How to Keep H Pylori From Coming Back

When it comes to your ability to keep H pylori from coming back, most of the focus tends to land on treatment protocols, diets, or the right combination of supplements. But there’s one crucial piece that often gets overlooked – yet it can make or break your ability to stay symptom-free for good AND eradicate your H pylori infection.

If you really want to keep H pylori from coming back, you have to go deeper than protocols. And that starts with something most people don’t associate with gut healing at all: building your body’s resilience to stress.

So, if you’re ready to dive deeper than endless treatment protocols and antibiotics, keep reading for the simple strategy that could make your next H pylori treatment your last.

Why Stress Resilience Matters for Your Ability to Keep H Pylori from Coming Back

Before we dive into the how-to, let’s talk about what stress resilience actually means. Because stress resilience is not just about meditating more or downloading another mindfulness app.

Stress resilience is your body’s ability to adapt to and recover from stress without it derailing your health.

Unlike stress management, which focuses on reducing external stressors, building resilience is about strengthening your body to better handle the stress that’s inevitably going to come your way.

If you’re anything like me (and many of my clients), you’ve probably got a full plate – whether it’s work, parenting, or family responsibilities. And when life feels like a nonstop sprint, “just relax” or “take a bubble bath” isn’t exactly practical advice.

The truth is, chronic stress doesn’t just wear you down mentally, it actively disrupts digestion, weakens your immune system, and makes it harder for your body to heal.

That’s why stress resilience is such a critical (and often missing) piece of keeping H pylori from coming back. Even with the best diet and most targeted supplement protocol, your stomach can’t fully recover if your body is stuck in survival mode.

If you’ve tried all the treatments and still feel like you’re back at square one, don’t overlook the role that building stress resilience plays in your ability to keep H pylori from coming back.

Strengthening your stress resilience may be the exact step your body has been waiting for.

Signs Your Body Lacks Stress Resilience

Many of my clients come to me after trying every supplement, every diet, every protocol… and still not getting lasting relief.

And when we dig a little deeper, we find that their body simply isn’t resilient enough to handle everyday stress (let alone an aggressive treatment protocol) without tipping into symptom flare-ups.

If that feels like you, that is a good sign that 

Here are a few signs that your body might be in a low-resilience state and that it could be impacting your treatment success:

• You feel exhausted in the morning and rely on caffeine to function – even after a full night’s sleep
• You experience ongoing gut symptoms like bloating, gas, or heartburn – despite doing “all the right things” to address these physical symptoms
• You struggle with falling asleep, staying asleep, or waking frequently throughout the night
• You feel overwhelmed easily and even small disruptions feel like too much
• You get sick often and it takes a long time to recover

If you nodded along to any of these, building stress resilience could be the missing piece in your healing journey.

Gut infections like H pylori tend to thrive in a body that’s run down and overstressed.

But the good news? If you’ve never addressed this critical stress resilience piece, there is so much room for improvement.

And helping your body become more resilient can completely shift the trajectory of your symptoms, long-term health, and your ability to keep H pylori from ever coming back.

What a Resilient Body Looks Like (And Why It Matters for H Pylori)

Now let’s flip the script. What does it actually look like when your body is resilient to stress, and how does that help keep H pylori from coming back?

A resilient body doesn’t just feel better – it functions better on every level.

When your stress response is balanced and your system isn’t constantly in survival mode, your body can:

• Maintain healthy stomach acid levels, which create a hostile environment for H pylori to survive
• Strengthen your immune defenses, making it harder for infections to take hold
• Support smooth, efficient digestion, so food and nutrients don’t linger and feed unwanted bacteria

These are just a few of the ways resilience impacts your gut health. So if you’ve ever found yourself stuck in the cycle of treating H pylori only to have symptoms return – or never fully go away in the first place – chronic stress may be the root cause no one’s addressed yet.

The goal isn’t just to kill off H pylori (because it is just a bacteria that you can get exposed to again and again).

The real goal is to build a body that’s strong, balanced, and resilient enough to keep infections from coming back in the first place.

Simple Strategies to Build Stress Resilience (That Actually Work to Keep H Pylori from Coming Back)

Now that you understand why stress resilience matters so much for keeping H pylori from coming back, let’s talk about a few simple strategies you can start using today.

