45: Your Body Is Shouting and You Keep Muzzling It: Why Speed Is the Enemy of Real Healing

What if the thing you keep trying to silence is actually the thing your body needs you to hear?

In this episode of Beyond Wellness Culture, Dr. Brook talks about one of the most common patterns in both conventional health and holistic wellness: trying to quiet symptoms without understanding what they may be communicating.

Whether it’s reaching for medication, stacking supplements, adding another protocol, chasing weight loss, or trying to make discomfort disappear on your timeline, the deeper issue is often the same.

We are trying to make the body be quiet.

Dr. Brook shares how easy it is to slip into this pattern, even when you deeply value natural health. She opens up about a recent moment when she started feeling sick and felt the pull to add more, do more, and take control, until her body gently reminded her that it was not asking for more. It was asking for support.

This episode explores the difference between caring for your body and trying to control it.

You’ll hear why symptoms that keep returning may be repeated messages, why fast relief is not always the wisest path, and how to use support tools with more respect and discernment.

Dr. Brook also talks about the emotional weight many women carry around weight loss and body image, and why you will not get the body you dreamed of until you learn to love the body you have.

This conversation is not anti-medicine, anti-support, or anti-relief. It is an invitation to slow down, listen with intent, and ask better questions before assuming your body needs to be shut down, pushed harder, or corrected.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• How both conventional and holistic approaches can fall into the same trap
• Why symptoms are often information, not inconveniences
• What it looks like to use relief as a bridge instead of a muzzle
• Why recurring symptoms may be your body repeating a message
• How to begin asking your body better questions
• Why building a relationship with your body changes the way you care for it
• How faith, discernment, and body listening work together
• Why loving the body you have is part of stewarding it well

If you’ve been doing all the “right” things but still feel stuck, this episode will help you step back from the wellness spiral and start rebuilding trust with the body God designed.

Because true health is not about forcing your body onto your timeline.

It is about learning how to listen, support, and respond with clarity.

✨ Your body has been trying to tell you something.

Find out what it's saying with the free 30-second Body Signal Decoder Assessment. Pick your signal, get your personalized guide straight to your inbox, and finally start making sense of what's going on inside.

Get it here: os.drbrooksheehan.com/decoder

🎧 And if you caught the mention of the Talk to Me, Body affirmation card deck during the episode, here's where to grab yours. 63 scripture-anchored cards to help you trust the body God designed for you.

Get yours here: drbrooksheehan.com/cards

📱 Come say hi on Instagram: @drbrooksheehan

⭐ If this episode spoke to you, would you take a second to leave a five-star review on Apple or Spotify? It helps more women find this show. And more women learning to listen to their bodies is exactly why I do this.

Transcript

Dr. Brook Sheehan (00:00)

Something I've said so many times over the years is you will not get the body you dreamed of until you learn to love the body that you have. It's important to show this body, this vessel, love. And all of these beautiful blessings come out of this.

Are you doing everything right for your health but you still feel off? Does the wellness world have you overwhelmed, second-guessing your body, or chasing yet another fix? You’re not alone. I’m Dr. Brook Sheehan, and welcome to Beyond Wellness Culture, a space where we step out of the noise and rebuild trust with our body. This is where we stop overoptimizing, find clarity instead of confusion, and approach our health in a calmer, more grounded way. Take a deep breath, and let’s dive in. 

Dr. Brook Sheehan (00:00)

Friend, welcome back to another episode of Beyond Wellness Culture. I am so excited you are here with me today. And this is a topic actually that I've been wanting to talk about for a very long time and just had a lot of different episodes scheduled prior to. I think that it's a timely message to be sharing on Beyond Wellness Culture, because it's really in alignment with that whole idea of what we are working towards, which is cutting out all of this crazy, crazy information that we have going on. And I'm saying crazy in the most lighthearted kind of way, not that that information is bad. Remember in episode 44 that we just talked about, the very first episode of the new brand, where the information isn't necessarily bad. We just have to figure out if it works for us. So what we're doing is we're cutting out all of that loud information and we're quieting down. We're coming back to center.

And what we're doing is working on having a beautiful relationship with our body so that we can actually learn to hear what it wants and what it doesn't want. And we can cut through that noise and get very specific on what is supportive to us in our endeavor to have a very healthy life and to steward these bodies that God has given us very, very well. And this topic, like I said, is something I've been wanting to talk about for a long time.

