your body speaks | Holistic Healing, Listening to Your Body, Women’s Health Over 40, Christian Health Podcast, Faith-Based Wellness

Ep21: 2 Surprising Signs Your Body’s Fighting Something: Early Immune Clues You Don’t Want to Miss

• Dr. Brook Sheehan • Season 2 • Episode 8

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Before you catch that cold, feel that ache, or find yourself flat on your back… your body tries to warn you.

In this episode of your body speaks, Dr. Brook walks you through the two earliest signals your immune system sends before a full-blown illness takes over — and what to do about it.

You’ll learn:

  • 🔍 The difference between “just tired” and immune-related fatigue
  • 🤧 What those random sneezes actually mean (spoiler: it’s not allergies)
  • 💧 Why more water isn’t always better — and how much is just right
  • 🚫 The sugar trap: how it silently sabotages your white blood cells
  • 🛌 How 45 extra minutes of rest can prevent a full crash
  • 🧄 And yes… the raw garlic trick that could change everything

Dr. Brook also shares her exact 2.5-day immune support protocol and reads aloud one of the most powerful cards from her Talk to Me, Body affirmation card deck, a reminder that your symptoms are not a betrayal, but a message of healing.

Whether it’s spring, summer, or smack in the middle of cold season, this episode will change how you listen to your body’s earliest whispers.

✨ Ready to shift from fear to faith in your body? Discover the Talk to Me, Body affirmation card deck—your daily reminder that God designed your body with wisdom and resilience.
Get yours here → drbrooksheehan.com/talk-to-me-body

🎧 Stay Connected + Explore More Support:

If today’s episode spoke to something deeper in you, there’s so much more waiting for you inside my world.

💬 Start meaningful conversations with your body using the Talk to Me, Body affirmation card deck. Each card is written from your body’s perspective to help you shift from fear to faith in your healing.

📔 Track what your body is whispering with the My Body’s Whispers Journal, a gentle guide to help you connect physical symptoms with spiritual, emotional, mental, and lifestyle insights.

🌿 Want to deepen your listening practice and explore real-time body wisdom with others? Join the waitlist for the bodyOS™ membership, where we learn to decode the body’s signals together.

🌐 For more tools, free downloads, and upcoming course releases, visit drbrooksheehan.com

📲 And come say hi on Instagram: @drbrooksheehan

⭐️ If you loved this episode, would you take a moment to leave a five-star review on Apple or Spotify. It helps more women learn to listen, trust, and transform their health.

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Honey, okay? This is the thing. This is the thing. A lot of people think, oh, I'm not feeling well. I'm going to drink a lot of tea with a lot of honey because I need honey, know, like honey and tea, honey and tea. Well, honey and tea, while they may seem like they go together like peanut butter and jelly, it's not beneficial to you. It's not beneficial to you. I'll say that right now. 

Welcome to the body speaks podcast with me, Dr. Brook Sheehan. Join me, on a journey, in discovering how to interpret the subtle signs your body uses to communicate with you - the whispers, the screams, and everything in between. Your body truly holds the answers for your health and wellbeing. It’s time to discover them, together. Let’s dive in. 

