46: When Wellness Becomes Control: Why the Women Who Try the Hardest Are the Sickest

What if your health routine is not creating peace anymore?

What if it has quietly become another place where you feel pressure, fear, and control?

In this episode of Beyond Wellness Culture, Dr. Brook talks about the hidden control patterns that can show up when you are trying to take care of your body.

After spending years moving from disconnection to obsession with her own health, Dr. Brook shares why more information, more protocols, and more tracking do not always lead to more peace.

Sometimes they lead to more fear.

And your body was never designed to function under constant pressure.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Why wellness can slowly turn into control
• How to tell the difference between your body speaking and your mind spiraling
• Why your body responds better to peace than pressure
• The danger of rigid health rules that ignore body signals
• Why symptoms should invite listening, not fear
• How to use the bodyOS framework: Pause, Connect, Ask, Adjust
• Why body trust is built one small response at a time
• How to swap strict rules for supportive rhythms
• Dr. Brook also shares practical examples, including how rigid diets, workout plans, recovery routines, and symptom checking can make you feel less connected to your body instead of more supported.

The key reminder:

Your body is not something to control.

Your body is something to build a relationship with.

When you begin listening with curiosity instead of fear, you can start to tell the difference between pressure and peace.

A simple practice from this episode:

Ask your body one simple “this or that” question.

Do you want coffee or tea?

Do you want the workout or a walk?

Do you want to push or rest?

Start small. Keep it simple. Let your body teach you how it communicates.

Final reminder:

Health should not feel like a full-time job.

You were designed to live with your body, not fight against it.

If this episode helped you, share it with a friend who is tired of trying to control every part of her health.

✨ 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/talk-to-me-body/

📱 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)

Swap rules for rhythms. If your body is crying out, if that antenna is going off, heed that signal, heed that voice, that whisper. Learn to listen to your body because the beautiful thing is your body will respond in such a miraculous way.

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)

Welcome back, beautiful friend. I am so excited you are here with me today for another episode of Beyond Wellness Culture. This has been so fun over the last two weeks, really diving deep into understanding how to quiet and cut through all of the noise in the external world and really start to tune into what our body is trying to say to us.

And as we're working on building a new skill, a new skill of listening and really tuning into ourselves and developing that superpower, I have to, and it would not be smart of me not to talk about this control aspect when it comes to our health. I wanna share a brief recap of my story for those of you who might be new to this show, welcome, so glad you're here.

In 2010, when I got pregnant with my daughter, I really started to learn about health in a brand new way. Now, prior to 2010, all the years of my life, those 26 years of my life, I lived very disconnected from my body. Taking a pill for every ill, I talked about that briefly in the last episode for last week. And I then got pregnant and really went to the complete other side of full zealous, full obsession, full insanity, like I want to call it. And I'm being real with you guys. I'm being real with you because it was not a good place to be. And this is what we need to talk about today.

We really need to crash through a lot of these beliefs patterns and a lot of these behaviors that we've picked up. And we didn't realize we picked up because we picked them up quietly. And then we started adding in more and adding in more and adding in more. And it reminds me of this, the backpack analogy when people in the mental health space, a lot of times we'll talk about the backpacks or the rocks in our backpack that we carry, whether it be trauma or shame or all the things that have happened to us or the things that we pick up mentally, where we start to believe these stories about ourselves. And it's, we've done this with our health routines, with our wellness protocols.

And since 2011, okay, there were things in 2011 that I was consuming, whether it be books, whether it be podcasts, whether it be listening to summits that a lot of experts would come on. And it was so interesting to me. And I remember even then trying to connect these dots. And I'm like, wow, we just heard that doctor and that scientist say this thing. And then a person on the summit the very next day would say something completely contrary to what was being said prior from that doctor or scientist. And it's so important to really cut through that noise.

That is my prayer with Beyond Wellness Culture is that we do find the ability to cut through that noise, to understand that our body is wise and it is a masterpiece and it doesn't operate from pressure. It operates from peace by design. But I wanna get into, I have to talk about it because there is so much control for the last 15 years. Now I'm telling you, I started this in 2010, learning all these things, had my daughter in 2011 and she's 15 years old now. And so over these last 15 years, I was in the midst of all of it, in the cycle, in the crazy, in the tracking and the doing. I've got this genetic mutation and I got to do these things to help support that. And then I got to work over here because of this, this, and this.

