58: The Hidden Idolatry of Biohacking Culture

In part two of this four part Body Theology series, Dr. Brook Sheehan takes on a word that shapes so much of modern wellness culture: biohacking.

She's honest about her own fifteen year journey through it, from complete disconnection from her body to full blown wellness zealotry, and what she found in the middle ground once she came out the other side.

This episode isn't an attack on supplements, wearables, or trackers. Those aren't the villain. What Brook is naming is something subtler, the moment care for the body quietly shifts into control, and control quietly shifts into idolatry.

She walks through what that promise of certainty actually offers, why early wins from optimization feel so convincing, and why the body eventually stops responding to the same tricks, not as a failure, but as a signal.

Drawing from Psalm 139, 1 Corinthians, Romans, and Colossians, Brook explores the difference between honoring the body as a temple and managing it like a machine that's never quite good enough, and she asks the question underneath every wearable, every supplement stack, every protocol: am I reaching for this from wisdom or reacting from fear?

She shares a story from a client whose morning routine had quietly become more trustworthy to her than her own faith, and what it looked like to let that go. The episode closes with a practical rhythm anyone can use when data and body seem to disagree, pause, connect, ask, adjust, drawn from the bodyOS framework Brook teaches throughout the show.

This isn't about abandoning wellness. It's about noticing when discipline has turned into performance, and finding your way back to reverence instead of control, and peace instead of certainty.

✨ 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)

I want you to pause when your data says one thing and your body says another. Give yourself a break. Don't have guilt and shame around that. You are actually honoring your body in those moments. Your wearable tool, your supplement, your workout, your fill-in-the-blank is not a verdict.

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. 

Hi friend, welcome back to another episode. Whatever you are doing in this moment, whether it be walking the dogs, taking care of your kids, making dinner, driving to work, I just pray that this day be blessed. And I am so appreciative of you spending time with me and learning different concepts that we are talking about on this show.

If this is your very first episode, we are in part two of a four-part series on body theology, something I'm so passionate about and really love exploring. This entire show is about really cutting through health and wellness noise and getting into a beautiful relationship with your body.

And that's not from a state of fear, but moving into peace with our bodies and knowing that they are intelligent, they've been designed intelligently, and they are doing wonderful work for us in the background, even if it doesn't feel comfortable. Now, this topic today is a hot topic, especially since we are cutting through noise in the health and wellness space. And there is so much noise in this space due to this one word.

And I first off wanna mention that I'm not vilifying this word. This is just a word that we have fallen into as a culture, and it's created a sense of idolatry. The word is biohacking. We live in a world where people are working on biohacking. In fact, I've talked to so many people who are wellness zealots like myself, like I was a wellness zealot.

I became so insanely crazy about making sure we do everything crunchy. We do all the wellness things. We make sure there's no toxins in our food and in our environment. And we're doing constantly, constantly, constantly. Now, biohacking has been on the scene for a very long time, maybe about the last decade and a half, at least, because that's when my whole journey into this world started about 15 years ago.

And God brought me full circle. I've talked about this story multiple times on the podcast. But now that I'm in the middle lane, one side being completely disconnected, the other side completely in this wellness zealot, and now I'm in this middle ground.

I'm seeing things with fresh eyes, fresh perspective. And this is not at all to dismantle some of your beliefs and feelings about health and wellness. This is mainly to provide a different perspective. And maybe I can encourage you with that. It is to provide you a different perspective on how you are viewing health and wellness because every single person's relationship with their body is going to look extremely different.

And you need to find out what works for your body. I'm here just to kind of share different things in terms of cutting through the noise and teaching you how to build a beautiful relationship with your body. But we cannot dismiss the fact that over optimization can become idolatry. It truly can.

And hear my heart when I share this. This is not at all, like I said, to be on the attack, but my heart is pure when I'm saying this because I did live in this world and it did become idolatry. It didn't look like resurrecting a statue. It didn't look like bowing down to something else. That's not what it was. It was these micro things that I would do day to day to day that ended up becoming a mountain of wild chasing and trying to optimize everything.