Hi friend, welcome back to another episode of your body speaks. I'm of course Dr. Brook and I am so excited and grateful that you are joining me for another episode. In today's episode, we are going to be talking all about how to understand what signals your body is giving you when it's starting to crumble. Now, simply what I mean by that is when your immune system starts decreasing in its capacity to deal with the pathogens or the bacteria or the viruses or the all the things that could be coming in and attacking it. What are the signals that our body is alerting us that there's something going on behind the scenes and how can we address them? So before I jump in, I want to make it very, very clear that no matter what time of year you're listening to this, it applies. OK, we don't just get sick in the cooler winter times. There are times when the immune system kicks into gear. in the summertime. There are times, you know, randomly in March or in April or all these different times where we can go down for the count. And I'm going to tell you right now, and I've mentioned this on another previous episode earlier in these recordings, that the body will signal to you that something's going on behind the scenes before it actually truly manifests into full blown sickness. So how can we learn to adhere and follow those signals that the body is giving us so we don't end up flat on our back, having to call out sick, having to change our plans around because we're doing according to what our body is asking. And I'm gonna share that with you today. So first things first, one of the big ones that I have experienced myself and I know that many of you listening may have also experienced this, maybe you didn't know what was going on. Unexplainable fatigue. Now, no matter how many hours of sleep you're getting a night, you just feel so depleted. Like you're just exhausted. You're waking up tired. You're moving through your day at a really low pace, right? Like feeling slow, feeling groggy, maybe like a low grade headache. And you are drinking water. You're trying to maybe up your caffeine intake to try to pull you through the day. I'll tell you right now that that is a sign that the immune system is working behind the scenes before you feel actual symptoms of a fever or a cough or the chills or any of those kinds of things. The other really, really, really big one, and I say really, really, really a bunch of times because it is so huge and something so many of us just dismiss and move on is sneezing. Now I am not. talking about the seasonal allergies that people get when they start to sneeze because there's more pollen in the air and that kind of sneezing. No, I'm talking sneezing where you just sneeze a few times, a couple of times in a row, like one Z, two Z, maybe even three. And the people next to you are like, God bless you. God bless you. You may have even done that for somebody else that you've heard sneeze, right? You've, you've, God bless you. Done, done the proper. societal thing to say and moved on. But what is going on there? Now, I want to get a little nerdy with you. I know for those of you who do listen to this show consistently, know, Dr. Brook likes to get nerdy and get into the weeds about different things. But I believe, and I truly believe this with my whole heart, that you start to truly understand your body when you have some education around it, right? when we understand where certain organs are, when we understand basic physiology, you don't have to understand every little nuance and every detail, but understanding some things will help you in the long run. So this is important to understand. With the sneezing, now there's a huge difference and this is what I'm gonna break it down with you, or break it down for you, I should say. With sneezing, there's two different kinds. There's the random sneezing that your neighbor or someone in your coworking space will say, God bless you and move on. Then there's the sneezing that you experience where your eyes are watering, your nose is dripping, all of those kinds of things. Those are more seasonal allergies. And when I talk about nose dripping, I'm talking about clear fluid coming out, kind of like if your eyes are drippy. Those you can kind of take the over the counter seasonal medications. If that's what you do, if you're more holistic minded and you don't like taking the medications, then you can do all the things that help with that. The teas, the nasal, you know, sprays and whatnot. But here is the weeds. I know I kind of went on a little limb and then we're coming back. Here's the weeds. your body does things in the background that you have no idea it's doing. So yes, you know your heart is beating. Yes, you know your lungs are expanding and deflating. Yes, you know these things are happening, but there's a lot of things quietly happening in the background and things like immune system distress. Now in the medical field, in doctoring, this is known as subclinical infections. So you can have a subclinical bacterial infection. a subclinical viral infection or fungal infection or parasite infection subclinical meaning underneath the clinical presentation, meaning you are not even expressing symptoms. So this is why it's super key to listen to these signals that your body is giving you because it's talking, right? This is what this whole show is about. I'm getting very animated on my soapbox. And for those of you who know me, I'll take a deep breath and slow it down. but I do get animated about this. There is subclinical things that go on. Pay attention to these signals. I mentioned unexplainable fatigue, the sneezing. I gave you ways that that sneezing, what differentiates. So what do you do when these things happen? Okay, a couple of things. And I'm gonna give you three big ones that you can incorporate for a couple of days after the sneezing. So let's say, We're gonna just kind of walk this through as an example. And I'm gonna use myself. So let's say yesterday, I was hanging out with