Experienced it numerous times with myself, in my family, working with patients, working with friends and clients and all the people in my ecosystem, and I see this online a lot, is that when something feels very uncomfortable to us, we are trying to look for a quick fix. We're trying to, what I would say, and I know this analogy can be very dark feelings to some people, but what I really truly believe is a lot of times we try to muzzle our body. We try to shut it up. You're talking too loud. Something's going on. I don't want to deal with it. So let me just do this. And I'm going to give you a few different examples. The reason why I'm being kind of elusive there, cause you're going to know what I'm talking about and you're going to be like, I've done that. Yes, I've been there.

Okay, here's the first thing. This is what we do when we feel a cold coming on or the flu coming on or our body's achy or we have a headache or what? What do we tend to do as a society? Maybe not you listening because you tend to be more holistic. However, we still can do this in a holistic way. But what does the conventional people do?

And if you're yelling out, take medication or take Tylenol or Pepto-Bismol, you are correct. That is what we do as a society. Something's going on in our body. And what we need it to do is just shut up. Shut up. I can't deal with this. I got to go to work. I have the kids. I have my job. I have my business. I have my church functions. I have this, this, this, and this. And we start to just make it be quiet. Right.

We do that with medication and people living in more of the conventional way will do that a lot quicker than us in the holistic minded people. And that's not to make anybody wrong in any of this, it's what is working for them or what they understand. And I lived in that world for so long. I lived in that very disconnected from my body state of being. So I took a pill for every ill. I did a cream for every skin condition. I just tried all these things, throwing them up against the wall if my body was not playing according to my rules and what I thought. But then when you flip the side to the holistic non-conventional way, really what we do is we may last a little bit longer than your average person with a headache.

We may do what we think we need to be doing to help support our body or we might be allowing it just, okay, you we're gonna go more the natural route. We're gonna take a little turmeric because we have inflammation in our body. I'm not telling anybody, let me just make that very clear, to take turmeric. If it's right for you, it's right for you, you need to figure out that based on your body.

I'm not personally working with you so I cannot tell you that you need this many grams of turmeric because you are this age and you live here and that, right? We don't do that here. That's not what Beyond Wellness Culture is about. You're not going to hear me talk about the top 10 supplements for this condition. So, but as a holistic minded person, we tend to wait a little longer than your average person, which again, no right or wrong then, when things are not happening at the speed at which they're happening, coming back to our turmeric analogy, we're taking still got a lot of pain in our knee or we still got a lot of pain in our body or our joints hurt or whatever. So then we stack on something else. We try something else. We're doing this or it's just because we didn't get into the hyperbaric chamber today, or it's because of all of these things that we start to rationalize.

So because the body is not conforming to our timeline as to when this headache or this knee pain or this [insert signal symptom that you're experiencing], because it's not going away in our timeline, what do we start to do? We start to add more. Now, I'm gonna put myself out there because I think it's important to just be very transparent with you and let you know. I'm a work in progress. Sure, I've built this beautiful relationship with my body all these years and I'm very in tune with it, but there are moments, there are moments friend that I get into these modes that I'm like, it's not happening as fast as I wanted to. And I start doing this very same thing that I'm talking to you about.

Here is a very real example that actually just happened to me about two weeks ago. I didn't feel great. I had all the typical body signals popping up in terms of I was sneezing multiple times throughout the day, two a-choos, at one point, another a-choo later on. And I was drinking the water. I cut the sugar. I was taking care of myself, but then woke up the next morning, completely depleted. Felt like I got hit by a freight train. Can some of you relate, right? And I was doing the supplements that my body asked for. So I was taking those. And then I started to feel in my own headspace, well, maybe I need this, this, this, and this. And maybe I need to do this, this, this and, I need to, I don't, I know, right? Starting to get into all of that crazy, crazy, just anguish, overwhelmed, feeling like, oh my gosh.

And honestly, if you've ever been checked by the Holy spirit, where He totally comes in and convicts you... When your body checks you, it is not with that same power of conviction from the Holy Spirit, but it is a check in your gut, in your spirit, where I was getting all into, and my body's like, I didn't ask you to start throwing in all these mix. Now, granted, I didn't do any of that. I definitely went grabbing for it and I wanted to do it and my body really in the moment checked me and said, I didn't ask for this. I just need your support. I just need you to do the things that you're doing. Do the things that you're doing. I'm not asking for anything more in that moment. And it was a real awakening for me, in that sense, wow, I still fall victim to the things of our society that we got into all these things to try to make our body work on our timeline.

Now a huge one and it's heartbreaking, if you're in this boat, there's absolutely no judgment, my heart goes out because I know the feeling. If you know anything about my personal story, you know that I know this feeling very, very well. But another one that I feel so burdened by and heavy hearted by is weight loss, especially for us as women. We want our body to look a certain way.

