53: Let Your Body Do Its Thing Instead of Stressing Over Every Symptom

In this episode, Dr. Brook unpacks why we've lost the ability to let a symptom just be a symptom, and why that instinct is costing us more peace than the symptom itself ever did.

She introduces the idea of a self-limiting symptom, one your body resolves on its own without any intervention from you, and walks through real examples: a fever running its course, a day of loose stool, a stretch of constipation, a headache after stress finally lifts, dizziness from standing up too fast, appetite dips, muscle twitches, itching with no rash, and even random yawning.

Dr. Brook shares a personal story about her own over-optimization spiral with lab testing and dental work, plus a client story about a woman convinced something was seriously wrong with her digestion until they mapped her symptoms back to acute stress.

She offers a simple filter to know when something actually needs attention (is it new, is it severe, is it lasting more than a few days) and then walks through the BodyOS framework in four steps: pause, connect, ask across the four pillars of physical, spiritual, emotional, and mental, and adjust only if the body is truly asking for something.

This episode connects back to episode 51 and invites you to build a relationship with your body rooted in trust instead of alarm.

Your body has been talking to you your whole life.

On July 11, join me live for Body of Wonder and learn how to decode the signals behind your symptoms so you can stop guessing and start understanding.

Save your spot: https://os.drbrooksheehan.com/workshop

✨ 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)

Think about how we handle almost everything else these days. If a web page takes three seconds to load, we are annoyed. If a text goes unanswered for an hour, we assume something is wrong. We've built an entire life around instant response.

And somewhere along the way, we've started treating our body the exact same way. The second there's any sort of delay, maybe a glitch, a symptom, a signal, we assume it means something is messed up and needs to be fixed right now.

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. 

Friend, listen to this list and let me know if you've ever experienced any of this. A day of loose stool. A headache with no clear cause. A wave of tiredness that ends up lifting by tomorrow. We treat all of these like emergencies. Most of the time, they are just your body finishing a job.

And today I want to talk about something that might sound simple, but it's actually one of the biggest reasons people stay stuck in a cycle of anxiety about their own bodies. We have completely lost the ability to let a symptom just be a symptom. The second something feels off, we treat it like a major alarm. Connecting this back to episode 51, where I talked about how we don't allow ourselves any discomfort, I wanna walk you through why this instinct is actually costing you more peace than the symptom ever did.

Losing patience with our own body. Let's talk about something that happens to every single one of us. We have a symptom show up out of nowhere. That loose stool with zero diet changes, maybe a headache that comes on with no clear trigger. What about the wave of exhaustion on a day that looked completely normal? What do we do? We panic.

We reach for something to make it stop before we ever even ask what is happening. But here's the truth: our wellness culture has trained us to intervene the second something feels off, and we've lost this patience with our own body.

Think about how we handle almost everything else these days. If a web page takes three seconds to load, we are annoyed. If a text goes unanswered for an hour, we assume something is wrong with the recipient. We've built an entire life around instant response. Amazon packages within seconds, DoorDash, all of the things. And somewhere along the way, we've started treating our body the exact same way.

The second there's any sort of delay, maybe a glitch, a symptom, a signal, we assume it means something is messed up and needs to be fixed right now. But your body is not a web page. It is not supposed to run at that speed. It has its own timeline for processing, clearing, and repairing. And most of the time, our bodies never even get the chance to finish what they've started before we step in and shut it down.

I see this constantly. Somebody gets a headache and reaches for medication within two minutes before they even ask if they're dehydrated or maybe stressed out, or maybe their blood sugar is so low because they haven't eaten in six hours. Someone has one day of loose stool and immediately assumes food poisoning or worse, starts believing they have a bacterial infection and starts researching symptoms online at 11 o'clock at night. The chatGPTing, the Googling, all of that raises the cortisol and can actually make you feel worse.

A shameless plug here for the Talk to Me, Body cards. I have a card in there that literally says, "I am your body. When you fear, I fear, and we spiral together." It will make you feel worse. We've confused speed with wisdom. So reacting fast doesn't mean you're actually taking care of yourself. Sometimes it means you never gave your body the chance to show you what it was actually doing.

This is a huge problem in this culture of overoptimization and wellness and things coming at us at every single angle. We need to allow our body to take precedence and be the one to decide when and where things are necessary. I want to define something because this term is going to come up a lot in this episode. And that term is a self-limiting symptom. It's one your body resolves on its own in a short window without any help from you.