And I was chasing so many things that were not even an issue. And I don't wanna say they're not an issue, but I think because we are living in a society where there is information overload, we begin to start to really put on things that don't belong to us, okay? I'm a chiropractor and it may be heretical to say as a chiropractor, but there's a lot of... in the chiropractic world that we just have to restore the natural curves back into the body. And while that is absolutely a necessity for some people that we have to restore these curves in the body, my whole thing is if the body is functioning, if the body is doing what it needs to do, why are we trying to do these kind of things that have the potential of exacerbating pain?

Now I'm saying this from experience, from clinical experience where I've watched people end up actually going downhill after trying to do something that was supportive for their body, including trying to restore the curve back to their spine. And now they're dealing with insane amount of headaches or insane amount of sciatica because of these forceful things. Now, I'm not saying every single chiropractor does things in a forceful way. It's important.

If you did hear the story from last week where I talked about my husband and his hip surgery. Now we went based off what the surgeon was saying. We went based off what the PT was saying, but his body triumphed all of their voices. So if his body was not responding to a medication that the surgeon gave him, or if his body was not responding to the protocols or the sets and the reps and all the muscles that he had to activate. If his body was not responding to that and kicking back, then we stopped. We allowed the body to take precedence. So if the PT said you need to do 10 reps of this particular exercise, but his body could only handle seven, then we're going to go with those seven. Now, again, I want to say a small caveat here.

This is not about I feel really burnout and I've been walking 10 minutes and I must want to rest because I'm feeling really tired. This is not about laziness. This is not what I'm talking about. Just, I can't push past 10 pounds. I'm only lifting 10 pounds. I can't. There are times when our head, we're working out, we're doing something.

And our head will be like, my gosh, I'm so, so tired. I don't know if I could do another rep, but our body is saying, yes, I can do another rep. We need to listen to that. There's also times when our body is saying, I cannot do another rep, but because we are either pushing ourselves up against somebody else during a workout where we're working out with them together. I'm kind of thinking more like the orange fitness type model, where you're almost competing against each other.

If your body's telling you to stop, you need to stop. I don't mean to get really aggressive right now, but the way that you cut through all of figuring out what is your body and what is your head trying to tell you something is by building a relationship with your body. I've talked about this so much in the last two episodes and so much even in the previous 43 episodes that we've had of your body speaks as a podcast, and now under this new umbrella called Beyond Wellness Culture, which we are still talking about body signals and still talking about building a beautiful relationship with your body, but just in a way where we're expanding the message because we're going to be talking about these modalities and these protocols and all the things that people are doing and how to really understand what it looks like to build this relationship with your body.

Just in summary of those last episodes, if we're talking about the workouts specifically in this example right now, we need to be able to differentiate whether it's our head or our body telling us a certain thing, and that is done by building a relationship with yourself. So every single day, whether you have a signal going on in your body right now, symptoms, or whether you're exposed to something, take a moment to always show your body gratitude.

Find out where your body's antenna is, meaning find out the source of where your body is speaking to you from. Every single one of us has a different antenna point. Now, I mentioned mine, in previous episodes, is more my chest. I feel this opening. I feel like if the insides of my body had a hand reaching out, it's just peace and it's just comfort versus when my body is saying no to something, it's closing in. I feel tense. I feel tight.

So when I'm asking my body questions, do you want this or do you want this? Very simple, this or that. It's not asking multiple variety of questions to make things overwhelming. Do I want these 20 different things? We really have to break this down. I've talked about this in prior episodes. Please go binge all of that. And you will start to understand what I'm speaking about if you're brand new to all of this.

But today's episode, we really have to talk about this crazy wild environment that we live in that is so loud and so obnoxious, telling us all these different things. And then we end up on Reddit channels trying to make sense of everything because we're just like, here's everything I'm taking and what do I need to do? Are you the expert biohacker? Are you the expert so-and-so?

Again, we operate more out of pressure than peace and our body wants to operate from peace. I talk a lot about on the show, stewarding our health well, cause we've talked about, especially as believers, to steward our finances well and steward our families well and steward our kids and steward our marriage and steward our church and our time with God and steward, steward, steward, but we never talk about stewarding our health. And God has called us to steward our health in a way that is not obsessive, that is not overzealous, that is not taking in thinking that we are smarter than the body.