So here's the issue is this biohacking culture that we are existing in. And you may not look at that word as being a negative, but again, what I want us to see is that biohacking actually gives you control, which is not a bad thing necessarily.

But here's the problem is once you have that control, all of a sudden your body will stop responding to tricks. Meaning you can actually do the wearables, you can do the supplements, you can do cold plunges, red light therapy, tracking apps, hyperbaric chambers, all of it. And they work, they work for a while. And then you hit this wellness plateau. I've talked about this on previous episodes, and then all of a sudden it backfires.

And you're just like, I don't know why I don't have the energy that I had before, or I don't know why I can't sleep, or I don't know, it must be something else. And so then we go into the pursuit of something else. And then we're constantly seeking information outside of us.

See, the moment that your body stops responding to these tactics that we're doing in the health and wellness space, I want you to recognize is not a failure. It's actually your body being so intelligent and it's sending you a beautiful signal that, hey, that optimization without listening, has limits. Now, what do I mean by that?

Last episode, we talked about how your body was designed with intention, not defaulted into existence. Very intentional design. And today we are looking at what happens when caring for your body's design quietly turns into something else entirely.

So in order to truly unpack this the way that we need to, we need to understand these different things. The first thing is the promise of control. What does biohacking do? It sells you certainty. It tells you that if you track it, if you hack it, if you fix it, you can make sure your body responds a certain way.

See, with every single app you use, every single wearable, every supplement stack, they all promise the same underlying thing. And that is if you get the inputs correctly, you can predict and control the outcome. For a while it works. And that's exactly what makes the promise feel true. You end up sleeping better after cutting caffeine. Your energy improves after taking a new supplement. The early wins are so real and they're exactly what keeps you chasing that next optimization.

But let's name the appeal directly because control feels safer than trust. And when your body feels unpredictable, optimization offers a way to feel like you're back in control.

Now I need to be very, very clear on something before we go further because I do not want this episode to sound like I am coming after your supplements or your Oura ring or all of your trackables. All of these things are not the problem. They're not the villain. They're just tools. And tools aren't good, nor are they bad on their own.

See, the real question underneath all of this is simple. Am I reaching for this from a place of wisdom or am I reaching for this from a place of fear? Keep that question in your back pocket because we're going to come back to it more than once today.

But here's what I want you to sit with for a second. Your body was designed with intelligence before any wearable ever existed. Long before somebody invented rings that track your sleep cycles or apps that score your recovery, your body already knew how to regulate hormones, repair tissues, balance systems. No algorithm could ever fully explain. And scripture actually makes this claim directly.

Psalms 139, the very famous scripture that you will see plastered all over different things in people's homes. Psalm 139. And it says, you are fearfully and wonderfully made. And that phrase is not poetic decoration. It is a design claim about your body. It's telling you that the intelligence came first, built in at creation. Long before anyone strapped a device on your wrist to tell you all about it.

See, this one is very personal for me too. Cause I spent, years of optimizing before I actually learned what it meant to listen to what was already built inside of me. I tracked everything. I chased every new protocol.

And what I eventually realized was that all of the tracking hadn't actually taught me how to listen. It had taught me to override all of my body's signals. So in years when I spent disconnected from my body, I was just popping pills for every ill, not even understanding what certain signals meant. Then I flipped it on its head and I went the other direction and I started taking pills, different kinds of pills for every issue and thinking that I was actually helping and supporting my body by doing 28 different supplements. Little did I know that I was actually not honoring my body.

I was believing that I knew best for it because somebody else told me that this is good for me. But this is where the line between care and idolatry can get a little bit blurred. Because if the wisdom was already there, where does this start to go wrong? See, Paul gives us language in 1 Corinthians, where he calls the body a temple of the Holy Spirit. A temple is honored, not endlessly managed. Can you imagine if they were just managing the temple and not having reverence for it?

There's a real difference between tending to something with care and treating it like a machine that's never quite good enough. Now I know idolatry might feel like a very strong word to bring into a conversation about supplements and sleep scores. So I actually want to define it here. In Exodus, God tells his people to have no other gods before him.