some friends or I was at a social event or I was just out grocery shopping, doing something. And I started to sneeze. Right? A couple of times. What I can do in that moment right there, A, drink a little extra fluid. Now I'm talking extra fluid. This is not dousing and drowning yourself out in water, okay? I'm talking maybe four to six, potentially eight ounces of water extra that you would normally drink in that day. Now, if you're starting to sneeze and you realize, holy moly, did I even drink water today? Like, am I even hydrated? Is everything in my body dehydrated? What is going on? How did I allow myself to forget all this? Right? We run into all these things in our head. I do the same things. I'm speaking from experience. That is the time to go, okay, you know what body, I love you so much. I wanna take care of you. I'm not going to live in this dehydrated state, but you're going to then at that point, you're going to say, okay, like I will maybe get another three glasses, four glasses in from that point of the day to the end of your day. Now, again, not drowning out your water. This is not literally like you sneeze twice and then you grab a 60 ounce big gulp cup or your Yeti or your Stanley or whatever you're drinking out of. Fill it up to the top and start gulping. That's not what I'm telling you guys to do. It's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is in that moment, recognize I need to drink more fluid. In the actual moment after the sneeze, that's when you can have about four to six ounces in that time. Like you can drink down four ounces easily. No problem. Not even like think about it, right? But then be mindful, be mindful throughout that day. Be mindful for the next few days. Now, when I say few days, I'm saying like two to three days, okay? You can count the day that you actually sneeze. So in this example, when I say I sneezed yesterday, I'm gonna count that day and I'm gonna take that day today. and tomorrow and I'm going to be very mindful of drinking a little extra fluid than I normally do. Now for me, I drink roughly 65 ounces a day. That is my Goldilocks zone for my body. That is my sweet spot for my body. Every single person is different. I'm going to do a news flash for you and I hate to break the news to you, but you do not need a gallon of water a day. You do not need a hundred ounces of water a day. Even at times in your life, certain like situations and experiences and you're running marathons and you're going into your sauna. Absolutely. Okay. Every single day, like you do not need a gallon of water. And I love Andy Frisella who actually started 75 hard. You guys may not even know that name, but Some of you may have heard of 75 Hard. 75 Hard is an amazing program. And really what that is about is about creating a discipline. But creating a discipline doesn't need to fall into this very, like, I'm trying to think of a nice word, doesn't need to fall in a very rigid way of doing things. That you have to have 128 ounces of water. If you do not drink 128 ounces and you only do 125, then you failed that day and you have to start over. That is ridiculous. If we overwater ourselves, think of a plant. You cannot under water a plant. You can't over water a plant. You have to perfectly water a plant. Different plants require different water, watering amounts, right? Just like different humans require different watering amounts. So we can't over water ourselves because what we end up doing there is we end up. flushing white blood cells out of our body. Why are white blood cells important? Because they're part of your immune system. We need white blood cells to allow our immune system to function. So if we're starting to see these body signals come through, we don't wanna be flushing out the good guys, okay? So that's that on water. You start sneezing, I sneezed yesterday. In this example, I'm gonna drink four ounces, four to six. right after those sneezes and then I'm gonna be mindful of drinking more water throughout the day. The other thing, the second one. Now this is a huge, huge one. I should have actually put this in first place, but the water is the easiest to consume immediately after you start sneezing. The second one is to literally remove every bit of sugar from your diet. Now I'm talking fruit. I am talking honey, okay? This is the thing. This is the thing. A lot of people think, oh, I'm not feeling well. I'm going to drink a lot of tea with a lot of honey because I need honey, know, like honey and tea, honey and tea. Well, honey and tea, while they may seem like they go together like peanut butter and jelly, it's not beneficial to you. It's not beneficial to you. I'll say that right now. Honey is sugar. Honey is sugar. A cup of tea, when I have any sort of immune system, signals coming on in my body, my body's talking to me hey, like if you don't take care of me right now, I'm doing the best that I can, but I need you to help me with the resources. Give me the resources that I need to fight this off, or I'm gonna be flat on my back. I'm gonna heed those signals. I'm gonna listen to that because I've learned enough. over my entire lifetime that not listening to those only sets me back like a week and a half. You know, I'm trying to recover. I'm doing all these things to try to get better quicker. And then I have to put my life on pause and miss out on all these experiences. And it's like, man, I could have easily just went along with what my body had to say and not had any of these honey is not something that we want to put into tea. If you wanna have any sort of teas, the traditional medicinal line, and I am not, this is not sponsored by them. This is I just love their teas. They have the herbal cold care. They have the throat coat. If your throat is feeling dry and scraggly, like I was actually on throat coat a couple of weeks ago, cause I really burnt out my throat. You're gonna hear it on another episode but bear with me. You know, this life, like this is real life. These podcasts