These are the exact tools I use myself and with my clients – and they make a noticeable difference in how the body handles stress, digestion, and recovery.

1. Breathwork

This is my personal favorite, because it’s quick, easy, free, and it works immediately.

One of the simplest and most effective breath techniques is called box breathing. Here’s how it works:

• Inhale for 5 counts
• Hold for 5 counts
• Exhale for 5 counts
• Hold again for 5 counts

Then repeat.

This type of breathing activates your parasympathetic nervous system – your body’s rest and digest mode – and helps pull you out of that chronic stress state that keeps digestion shut down and symptoms flaring.

Try doing 5-10 minutes of any sort of deep breathing before bed tonight. Consistency is key, but you should feel a difference after your first session!

2. Cold Exposure

Cold exposure is another powerful, science-backed way to build resilience.

My go-to method? Cold showers.

The idea isn’t to torture yourself – it’s to use the cold as a controlled stressor that helps train your nervous system.

The first instinct when cold water hits is to tense up and hyperventilate. But the real skill is learning to breathe slowly and relax through it.

That practice of staying calm in a controlled stress environment teaches your body how to better regulate its stress response, so when real-life stressors hit, your body doesn’t go into overdrive. It knows how to respond, and it is used to reacting calmly in stressful situations.

Try turning the water to cold at the end of a shower – just start with 15 seconds, and work your way up to 2 minutes or more.

The key is not to let your stress response take over. Focus on your breathing and relaxing into the cold. You’ll be amazed at how not cold the water will feel after you do this for a while!

3. Nervous System Training Tools

There are also some amazing tools and devices that can help you track and train your nervous system over time. One of my favorites is the HeartMath Inner Balance Device (use code NINJA at checkout to save 10%!).

HeartMath is a small device that clips to your earlobe and measures heart rate variability (HRV) – a key marker of how well your body adapts to stress. You use it while doing guided breathing exercises, and the app turns it into a game, giving you real-time feedback and a score to track your progress.

And what’s great about this device, is that it helps you get into a consistent routine of doing this focused breathing, helping your body more easily shift into a parasympathetic nervous system state, and increasing your HRV.

Because higher HRV = better stress resilience. And that’s what we’re aiming for.

I’ve found this tool incredibly helpful both personally and professionally. This is the one tool that I consistently use to help calm my body, sleep better… and I actually see higher HRV (as tracked by my Oura Ring) when I use the HeartMath before bed. So it definitely works!

Consistency Is What Keeps H Pylori From Coming Back

When it comes to being able to keep H pylori from coming back, no matter which practice you start with (breathwork, cold exposure, using a tool like HeartMath, or something else) the most important thing is consistency.

Building stress resilience is just like building muscle at the gym. You can’t expect to do it a handful of times and suddenly have lasting results.

It takes repetition, patience, and daily commitment. At first, the changes might feel subtle or even invisible – but over time, they compound in powerful ways.

When you make building stress resilience a regular part of your life, you’ll start to notice big shifts in your energy, mood, immune strength, and digestive symptoms.

Your body will feel more grounded. You’ll recover faster. And most importantly you’ll finally create the internal environment that is able to keep H pylori from coming back so you can make this next treatment protocol your last!

So if you’ve tried everything else and still feel stuck, but you haven’t consistently supported your nervous system… you haven’t run out of options. In fact, you may have just found the most important one.

The Bottom Line

If you want to keep H pylori from coming back, you have to do more than just follow the right protocol or avoid trigger foods. You have to support your body in a deeper way – by building its resilience to stress.

Here’s what to remember:

• Stress resilience isn’t about eliminating stress – it’s about helping your body handle it better.
• A low-resilience state can lead to poor digestion, weak immune function, and repeated H pylori infections, even after treatment.
• A resilient body maintains strong stomach acid, smooth digestion, and better immune defenses.
• Breathwork, cold exposure, and HRV training tools like HeartMath are all powerful ways to train your nervous system.
• Consistency is key. Just like building strength in the gym, results come from daily, repeated practice, not quick fixes.

If you’ve done all the right things and still feel stuck, building stress resilience might just be the piece that unlocks lasting relief from your stomach symptoms.

Some of the links in this post may be affiliate links, which means I may earn a small commission if you choose to make a purchase, at no extra cost to you. I only recommend products I use personally and recommend to my clients to support gut healing. Thank you for supporting my work!