Now let's go through a few real examples of what this self-limiting symptom is, because seeing them laid out changes how you respond next time. Think about this. A fever. It runs its course and it breaks. Your body raises its own temperature on purpose because most viruses and bacteria don't survive well in heat. The fever isn't the malfunction in your body, it's actually the intelligence, the strategy. And when we rush to bring a fever down the moment it appears, we can actually be working against the process the body started on purpose.

Now, can you imagine something like a fever happening in your body and you running for Advil or running for Tylenol? Not saying those are the enemy, but hear me out for a second. When we do those kind of things, what we're saying is we don't have time for this, we don't believe you're intelligent.

We're sending all these messages of distrust to the body when we do these things. With Beyond Wellness Culture, with everything that I'm teaching, it is about creating trust and building a beautiful relationship with your body that is built on trust. So be mindful before running to those things, knowing your body is doing some beautiful, beautiful things in the background. So what is a single day of loose stool telling you?

Well, that can be your gut clearing out something faster than usual. Maybe it was something you ate. Maybe it wasn't. Maybe it was stress. Maybe it was a shift in your routine. Your gut has the ability to speed up transit time when it decides something needs to move quickly. That's not a crisis. That's the intelligence in your body and your gut doing exactly what it was designed to do.

Yes, I'm getting animated, but I want you to understand there's intelligence behind all of these things that we deem problems, that we think that they need a solution. Sometimes they just need us to recognize them, see them for what they are.

Thank you, body, for that restless night of sleep. Thank you, body, for getting all of the icky stuff out of my gut. Thank you, body, for slowing down my gut for whatever reasons. Speaking of slowing down the gut, let's talk about what a stretch of constipation might be when there's no change in food or water and it's just moving at a slower cycle.

This is not a stall. Digestion isn't a fixed schedule. It shifts with stress, with sleep, with hormones, with your travel, because your body gets anxious and it doesn't want to have a bowel movement in a different bathroom. We've talked about this on other episodes really early on in the podcast. Take a peek at those.

Super fascinating how your body works that way. And constipation even happens with the change of seasons. So a day or two of slower movement actually doesn't mean that there's something wrong. It means your body is adjusting its pace. So be willing to walk through some uncomfortable ability, can't even say that word. Don't even know if it's a real word, but hey guys, uncomfortable ability. Be willing to walk through the icky stuff because honestly, a lot of this stuff is self-limiting symptom. It will resolve on its own.

What about those nasty headaches that can be your nervous system settling after stress or tension? A lot of headaches show up not during the stressful moment, but right after it, when your body finally has room to process everything that it just held on to.

Nausea passes, the fatigue lifts. And here's the thing I really want you to hear, friend. Most of these resolve within a day or two, completely on their own, without a single intervention from you. Not because you did something right, not because you took that Pepto-Bismol, not because you grabbed the Tylenol, not because you made yourself eat so much fiber so that constipation went away, or not because you doused yourself in melatonin so you could sleep through the night. But because your body was built with the intelligence to handle it, thank you, God.

I get very excited about this because this is stuff that people are not hearing about. This is stuff that you don't hear about on another health show when they're talking about your supplement stacks and your peptides and all these things. We got to come back to understand that the body is amazing. And there is a whole list of other small, ordinary things that your body does that don't need a diagnosis.

And I want to take a moment to go through several of these because I think once you hear the full list, you'll actually start to recognize patterns everywhere in your own life. And you might not even hear something in this list that you're experiencing, but I want you to actually go, maybe this thing that wasn't on the list that I'm experiencing is one of these self-limiting symptoms.

Let me just keep an eye on it and see how things go and not freak out. Have some peace about it, knowing, hey, my body's super wise and it's working in the background, doing exactly what it needs to do. But here are some of those other symptoms: dizziness. When you stand up too fast, it's actually just your blood pressure catching up, and it's not a sign of a serious condition. Your adrenal glands need to push that blood up to the brain. And when you get up too quickly, sometimes.

That little dizzy spell happens. Nothing to really worry about in that moment. If it resolves, it resolves. Now, if this is ongoing dizziness over and over and over, that's a little something to get checked out and be more intentional about trying to solve or trying to figure out what is the body trying to communicate in that sense. Now, what about those random aches that show up in your shoulder? Maybe your knee for a day and disappears just as fast.

Your body compensates constantly. Not every ache has a clear origin story and it doesn't need one. What about your appetite? Maybe you didn't feel like eating for a day or two. Maybe your appetite took a dip. This happens with stress.

Can happen with poor sleep, with a shift in your schedule, it's not automatically a red flag. And oftentimes, what I see when the appetite dips, it's either hormone shifting, maybe you're somewhere in your cycle, also when your immune system is working behind the scenes in a higher capacity, meaning it's fighting off some bacterial infection or viral infection.