aren't, everything so perfectly done everywhere across the board. So, hey, this is what it looks like, right? We just turn on the mic and we share the information. So on that note, Throat Coat's, a good one. They have a lot of other tea lines that you can do to help support you through seasonal issues, where your immune system is kicking up. The other thing, okay. ⁓ sorry. I want to, I want to stay back. on the sugar one, because it's huge. There's one big, huge part that I almost just brushed over. Sugar depletes magnesium, okay? So I'm not saying, this is something I am clearly not telling you. I am not telling you, hey, keep all the sugar in your diet that you would normally keep in your diet, and then just take a bunch of magnesium. Just throw magnesium pills down your throat, swallow them, do all that. Yeah, you know, because you're just... you're putting more magnesium in to offset the sugar. No, what I'm saying is cut the sugar out. And I'm gonna give you a metaphor to think about this. Like if you have sugar in your diet and you have subclinical infections, subclinical bacterias, viruses, things going on, your immune system is fighting it off, I will tell you there are so many times that your immune system has fought off so many different things that you had no flipping idea that it did. And it didn't even give you any signals because you were doing so well. giving it all the resources it needed. So kudos to you on that. Like that's how amazing our body's are. But sugar comes in and acts like a blindfold around those immune cells. I talked to you about how if we drink too much water, we flush out healthy immune cells out of our body, those white blood cells. We don't want those white blood cells gone, nor do we want those white blood cells blindfolded. And they're going to battle against all these viruses, bacterias, fungais, parasite, all the things. and they don't have the proper resources to do so because we're just drinking our tea and honey and we're just loving it. We're eating our fruit. We're getting some vitamin C through our oranges and our grapefruits and we're doing all the things. It's like, no, no, no, no, I adamantly, my patients, I don't want anyone want to say poor patients because they know me by now, but they know I get on a really kick and I'm like, get. fruit out of your diet. I'm not telling you that you have to do this forever. I am saying do this for essentially two and a half days. So if I sneezed yesterday, like we're using in our example going back to that, and I cut sugar from that moment on, and I cut it out the next day, and the following next day, and I don't have fruit, and I don't put honey, and I don't do any of the things, and I'm just maybe drinking a couple glasses of tea a day, like during those two... two and a half days without honey, just tea and water. Imagine that. You don't have to put sweetener in everything or have all this citrusy fruit to get the vitamin C. The vitamin C in that fruit with the sugar content, the sugar content is offsetting your vitamin C. So you would almost be better off supplementing with vitamin C. But one of the things you know in this show is I don't talk about this is the amount of vitamin C you need to be taking and this is the amount of magnesium. Like you will never hear me like promoting or telling you doses of supplements. I am not an anti-supplement doctor. Supplements are amazing. They work. They do exactly what they're intended to do when you take the right ones and the right dose for your body. That's a whole separate episode. I believe it's episode six of this podcast. You can go all the way back to that and hear all about those. in my viewpoint on supplements if you're a brand new listener. So no sugar. We do not want that immune system blindfolded. We don't want that magnesium depleted. We need these resources. We're gonna support our body through these two and a half days. The third thing to do, so we're upping our water by like four to six ounces. We are then cutting all sugar out of the diet. The third thing we're doing is we are resting, okay? So this is not burning the candle at both ends. This is not staying up way past your bedtime, ending up in the endless doom scroll on your phone or watching the news or doing what you even do. Like if your bedtime is typically, let's say 10.30 at night, I'd say during the times like those two and a half days, really try to pull that bedtime even back by like 45 minutes. you may not fall asleep right away, but getting yourself in bed, getting yourself just kind of ready and prepared for sleep, it can do your body wonders. you can maybe turn on a podcast and have your phone set far away from you so it's not right, at your head and the EMFs are doing their thing to you. But really, just setting your body, getting it set for earlier bedtime, okay? not starting your bedtime routine at 1030 if that's your normal time, but pulling that back about 45 minutes. And there's no general rule to that 45 minutes, but it's an easier thing to do than to try to go, well, you have to set this two hour bedtime routine and you got to get in bed in six o'clock and no, like, and I understand too, because there could be times when we're sneezing, you know, I'm telling you, let's say I sneezed yesterday and we have an event the following day. Well, that's only a day and a half. I didn't have the full day, but That day and a half, you doing those proper things, where you can, it's not about trying to do all three things. if you can do all three things, that is giving your body the best fighting chance to get through whatever it's getting through. If you're only able to do the extra six ounces of water and cut all the sugar so that you can get to your event that next day or the same day that you are sneezing, it's being mindful again of all of the things, right? So it's not, pushing yourself beyond the capacity that your body has because who's ultimately gonna win? let's think about this. Who is ultimately gonna win, you or your body? Yeah, I'm