So these three signs that wellness has turned into pressure, I'm sure a lot of you, myself included, can find yourself in some of these buckets. The first one is routines that you feel you can't break. They've become so rigid that your body is screaming out for a tangerine and you will not, you will not go get that tangerine because you are following the carnivore diet and by God, no means that tangerine is ever entering your body. Lord Jesus, my goodness, if we've become so rigid in that routine, there's something wrong. Your body is screaming out for that tangerine, but you will deny that tangerine because you are following this rigid plan. That is the first sign that your wellness routine has gotten out of control.

Second thing is the symptoms start triggering tightness, not listening. So we start to fear all of these things going on in our body. We start to freak out. And then all of a sudden, we are long gone into some rabbit hole with ChatGPT, Google, whatever other AI tool you might be using. And now you've got some crazy, insane disease. Okay. Understand, yes, those things happen. Yes, that does happen in today's society where there are things that are bigger that can't just be solved by drinking cucumber juice or having celery every morning, right? There are things that the body needs additional support for. I'm not at all advocating for us to say, let's just not listen to any of that. And let's just stay over here in this la la la kumbaya camp. That's not what I'm saying. But every symptom should not be triggering fear in your body.

Now, my Talk to Me, Body card deck, shameless plug, that project that God breathed upon and had me be the one to carry this out into the world. One of the cards that I wrote is, the body speaking to you, when you fear, I fear, and we spiral together. So we get these anxious thoughts in our head that something bad is happening in our body.

And so then we start to go into, again, the rabbit trail with ChatGPT and we start getting all wild and crazy and we're not coming from a place of tuning into our body. Taking a deep breath out, quieting the noise and saying, you know what? Okay. This is happening to me right now. What can I do in this moment? Take a pause, connect with your body, give yourself a moment and then start to ask some questions.

How can I support you? Now my framework, the bodyOS framework is pausing, connecting, asking, and then adjusting. When you're asking, you're bringing these questions, all these crazy questions, my gosh, my shoulder's hurting because of, I don't even know. Let's break it down. Is it in the physical realm? Is it in the spiritual realm? Is it in the emotional realm? Or is it in the mental realm?

So sometimes and most often actually, things don't always get tied to the physical. A lot of times like gut issues, a lot of, my gosh, my stomach hurts so bad. Well, you're in a really abusive relationship or a toxic environment or your boss is screaming at you and you just have all this underlying stress about having this hard conversation and it's causing your body or your belly to be so just queasy or icky or bloated or you're not processing food. Well, of course not, on a physical plane, your body just can't handle all this stuff going on. So when you're tuning into your body, ask which pillar is impacted and then really kind of deduce down.

Another shameless plug, Body Signal Decoder. You can find it in the show notes below, but that will help you really work through the top eight body signals that your body will present with, pick one that's present that your body is saying, yep, let's go after these stress signals or let's go after this gut distress. And it will help walk you through that. But that is a way of really just kind of getting into tune with your body when these symptoms show up. This is not a time to start spiraling into massive anxiety.

It's a time to really sit down and listen, or sit down and even take a rest. Cause a lot of times we're just like push, push, push, go, go, go in these rigid lives that we live in, in this crazy, running up all four cylinders or five, however many cylinders, right? That cars have. I don't ever mean to make the body sound like it's a machine, but you get what I'm trying to say. We're running, running, running, no brake pedal.

If trying to maintain your health is literally a full time job and it's taking up all your mental space, I'm raising my hand. If you guys can't see me in the video, I am raising my hand because that was me, girlfriend. That totally was me. I was the girl. It was consuming everything I did to the point like, don't you dare use plastic. You have to do this.

And if you eat this, you're going to die and don't have this. Oh my gosh. Oh, oh, oh. On the street corner, my, my poor family was just like, oh my gosh, Brook has gone off the deep end. She's super overzealous and I just feel judged by her. So I'm not going to dinner with her nor are we going to invite her over. No, not saying that happened. Praise God for a beautiful family who's loving and gracious and merciful and just all the characteristics of Jesus because I was a little difficult deal with.