And idolatry rarely looks like a statue or an altar anymore. Remember, I said I wasn't erecting a statue. I wasn't bowing down to something when I was doing this. But what idolatry looks like is devotion, time, money, and identity centered on one thing above God. I put my health and wellness and my body optimization above God.

And I just want you to ask yourself honestly: what gets more of your attention each day? Your relationship with God or your body's metrics? Making sure you get your workout at the gym because you need to do two workouts, because your personal trainer said if you don't do this, then these results won't happen? Or are you actually giving yourself a moment to just take some rest, take a moment of peace to ask your body if it can handle that extra workout?

See, workouts aren't bad. All of these things that we're doing are not bad, but it's what we're doing with that information where it becomes a problem. Now, I'm not asking you this or making these statements to make you feel guilty. I'm asking because most of us have never actually stopped to answer those questions. Myself included for a long time.

I want to talk about how this shows up practically. If you're waking up in the morning to check your sleep score before you're even checking in with God, there can be an issue. Rearranging your entire day around a workout window, that could be an issue. Feeling more anxious about a wearables readiness score than about your own spirit. That is a huge issue. I just gotta say that. See, none of these are wrong on their own, one by one, but together they can quietly become your center of gravity.

I think about a client who I worked with that reminded me so much of myself. She spent years in the biohacking routine that was so intense that it had taken over her entire identity. Her morning started with five different supplements, a cold shower, light therapy lamp, and a specific breathing protocol all before she said hello to her family. When any part of her routine got disrupted, her whole entire day felt off. Not because her body actually needed all of it, but because the routine itself had become the thing that she trusted more than anything else, including her own faith.

When we started peeling this back, she realized that the constant optimization really wasn't about health anymore. Mm-mm. It had become a way of proving her worth to herself every single morning before she even had coffee. How many of us are doing this? Let's think about that. Letting go of a few pieces of that routine was terrifying. And I mean terrifying for her at first.

But what she found on the other side wasn't a decline. It actually was relief. Her story is a pretty clear picture of what I just talked about, and my own story that I highlighted as well. Care tipping into something closer to worship without her ever noticing the shift.

That is exactly the pattern Paul was pointing to when he wrote to the Romans. In Romans 12, Paul asks believers to offer their bodies as a living sacrifice. That is a striking phrase because it reframes body care as worship, done in submission, but not performance done for control. See the difference? The difference is the posture of your heart underneath it. Worship says, here, this is Yours. Performance says, watch me get this right.

See, Paul makes a simpler point in Colossians, naming earthly things that quietly take God's place. Optimization can hide in plain sight because it looks like responsibility. See, nobody questions somebody who is disciplined about their health, especially Christians, because we believe and we know to be true that the Holy Spirit resides in our bodies. That is the temple of the Holy Spirit.

So we swing that pendulum super far over and we quietly fall into this place of idolatry where yes, we are taking care of our health, but at what point did that health quietly become control? Discipline and devotion aren't automatically the same thing. And it's worth asking which one is actually driving your routine.

See, I know you care about your health. I know you care about your well-being. This is why you listen to this show. This is not for somebody who doesn't care about their health. This is for you who does care about her health and wants to be well and wants to stay fit and wants all of these things. And those are beautiful pursuits, I have nothing against that.

I love taking care of myself. I love supporting myself with good food. I love supporting myself with movement and quality fluids and all kinds of things that are there. But I also love honoring my body and I love honoring God.

And in that, the beautiful thing is I've built a beautiful relationship with my body that you can too. And so now when things come across, when there's decisions to be made, whether I need to eat this or I need to do that workout, I ask my body. And a lot of times now, having experienced this for this many years, I'm able to hear my body respond before I even ask a question.

It says, Brook, we need to get out there and go for a walk. It says, Brook, we need to eat that kiwi. Okay, it says, Brook, we need to like take some rest and actually rest from a place of not having to perform or to feel like you did enough to earn that rest. We need that rest to be able to do the rest of what you're gonna do. And the beautiful thing, like I just said, is you too can build this relationship. And that is what I'm teaching you.

