents is if you weren't a little alarmed about the idea of using hypnosis, I would be very surprised. Because what do most people know about hypnosis? They know entertainment hypnosis.

They know what they see in the movies, they know what they see in stage shows. So what do they know? They know mind control and magic and kind of weird things like that.

And it's kind of fun to watch, but it's very different from what we're doing clinically. And so when I explain, okay, if it's not all that entertainment stuff, then what is it? Well, it's actually pretty straightforward and simple.

We all have this normal state of consciousness called trance. We all kind of go in and out of it.

You know, my, my daughter makes fun of me all the time because I'll be watching TV and she'll try to talk to me and I'll respond like 30 seconds later, there's this like delay because I'm just so focused on, on what I'm watching. Everything else kind of gets tuned out. That's just an example of trance. We go into trance when we drive our car to a place we've been many times.

People go into trance when they exercise. It's. It's happening all the time. And so hypnosis is just about teaching people how to go into trance on purpose instead of accidentally.

And the reason we care about trance is because when people are in trance, they have a much more clear ability to influence the mind body connection. And there's theories that that's because when people are in trance, their ability to focus on just one thing is much more powerful.

In our normal state of consciousness. I'm hearing the fan behind me, I'm noticing the light. I'm looking at you.

It's a diffuse state of awareness, whereas in trance we can be laser focused. And that allows us to influence our body much more powerfully.

What does that look like then in terms of how long does a child who's undergone clinical health hypnosis to deal with these conditions that we're talking about, how long does that last?

How long does it take for them to be able to teach themselves how to go into trans if and when they encounter an issue that could lead to what we're talking about here?

And that's the other good news. These treatments are not very long term. They tend to be between eight to 12 sessions. And honestly, from my experience, kids are even faster.

I've just got done helping a patient, 12 years old, functional abdominal pain. And this was. They weren't eating as much, they were avoiding foods.

They wouldn't go out places because their stomach was hurting and they were scared it would hurt in places where they weren't really going to be comfortable. It took, I think, for this person, and they responded a little quickly, but they responded in two sessions.

Kids tend to be better at hypnosis, and the research shows that hypnotic ability peaks at around 11 or 12 years old. They tend to be the best subjects. They responded very quickly. But I've noticed over the years that often kids will respond much faster than adults.

But if you want the average course of treatment, including kids and adults, it tends to be around 8:12 sessions.

Take us through what a typical session, if that exists, looks like with yourself and a teenager as it relates to using cognitive behavioral therapy.

Sure. So let's say we're talking about their tendency to catastrophize. That's a really common one.

So you might have a kid who wakes up in the morning and notices they've got a stomach ache, and immediately what they're thinking is, oh my gosh, I can't go to school. Okay, well, why can't you go to school?

Because it's just going to get worse and then everybody's going to make fun of me because, you know, I have to go to the bathroom and it's going to be terrible. I won't be able to concentrate, and the teacher is going to be mad at me because I won't learn. Right?

And so you can see all the catastrophizing that, that they're doing. And so what you want to begin with is help them to understand a very fundamental concept. And that is the way we think influences how we feel.

And it seems like such an obvious one for adults, but for kids, it's something that's not so obvious because their thoughts are just kind of in the background for them. Sometimes they don't even realize that's what they're really thinking.

So often the first step is help them just to become aware of their own thinking. Okay? And then realize, okay, how do you think that kind of thinking is affecting how you feel?

And then once they get that, then you can start playing with, I wonder what you'd feel like if you were thinking differently. Why don't we try on some different thoughts?

What would it be like if you thought to yourself, oh, my stomach might hurt at school, but I'm tough enough, I can take it, I can handle it. Or if I, if I have to go to the bathroom, probably nobody's going to care, right? How do you.

And then have them think about how they might feel if they, they tried out this alternative thought, right? So what you're, you're developing is increased awareness, the awareness that thought, how thoughts influence their feeling.

And then you're building cognitive flexibility, the ability to try on other ways of thinking and see how that works. And maybe it works better for them. So that would be an example.

There are certainly kids in that group who feel everything in their stomach, as it were.

What can you suggest to parents who may be experiencing that in their family with their children to help their kids support better digestion and emotional resilience?