Okay, let me just tell you that and I know some of you sisters in this camp, I feel you because I was there. I was there and it is not a fun place to be in. I'm not gonna lie and I'm sure you might be experiencing that if you give yourself a chance to really kind of, is that me? My gosh, that really is me and we don't want health to be a full-time job. We want to live our lives. We want to be able to enjoy this life that God has given us and trust that these bodies are going to take us the distance that we need to go to run this race that we've been called to run, and do these things that we've been called to do. There's hope.

There's hope for you on the other side of all of this because, I got out of it. I got out of this trap. Now there are times when I try to fall back into that trap and then I get reminded and rebuked and convicted and the Holy spirit comes in and goes, whoop, what are we doing? So understand, as you're kind of working yourself out of this, you are really just taking it step by step, step by step.

I love you body, thank you for taking care of me. Simple as that, gratitude, building that relationship from it. So how do we shift from control into a peaceful leadership role with our bodies?

First shift is to swap rules for rhythms. I talk about that tangerine earlier in the episode and I said, my gosh, I'm on the carnivore diet, I can't have that tangerine. We're going to swap those crazy rules for rhythms. If your body is crying out, if that antenna is going off, say, give me that tangerine. Heed that signal, heed that voice, that whisper, your body telling you to get that tangerine. I'm not saying you have to go buy 20 pounds of tangerines. Maybe you just grab one and you enjoy it. And then you continue on with your carnivore diet and you just learn to listen to your body because the beautiful thing is your body will respond in such a miraculous way.

I had a friend of mine recently say, when I was telling her and we were talking about the this or that practice, asking your body, you want this or that? Now this is always your body, what you always do. So if it's always drinking coffee in the morning, ask your body, does it want coffee in the morning or does it want lemon water? Does it want coffee in the morning or does it want tea, right?

The "this" is always going to stay the same as to what you normally do and you're going to shift up the "that" portion. So I was talking to her about this and she goes, I'm just fearful of asking my body because what if it says it doesn't want the coffee and it wants this and I had to smile and laugh because I've been there and I also know that when we work with our body in a beautiful way and give it what it's asking for, it actually performs better than we would even think.

Maybe we feel like, my gosh, I can't even imagine going off the coffee because I'm going to get that caffeine headache. But your body is actually screaming out for tea, a breakfast tea. Well, that has caffeine, but something like a lemon water. And we're just like, my gosh, we didn't get the headache or wow, we just have so much energy that's sustaining us throughout the day. So understand, honoring your body, you're going to get results that you wouldn't even imagine that you were getting.

The next shift is to choose consistency over intensity, right? When we're in this control, I got to do all these things, track everything, it's just psycho status. We get very intense about things, but then all of a sudden we fall off a cliff. So we might have this intensity for a six month run, or we might have an intensity for six weeks or six days or six hours, but there's no consistency to that, or the intensity shifts because the body no longer works or whatever supplement we are taking or whatever we're eating, we're not getting those results because we've hit that wellness plateau that I talked about in a prior episode. But we need to really maintain some consistency.

So it's not about making health a full-time job. It's really about coming back to center and even if we're doing a simple practice like eating more protein throughout the day or drinking more water or taking some walks and moving our body. It does not have to be intense. It just needs to be consistent. And the next thing is building trust through gentle listening. I've talked about this throughout the episode. We build trust with our bodies the more we listen to it. So when it is screaming out for the tangerine, listen.

Give it that tangerine and over time you'll continue to build trust with your body that you won't even be consciously aware of your practice of this or that, and pausing, and asking the questions, and what do I, all of a sudden you'll be just going about your day the more you practice this and you'll just realize, wow, my body. And I just, I actually am feeling that in my spirit that that is happening to somebody right now who's listening, that they're just feeling this sensation in their body, that their body is seeking something.

And I'm just going to tell you right now, heed that, heed that whisper that the body is seeking because in that moment, you are building this trust and it's going to get easier and easier where you're just going to be like, wow, like I said, it truly feels like a superpower. I hope that was really helpful, friend. I hope you gained a lot from this episode.

I look forward to continuing this conversation and this journey with you and just bless you and pray for you on your week and this journey that you are on and I will see you next week. God bless you.

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.