So when we start doing things to try to make it look that certain way, because the body is not working on our timeline, this is where it gets murky and this is where it gets icky and not so fun because we're doing things that may be getting us results, but internally our body is just crying and screaming out, I don't know what to do here. And certain things start falling apart inside.

Again, no judgment, but if we work with our body in a way that we're like, you're going to listen to me and I'm going to have all authority and dominion over you. Biblically speaking, let's talk biblically speaking. I stand by the word of God, love the word of God, eat the word of God every single day. Biblically speaking, we have the flesh and we have the body.

Now the flesh is definitely something that we want to take authority over. We don't want the flesh running and ruining our lives. I'm actually going to be doing an entire episode in the near future on the sarx versus the soma. The flesh is the sarx, that's the Greek word, and the soma, which is the Greek word for body, the flesh versus the body, and how important it is to know the difference, as a believer, and to be able to walk with this because it is building a relationship with our body, the soma, the wise masterpiece that God created versus allowing our flesh to lead. So when I'm saying taking authority over our flesh, absolutely. Trying to take authority over our body and what it's asking us and what it's wanting and how it is functioning, that's not something we need to be doing. We don't try to make the soma respond and act on our timeline.

This is a grace walk. This is a walk of understanding, and honoring our bodies, not trying to hack it, not trying to make it do something. Right. So all of that, when we get into these modes, we really start to quiet our body down. Our body goes, okay, fine. You're not going to listen to me.

I'm gonna just continue to keep doing what I'm gonna be doing in the background, but you're not gonna get what you are looking for. And something I've said so many times over the years is you will not get the body that you dream of until you learn to love the body that you have. And I wanna say that again, you will not get the body you dreamed of until you learn to love the body that you have.

It's important to show this body, this vessel, love. It's important to steward this body well. And in time, as you build this relationship, you will begin to see things transform internally, not only physically, spiritually, emotionally, but also mentally in such a beautiful way where things just start to go, my gosh, you're eating certain foods that you vilified in your past, and you're eating them now and your body is responding so beautifully and you have so much energy to do what God has called you to do. And all of these beautiful blessings come out of this. So I want us to understand that when we treat our discomfort like an emergency, we put that muzzle over our body. When we silence signals without learning the patterns, right?

Maybe these headaches are coming on every single day because of stress at work, or maybe they're coming on every single day because there is a food trigger. There is something that you are so stuck to your rigid food plan that you're doing every single day that it's just your body screaming out help. And you're just silencing it with a Tylenol or with an anti-inflammatory natural one. Okay. And then the third thing is when we stack these fixes, when one doesn't work fast enough. So we start adding more to the mix. Like what I wanted to do the other couple of weeks ago when I was feeling sick, I was wanting to add more to the mix. Maybe I need to take all these things before I go to bed so that I just sleep through the night and get well in the morning.

Funny thing is, when I begin to just let my body do what it's been designed to do and work to support it, it moves itself through that discomfort in a beautiful way that we've gotten to the other side of that. We're on the other side of that valley. We're on the other side of the icky turmoil. But now we're in such a much better place with our body because we didn't silence those things. We didn't force it to do something. We didn't cause other systems to go offline in the body because we've overpowered this one.

Now, if you go back to episode, I think it was 42 at this point, you can hear when I'm talking about what happens when we do too much. When we do too much, we start to throw other systems off, right? Something seems like it's working and then it's no longer working. You've hit that wellness plateau. That's what that whole episode is about.

So I want us to remember that fast for our body is not always the wise decision. That sometimes things take time and that's okay. Now I'm not telling you to live with all this chronic pain in your body and have no solution and you're kind of just winging it. That's not what this is about. This is about understanding and building that relationship with your body.

Now, of course we're going to exercise wisdom in all of this, right? So there are times where we do need to get on a much powerful medicine, whether that be an antibiotic or some sort of drug that can help support in that moment and praise God for that. This is not, I'm not anti-medicine. I'm not anti-pharmacology.

There is a time and a place where this is necessary. I want you to exercise wisdom, but do not mistake what I'm trying to say here. I'm talking about your day to day little disturbances, little discomforts that we just shut up, that we quiet down. We kick the rock down the river. We kick the rock down the road and we hope and pray that it's gonna be gone and we never have to deal with that headache again until the next time it happens because we ate that triggering food and here we are, right?

So this is about getting information from your body, building a relationship with your body to get that information from it. The more that you just even exercise that simple step that I talked about last episode of gratitude, showing your body gratitude every single morning for what it's doing, and really tuning into where your antenna is in your body, where your body is giving you the most signals, then you can start to feel that peace when you're asking it, do you want this or this? Can I support you with this or this? Two options, not 20, two options, and it's giving you the information based on what you've discovered about yourself. And that's the most beautiful superpower, right?