sure a lot of you are laughing right now because it will always hands down be your body that wins. Hands down, 100 % across the board. So either you can support it in the moment and give it what it's asking for when it's signaling to you or... you can try to run the other direction and act like you don't even hear it and find yourself sick in bed. And I would hate that for you. I would hate that for anybody because it doesn't need to happen. It doesn't need to happen because the body tells us it's talking to us. We just have to understand and learn to interpret those signals. And I'm helping you do that through this show. There is another step. Now I understand this may sound so crazy to some people and I've done this. I've done this with my child. I've done this with myself. I've done this in my family. People know people in chiropractic school. I will tell you they knew. Oh my gosh. Dr. Brook must have been having some expression of some immune system distress because I could smell it all over her. And of course I don't want you to have to go places smelly and you know I I say that jokingly because it's like people in chiropractic school, would smell it on me after days of on end of doing it. So if you're going to do it one night, it's not going to be something that you're going to, people are going to smell, but it would be something that yeah, my body would try to push it out through the pores. And that's garlic. So raw garlic. Now you can actually take garlic cloves or you can actually take minced garlic. You know, some Not as impactful ⁓ as you taking garlic cloves and then crushing them, like mincing them yourself and letting them oxidize on the countertop of your kitchen or on a plate, on the cutting board, however you do that, because that garlic getting exposed to that oxygen is actually making it more potent. And you want more potent garlic because then it can do the work that it's doing. Now, garlic, the reason why it is so impactful. It is really high in the amino acids that make up glutathione. Glutathione is your body's number one antioxidant. It is the thing that helps your immune system fight the bad guys. Now, anytime people take Tylenol, Tylenol will deplete that glutathione store. Now, the liver is where the glutathione is made, primarily. And so anytime you take Tylenol depletes that glutathione. We need glutathione to help the immune system garlic helps support that So what I do what I like to do is yes I do those three things the rest the water the sugar the no sugar and the resting and then I do take a little bit of raw garlic to help support my system now my husband I will say I've been married for two years has never complained about me smelling like garlic. So my body is processing it a lot better than it may have used to at, years ago. I was in grad school. Oh my gosh. almost yikes, nine years ago, I started in 2016. So coming up on 10 years, that's crazy. I've been out of school for the past six years. So yeah, my body's been doing a lot better because I'm learning to listen to it a lot better and it's processing and it's doing things. the way that it should be without expressing all these scents. Anyway, I digress. So yes, raw garlic could be something you could do to help support you in this season of immune system distress. You don't wanna be flat on your back. So I really do, I wanna wrap this up, land the plane. I really do hope that this was very beneficial, that you learned some ways to really tune into your body and listen to it. And before I close up, do want to share, this is actually card four. For those of you who are watching on YouTube, you see that I'm holding the card up. For those of you listening, I'm going to actually read the card. So those watching and listening can actually know what card four of the Talk To Me Body card series says. And all of these cards have been inspired by conversations I've had with patients. They've been inspired from me just building on this body of knowledge that I have that the body does speak and really feeling into my gosh, like, if someone really could understand, get to know their stomach, like they get to know their coworker, like how amazing would that be? How much more would we just learn to love the body's that our soul resides in? And so this particular card, card number four, it's a statement from your body as a whole. like top to bottom, every single piece of you, I am your body. I slow you down not to frustrate you, but to heal you. My symptoms have purpose. So those signals that I mentioned, the sneezing, the unexplainable fatigue, those have purpose. They're compensation, not chaos. This is an intelligent design here. A fever is not danger. A chill is not failure. An ache is not forever. I'm working miracles in those miserable moments. Be patient and listen. I've healed from worse and I will again. That is the beauty of our body's. Our body's continually rejuvenate, renew, restore all of the things God built them this way and they will heal over and over and over again. We just have to learn to get more in touch, more in tune with them, what they're actually saying and we can actually help them heal faster. while we still live our lives, going to our works, going to our functions, going to kids programs, kids games, all the things that we do, running our businesses and whatnot. So thank you for allowing me to share this with you today. I'm so excited. We will have another episode in two weeks and I'm so excited for you to hear my guest on that episode, If you have found value from this episode, I would super duper appreciate it. If you can rate and review this show. I am a Spotify listener. I listen to all my podcasts on Spotify. So if you listen to the episode, you can go on there, click the three dots and give it a five star if you found a lot of value with it. Really just helps people find the show and others to learn about how their body ⁓ works and functions in such a beautiful way. So on that note, love you and I will speak to you all soon.