Probiotic Thoughts: Can Your Thoughts Shape Your Microbiome?

The Push Pull Principle:

Let me explain what I mean by push and pull. Think about a fan. You can push electricity into it, and the fan will start rotating. That is one direction. But what if you want electricity from the fan? You can rotate the fan physically. When you do that, electricity will come out from the other side. So there is a relationship between electric inflow and physical movement. Either you send electricity to get movement, or you create physical movement to get electricity. This forward and reverse kind of interaction appears everywhere once you start looking.

Another example comes from my time in Bombay. I needed to join a Yahoo chat, but I did not have a microphone. So I put another headphone into the mic jack and spoke into the headphone. Why did that work? Because just as sending current through a speaker produces sound, speaking into a speaker produces electricity from the other side. It acts as a microphone. Many things in life have this push pull or reversible interaction.

Nature is full of such events. Consider a horse drawn cart. The horse pulls, and it works fine. Or consider a train with an engine at the back pushing. That also works fine. Whether pulling or pushing, as long as the work gets done, it works.

So I started wondering: Could this principle apply to our own biology, specifically to the relationship between our mind and our gut microbiome? Either we eat the right probiotics to become healthy, to gain motivation and willpower, to improve our blood pressure and metabolic parameters. That is the push. But could we do the reverse? Could we start improving our mindset first so that the right probiotics develop within our body? Could we start changing our mindset so that the probiotics colonize our gut naturally?

Here is the logic. If research shows that a certain probiotic improves your willpower, can I first start working on my willpower so that the probiotic now has an environment conducive to its growth in my gut? By forcing an outcome, you are creating a need for that probiotic. Your body, having already created that state, realizes that the state cannot be maintained easily. So your body looks for a shortcut. It asks, where is that probiotic? It scans the incoming streams of probiotic immigrants and looks out for the right one more earnestly. When it encounters the one that is required, it provides the right environment, fast tracks its acceptance formalities, creates the niche, and cultures more of it.

This is where the concept of dinacharya comes in. Dinacharya means a daily routine, a disciplined lifestyle. It helps you create the pull. If there is no push from nature, if you cannot easily get the right probiotics, then you create the pull by following a certain lifestyle. You make the pull so strong that even a little bit of input goes a long way.

When people are deprived of sleep for a long time, the body uses every opportunity to catch some sleep. It starts to snatch micro sleep events, sometimes in the moment it takes to blink one's eyes. That is the power of intense need and sensitivity. When you are finely tuned, when your need for certain probiotic helpers is very high and intensely felt, the body will issue a lookout circular and work hard to fish out that microbiome from wherever it is present. Even if it is only one hundredth or one thousandth of what exists in an ideal scenario, like a high CFU probiotic pill, your body will find it, provide it the support, culture it for you, and help you reap the benefits.

So you need to create a pull. That is where dinacharya helps. That is where acting before something becomes a part of you can make a difference. This is something I would love to research further. Just as probiotics impact our thoughts, how can we use our thoughts to invite those probiotics into our body?

Let us shift gears.

Consider laughter therapy. We know that when you laugh, you relax, you release tension, you release stress. But for a long time, we were told that laughter has to happen spontaneously. Then I saw laughter clubs where people stand together, get ready to laugh, and laugh for no reason. Surprisingly, even when they laugh artificially, slowly their muscles start to relax. Their expressions shift from acting to genuine laughter. You can see the transition. Someone forces themselves to laugh, and then the laughter becomes real. No joke was involved. Nothing was funny. Yet the laughter and its benefits still came.

Either you laugh because you hear a joke and get all the relaxing effects, or you force yourself to laugh, and automatically the muscles relax. The genuine laughter follows, which again helps you release tension and become healthy. Even with no external stimulus, you can force create laughter and get all its benefits because after some time it becomes genuine.

Now apply that same thinking to the microbiome. Could we behave in such a way that we create a pull for these beneficial bacteria to grow within us? There might only be a small number of those probiotics in your body right now. But if you start to behave in a certain way, could that provide the impetus for them to divide more, to grow more aggressively, to occupy new niches, and to start giving you the postbiotics you need? If you create a demand for the postbiotics, could you be encouraging the probiotics?

That is something worth probing. That is something worth experimenting on. We could design clinical trials to see if, just as probiotics give us certain benefits, we could act in that particular way first so as to help those probiotics grow within us.

It is not about just pretending, but actively trying to experience the intended outcome: acting less stressed, acting more motivated, thinking and feeling as if you have more energy. Then observe as weeks pass by whether your body starts to feel better and whether the effort of maintaining that state fades and the behavior becomes more spontaneous and feels more natural. For example, you might start to feel more in control, lose weight without trying, or find it easier to sleep, relax, and unwind. Perhaps this could be a sign that your body has recruited the right probiotics because there was a requirement and an urgency to address it as well.

Either the microbiome pushes you to be motivated, or you pull yourself into a direction that helps the microbiome grow and sustain itself. That is the push pull principle. And it may be one of the most important frontiers for understanding the connection between our daily actions and our inner ecology.