Do you think Colitis leads to Anxiety or Anxiety leads to Colitis

I don't know about it "leading" to the disease, but it certainly has an effect. Anxiety and stress will trigger the bowel even in healthy people.

However, getting your anxiety/stress under control and learning how to manage it goes a long way in help us feel better, improve the condition, and help maintain remission.

Yes! :)

Hello,

I have been on Lexapro now for almost 5 yrs due to the anxiety of my UC. It does help greatly to help me mental state.

I still get nervous though if I dont know where a bathroom is. I have to ask someone right away where it is located if I have never been in that particular place before. It puts me at ease

This a huge issue for me. Just look at all my recent posts if that's any indication.

I have GAD (undiagnosed), ADHD (diagnosed), OCD (diagnosed) and UC. My sister has the same illnesses but even more so. She has had a long and difficult road with Ulcerative Colitis and her worst flare ups coincided with the times in her life when she was dealing with the most anxiety. She was hospitalized for two years with UC and she was on Prednisone for more than five years as an adolescent (not to mention other drugs).

My flare ups also coincide with stressful times. I just returned overseas, I just worked (and quit) a hellish job with 16 hour days and I recently quit smoking and decided to re-think some major aspects of my life. All this caused a mega-mega flare up. Before I returned overseas I lived with my parents for two months, smoked, ate a lot of food and didn't work. I was as healthy as a pig.

However, in my sister's and in my case, we've both been told by different doctors in Canada that there is no official link between UC and mental states. The Canadian medical association or whatever it's called officially says that there is ABSOLUTELY NO connection between Ulcerative Colitis and stress/anxiety. This has made my family quite angry as my sister didn't see a long term improvement until she started fighting the UC and the anxiety at the same time. Now she's on medication for both and doing much better (she's been in remission for years and years).

It's a circular relationship from my experience. Depending on the type of gut that people have and the bacteria residing in the gut, some people are more prone to anxiety triggers and this is particularly the case with UC patients. And of course, UC will cause anxiety. It's really a vicious cycle.

Anxiety and stress have been huge issues for me as well. I'm pretty sure that stress over a job situation is what (helped) lead to my UC. If I had only known what physical harm stress can do, I would have tried a lot harder to manage it! Now, I find that stressful situations definitely lead to "urgent" situations, but I don't think that elimination of stress is all that is needed to cure my UC, or even that stress necessarily makes the inflammation worse. I think that's really hard to figure out, since even "normal" people have more urges associated with stressful situations.

Nonetheless, I believe that management of stress is very important for leading a comfortable, healthy life -- especially for those of us with UC. And, of course, having this disease can certainly lead to more stress! So, it's definitely circular, as folks have already mentioned. I'm getting some "mindfulness" books soon, and hope that these will help in my continued quest to lead a more calm, stress-free life. Or, at least help me learn to manage the inevitable stress a bit better...