So I think as parents, we have, we've got a great perspective, I think better than any doctor in the sense that we really know our kids, right? We've seen their patterns. And so if you've got a kid that tends to feel things in their stomach, right?

And there's definitely a subset of children that are like that. The best thing you can do is is help them build safety, help them build the understanding that they're feeling this in their stomach.

But it doesn't mean there's anything wrong. In fact, they have a strong, healthy stomach and that what they're feeling is just their brain's way of expressing feelings.

And our job is to figure out what those feelings are. Because once we figure out what the feelings are, then we can do something about the situation.

When it's living in the stomach, really, there's nothing we can do about it. So it's kind of a two step process. One is to help them understand that they're safe and healthy.

And then the second is to try to do that investigative work to figure out what those feelings are about. Are they worried about their teacher? Are they worried about an assignment? Is somebody picking on them?

You know, like what is going on with the child, that they're having these feelings that are going into their belly?

Let's talk for a moment about routines. Kids generally enjoy routines. That kind of structure is something they all need. When we're talking about meals and school and schedules and sleep.

How does, how do those different pieces impact emotional health, emotional well being and the digestive system as well?

I think they're so important to develop healthy routines.

And I think a mistake that a lot of parents make when they have a child with one of these disorders of gut brain interaction is they allow the disorder to run the show. And what do I mean by that?

I mean, because their child is uncomfortable, that now becomes a reason to begin avoiding things, to disrupting their routine, to shifting.

And that's probably one of the worst things that you can do because the more the child begins to avoid life, the more anxious they're going to become. And so often I'll start working with, with a child when, you know, it's far along in that process and they might not even be going to school at all.

Right. They're, they're homebound in some way.

And so it's really a harder, longer process to get them back into school, to get them back into activities, especially when they've been out of school for a while or out of activities for a while.

So the best thing that a parent can do once they confirm that there's no structural problem, that there's no inflammation or illness, is to maintain those routines as much as possible because they're good for the child and they're going to prevent the child from developing secondary problems.

If there's one change that you wish that parents could make as it relates to their child's gut health, what would that be?

So it's interesting they did this study on parenting style as it relates to kids with these kinds of problems. What they found is a little counterintuitive, but it makes sense from a certain perspective.

What they found is that the parenting style that was very loving and attending actually tended to work worse for these kids.

And a more matter of fact, kind of straight, like, not necessarily, these aren't parents that don't love their kids, but how they handle their kids when there's pain, when there's discomfort.

And in a more matter of fact, very kind of down to earth, hey, I'm sorry that, you know, your stomach's hurting today, but you know, we still need to go to school. Right? Versus oh my gosh, my poor baby, like, and then, you know, I'm going to rub your back for a half hour and I'm going to do this.

And that those kids tended to do worse than the parents that had a more matter of fact style.

So what I'd recommend is that if your kid is having these kind of problems that you might want to kind of, if you, if you're, if you're on the, you know, the, the spectrum of very mud, you know, very loving, very, you know, kind of indulging your kid a lot, not in a negative way, but just maybe that's your personality, you might want to shift a little bit over to the other side of the spectrum and be a little bit more matter of fact, a little more kind of down to earth.

What would you say to any of the audience listening or watching this interview about what they need to keep in mind in general about gut brain health, whether they are a parent, whether they are a child, whether they're an adult?

Yeah, I think that, and this might be even broader than gut brain health, but I think this applies to all kinds, that the connection between the mind and the body is much more powerful and impactful. I think that most people realize and that there's not just a lot of pain in the gut, but a lot of pain in the body.

Often that can be explained as a mind body reaction. And I think as a culture, our western culture kind of tends to disregard that and we want to medicalize everything.

But I think it's, I mean, I know from my experience it's happening a lot more than we realize.

And so it's something to keep in mind if your kid has any kind of chronic pain, you want to just keep it in the back of your mind that if you're going to the doctor and they're not finding anything, that that might also be a very real possibility that this is a mind body problem, not necessarily a problem that's going to respond to medication or surgery or something, something like that.

Lots of tremendous food for thought for parents and certainly for all of us, really. Dr. Ali Navidi, licensed clinical psychologist and CEO of GI Psychology, thank you so much for your time and your insight today.

My pleasure.

To learn more about today's podcast, guest and topic, as well as other parenting themes, visit whereparentstalk.com.