So let's bring this back to something practical because I don't want you leaving this episode feeling overwhelmed, feeling like, I don't know how to build a relationship with my body, or having conviction and having nowhere to put that conviction. Because see, the Holy Spirit might be pressing something on your heart today and sharing, like, yes, like maybe we've slipped a little bit into that idolatry. And what I'm encouraging is for you to bring that needle back to the middle ground, where your full devotion is to the Lord, where you are taking care of your body in such a beautiful way and building a relationship with that.

So the first thing that practical tip that we need to do is pause. I want you to pause when your data says one thing and your body says another. So if you're pushing, pushing, pushing, reading all the data, and you're not actually giving your body a chance to just say, I need a rest. if you're feeling like you're burning.

Candle at both ends, and you're not able to do the other workout. Give yourself a break. Don't have guilt and shame around that. You are actually honoring your body in those moments. Like the best words that I hear from people in my world is my body said. And I absolutely love hearing that because your wearable tool, your supplement, your workout, your fill-in-the-blank is not a verdict.

Okay, after you pause, what you're gonna do next is you're gonna connect. Connect to what's happening underneath the numbers or the feelings after taking the supplements or the feelings after you're eating the food, all of those things. Is it something that your body actually needs? Or is this anxiety wearing a disguise of discipline?

That's a huge one because a lot of times when we're doing all these things thinking we're super disciplined and we love shouting the numbers out on the rooftops, like my sleep score was amazing. This happened. Look at me. I'm doing all this stuff. But what's hiding underneath all that? What are the feelings of the stress and and the worry and the loneliness? Anxiety a lot of times is hiding behind that discipline. And it's disguised and we don't really like recognize or even acknowledge it.

So after you connect, you're going to ask a question. based upon the four pillars of health. So physical, spiritual, emotional, mental. Now, if one pillar is off, it could be in a different pillar. what is this routine actually serving?

So if you're doing a bunch of supplements, people think about the physical, right? That can be supporting your physical. If the body is saying no, then honestly, it might be looking into letting it go by the wayside for a moment. Doesn't mean you won't ever need that supplement. There's times when the body does need things. It's dynamic. It's not static. You don't start something and never stop it.

So step four is adjust and you're going to adjust based on what you find. So in the case of the supplement example I just gave prior, if you feel like your body is saying to stop. Stop for a moment. If you're not clear on the decision and you feel like you're just doing things to just do things because that's part of your routine and you're taking these 15 different things, maybe just decide I'm not gonna take all 15. I'm gonna just do a core group of maybe two or three. I'm gonna see how my body does. You're gonna make small adjustments. You're not going to do what your algorithm demands.

And by algorithm, that can totally be your social media, also algorithm being the data from the tracking devices.

In closing, I just want to make it very clear, like I said in the very beginning, biohacking is not the villain. It's not the issue in this episode. Fear is your villain. Fear wearing the disguise of discipline is. Because when we are fearful of things going wrong, when we're fearful of aging, when we're fearful of not being healthy, when we're fearful of this, when we're fearful of that.

We're not operating from a state of peace. We're operating from pressure. And when your body stops playing along, it might be actually doing what it was designed to do. So those wellness plateaus consider them a blessing, not a frustration, not a stress. They're calling you back to reverence instead of control and peace instead of certainty.

In part three of this four-part series, we're going to be going deeper into what reverence looked like in scripture, all the way back to the offerings that God asked the Israelites to bring. So we are going a lot in the Old Testament, but I think it's important to understand that an intentional God created you, created your body, made the decision to put your soul inside this body that you get to exist inside of.

We get to talk about how He has reverence for the body and how much he honors and respects his beautiful creation. On that note, friend, have a beautiful, blessed rest of your day. If you haven't already utilize the body signal decoder, it is available in the show notes and it will help provide some sense of direction on signals or symptoms you might be experiencing as you move forward. So bless you and I will chat with you on the next 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.