Maybe you're not feeling outward symptoms because your body is constantly working to get those invaders out of there. If your immune system is working at a higher capacity, it's not going to want to expend energy to try to digest all of the food. Because when we do eat food, that requires the body to use energy to break that down into the smaller components so that we can absorb it, so that we can use it for what we need.

So when our appetite dips for a day or two, it's not an alarmist. It's not something to be, my goodness, I'm freaking out, what's going on? And trying to force yourself to eat. Honor the body's cues. If you've ever had a pet, I remember our pets when they would get sick, they would vomit. What does a dog do? He eats the grass first and then he makes himself throw up and then he doesn't want to eat his food.

As long as you're staying hydrated, you're going to be okay even with that appetite dip. So don't put a lot of emphasis or fear on that if it's only lasting a few days. What about muscle twitches? Muscle twitches. We don't like those. Usually those are just nerves firing after a long day, maybe a muscle twitch. Sign you might need a little bit of magnesium. You can get this from food source.

There's seven different types of magnesium. I'm not a big huge supplement pusher here at all, but you got to make sure you get the right kind of magnesium for muscle twitches, which is magnesium glycinate to help with the muscles, and also having adequate rest of those muscles. It's not a diagnosis. So if you're just having twitches here, those are signs muscles need a little bit of nutrients.

And you can support that through a good quality diet, maybe adding a little bit of magnesium glycinate to help support that. What about that restless night of sleep that I said? We wanna thank our body even when we have those restless nights of sleep.

Those things can happen. Sleep isn't perfectly consistent every single night. And one rough night doesn't mean sleep is completely thrown out the window and needs to be fixed. Itching with zero rash. This is me sometimes. This was me actually a few days ago. I was like, my gosh, I can't even sleep. My husband made a comment. He was all itchy in the bed.

And then once he made that comment, I don't know if my brain grabbed a hold of it. And then it's like all of a sudden I'm scratchy and I'm like, do we got bed bugs? What's in here? But no, it just happened that one night, random, body was doing something, but itching with no rash oftentimes is just histamine responding to something minor, like stress, heat, or new fabric.

So you don't need to necessarily jump on an antihistamine in that case. I just itched wherever my body was itching, woke up the next morning, I was totally fine. Now, a sudden spell of yawning that has nothing to do with being tired. What is this? Why is my body doing this? Your body sometimes does this to regulate oxygen and cool your brain. It's not exhaustion, it's regulation. How many of us are breathing very shallowly?

And not even realizing how much we're breathing shallowly. Right? We're taking these really short breaths because we're got our shoulders up to our ears and we're like, what are you talking about? What are you talking about? I'm breathing. The amount of times I'm telling patients, make sure you're breathing, even if you're just washing your hands after using the restroom, take a deep breath in and breathe out, right? Take some, get some oxygen in your body.

Get your oxygen in your blood. Allow your body to function with quality oxygen. When you're yawning a lot, the brain is screaming for oxygen. Another sign, and this is something to think about, not necessarily to correct. We're not talking about correcting all of these little self-limiting symptoms that the body comes up with, or not that the body comes up with, but you understand what I'm saying, that the body presents with sometimes.

Not that I'm saying that this needs a solution, but things to think about if you're yawning all the time and there's not tiredness, it also could be a stomach acid imbalance. So you might need to actually incorporate a little bit more acid into your diet.

Simple fix for that would be like a little bit of apple cider vinegar before a large meal to really help that stomach, that pyloric sphincter, not to get technical, in the stomach open up to be able to push food through to the small intestines where it needs to go to be assimilated and desimilated, built up and broken down to what it needs to be. So that could be also a reason for yawning.

Again, not necessarily telling you to throw apple cider vinegar into your diet, but I am telling you that that is something, if it does persist and continue on, might be something to think about. So I hope that this encouraged you to actually start naming these for what they not noise, not red flags. Your body does create background noise all day long, and most of it doesn't require your intervention.

Yay, body. Thank you for being so incredibly wise that you don't need my intervention every single time.

I want to share a story now of a client I worked with a while back who actually came to me convinced that something was seriously wrong with her digestion. She'd had one day of loose stool every few weeks, completely unpredictable, no pattern that she could find. She had already been through several rounds of testing, everything came back normal, which somehow made her more anxious, not less.

And I can attest to that. Okay. I was doing all the lab tests. I was doing everything, everything coming back normal. And I'm like, no, it can't be. It can't be. I definitely have heavy metals. All my heavy metal testing. Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. Spending $20,000, $20,000 to get my entire mouth redone. And I'm talking about not all my teeth are fake. I'm saying all the amalgam fillings that I had in my mouth, I had them all replaced with better quality material that wasn't offgassing and putting mercury into my body.