I want to talk about how to use any sort of relief. And we are talking about weight loss, we are talking about over the counter drugs, we're talking about all these different things that we do to try to get relief for our bodies, right? I want to talk about these three ways to use it with respect. That's important, with respect. Number one is using this relief as a bridge. So taking the help that we need, but then getting curious, right?

So, if you're popping the Tylenol for every headache or you're taking the turmeric or you're doing a lot of anti-inflammatory supplements, we want to get curious as to why these symptoms are popping up, not just these things helped those go away. Because those things eventually will not work after your body's been on them for a long time. Hence going back to the episode about the health plateau, because a lot of people in this wellness space, this wellness space has gotten really loud, talk about all these different things and then it stops working, and that symptom raises its ugly head again and you are back to square one trying to figure out something or taking more of something just to get it to go away. So keep in mind, as you are building respect and trust with your body, that it is important to use this as a bridge.

The other thing is, ask a question after the symptom gets calmed down. And what does that mean? What is my body asking me before I'm trying to shut this down? So I'm about to take the turmeric, I'm about to do my daily protocol. I'm talking a few I'm going to be reiterating over and over and over, episode to episode, this is not about making health overwhelming. This is not about making health a full-time job. We are actually coming back to center and we are really dialing ourselves back and not doing so much and just taking the moment to go, hey, headache, is there something I'm eating? Tune into your antenna. Hey, headache, am I not sleeping well? I might feel like I'm sleeping throughout the night, which is great, but am I not getting good quality sleep?

Listen for the signal. And what you're going to feel is just peace. I don't know how to describe it, but for me, I just feel this peace. I can feel almost like if my body, yes, I have hands, right. But if my body internally had a hand, it'd be just like, yes, yes. Reaching out. Yes. That's it. Versus this tightness in my back, in between my shoulder blades. Like, no, don't do it. When we get scared and we bring our arms and our legs close in and we tighten up all of our muscles. That's for me personally, I want you to tune into what yours is. But being able to ask your body that question what am I doing that could be causing some kind of problem? And if you're not getting a response within those 10 to 15 seconds, do what you're gonna do. Again, not right or wrong. I'm not saying it's wrong for you to take that, what I want you to do is just start to practice these little look for the does that mean?

If the same symptom keeps coming back, your body is repeating a message. So let's go back to the headache example, if we're constantly getting the headache and we tune in that antenna and it says it's food related. So again, we eat so many different foods. So maybe we deduce down, so we cut out the broccoli or we cut out the carrots or we cut out the big potato or whatever it is, not vilifying any of those foods by the way, but whatever that is and then we have the same thing happen again? Okay, maybe I pulled the wrong thing. Body, is it something else? Hmm. One of the things I like to do because it can be so many different options with food choices is, is it breakfast, lunch, dinner, snack? Or is it something I'm drinking, right? Because that could be food and drink. So breakfast, lunch, dinner or snack.

And I'm like, okay, where's my antenna going? Something I had for lunch today. Okay, let me go backwards. What did I have for lunch? Or, hey, this headache actually came on over the weekend. what did I eat on Saturday? Right? And sometimes those are the hard questions to answer because we don't remember. Where was I on Saturday? What did I do? Right? But this is how you break down so many different options into these, deducing down to where it's actually manageable and not overwhelming. Awesome, right?

All right, I know I went through a lot there, but I do pray that this information blessed you that you are just, even more and more as you're hearing this and you may not put anything into practice that I talked about today, but as you're hearing this, if I was to say any one takeaway for you to do after you listen to this is, just continue to build a beautiful relationship with your body. Continue to offer it the grace and the mercy that you may give other people in your life. Continue to offer yourself that and just say thank you. Thank you so much for taking care of me. Thank you so much for all that you do. And I do want to build a beautiful relationship with you and I am going to do my best to make that happen and just help guide me along in the process.

And I promise you, it will serve you really, really well over the next years to come. And it's just gonna be such a beautiful way of building on that superpower and cutting out all of that health noise. And I hope you have a very blessed week and I will see you next week.

Friend, thank you so much for spending this time with me today. I know your body is grateful that you listened to this episode as well. If this conversation supported you in any way, please share it with someone who feels overwhelmed by their health, or quite possibly stuck in that wellness spiral. And leave a review on Apple Podcast as it means a lot to know this space is supporting you, and helps this message reach the people who need it most. Alrighty, let’s close those tabs, exit the apps, and let your body do what it already knows how to do. I’ll meet you back here every single week. Bye for now.