Prior to doing that, even having, and I had to do it in every quadrant. So I had, I mean, when I was younger, I had probably cavities in every tooth and then some more, in between the teeth. And I for sure thought heavy metals were causing issues to my body because I was going frantically obsessed into that over optimization.

Researching, doing everything, I made myself sicker, and that's going to be a whole topic for another episode. I made myself sicker in that pursuit of trying to find what was that thing that was throwing me off. Well, it's because I was trying to do so much and I wasn't honoring my body and all of these things. But all of these lab reports, I don't mean to steer away from this story, I'm going to get back to it in just one second. All of my lab reports were coming back normal.

And it created more anxiety for me, just like it did for her. She felt like there had to be an answer that nobody found. Whoo, girl. Man, when we finally sat down and really mapped out what was actually happening in her life on those days, there was a pattern that showed up immediately. Every single episode happened within one or two days of a highly stressful event.

A hard conversation with her husband. There were deadlines at work. She had sleepless nights before big meetings and her gut wasn't malfunctioning. It was responding exactly the way that the nervous system under acute stress, meaning current stress, acute, not chronic. This is in the moment stress, is designed to respond. Our nervous system is designed to respond this way under acute stress.

Once she understood that, everything shifted. She stopped spiraling every time it happened. She started asking completely different questions. Not what's wrong with me, but what did my body just process? Or what I like to do and what I shared with her to do is just giving her body the gratitude. Thank you, body, for reacting and responding the way that you are while I'm in this stressful situation.

And if there's any way I can support you, let me know. And within a couple months, the frequency of all of this actually went down because she wasn't adding an extra layer of panic, of stress, of cortisol on top of an already dysregulated nervous system. This is the pattern I see over and over. The anxiety about the symptom often does more damage than the actual symptom itself.

So instead of asking, "What's wrong with me?" Ask, "What is my body working through right now?" Here's a simple filter, and I want you to actually remember this one because it's part of this episode that you can use immediately. Is this new? Is it severe? Is it lasting more than a few days? Is this new? Is it severe?

Is it lasting more than a few days? If yes, pay attention and get it checked. That filter matters. It's not permission to ignore real warning signs. But if it's no, if this is mild, if it's familiar, if it's correlated with high stress, if it's correlated with your cycle, every time you have your cycle, this is what happens. Great.

Then that means it's going to be short-lived. Once the cycle is over, it's going to be over. And it's likely your body's doing its job. But this is the part that trips people up. It's permission to stop treating every small symptom like an emergency without swinging all the way to the other extreme of ignoring your body completely. It's that middle path, the awareness without the alarm.

And I wanna walk this through what it actually looks like using the bodyOS framework, because I want you to leave this episode with something practical and not just a new mindset. Although a new mindset is the first thing we have to get.

So what you're gonna do in the bodyOS framework is you're going to pause. You're gonna take a moment to pause before you reach for something to make it stop. That one step every single time, not forever. Just long enough to ask a question instead of reacting on autopilot.

Next step, step two, you're going to connect to what is actually happening instead of jumping straight to fix it. What did today look like? What did yesterday look like? Is there stress? Is there a shift in routine? A lack of sleep? Something that would explain this without it being a mystery?

Third step. I want you to ask across all four pillars: physical, spiritual, emotional, mental. What might be moving through you right now? Sometimes the answer is purely physical. Your body is clearing something out. Sometimes it's emotional, a hard conversation that happened that you're still processing. Sometimes it's spiritual, a season where you've been caring more than you've admitted out loud. All four levels talk to each other constantly.

Step four, adjust, but only if your body is truly asking for something. Otherwise, just let it finish and give it some gratitude. Adjusting doesn't always mean doing something dramatic. Sometimes the adjustment is simply drinking more water and going to bed early. Sometimes it's giving yourself permission to rest for one afternoon. And sometimes the correct adjustment is doing absolutely nothing and letting the process complete on its own.

And friend, if you remember nothing else from this episode, I want you to hear me when I say not every symptom is a problem waiting to be solved. Sometimes it's your body finishing something you didn't even know it started. Thank your body for what it does without being asked. Take a breath, let it work. It usually knows the way back before you even do.

All right. So if you do have signals that you are trying to work yourself through and they are a little bit more consistent than your typical self-limiting symptom that you can just ignore, I want you to head over to the Body Signal Decoder assessment in the show notes to learn the difference between what is an actual signal that needs attention and one that just needs your trust.

Have a beautiful, beautiful week. Be blessed. And I will talk to you next week with another fun episode.

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.