44: Is Health Advice Keeping You Stuck? Why More Tips Can Slow Your Progress

Welcome to the first official episode of Beyond Wellness Culture.

After 43 episodes as your body speaks, Dr. Brook is stepping into a refreshed direction with the same heart: helping you understand your body, quiet the outside noise, and rebuild trust with the way God designed you.

In this episode, Dr. Brook shares why the podcast rebrand matters and how Beyond Wellness Culture will help you move out of health confusion and into a calmer, more grounded relationship with your body.

This episode is for the woman who feels overwhelmed by wellness advice, stuck between too many health tips, and unsure what her body actually needs next.

Inside this episode:

• Why your body speaks, but wellness noise can make it hard to hear
• Why too much health advice can keep you stuck instead of helping you heal
• The 3 ways health advice creates confusion: Too many starting points, too many changes at one time, outsourcing your next step
• Why more information is not always the answer
• How to find your body’s “antenna” so you can begin tuning into its signals
• Why your next health step should be simple, not overwhelming
• How to choose one body signal to focus on for a week
• Why basic support like water, sleep, protein, and gentle movement can matter more than another protocol
• How to use a simple filter before trying anything new

A key reminder from this episode:

Information is not always direction.

Sometimes more tips, more tabs, more podcasts, more protocols, and more expert opinions only create more static.

Your body needs space to speak.

Dr. Brook also walks you through the idea of finding your body’s “antenna.” Just like old radio antennas had to be adjusted to hear a clear signal, your body may have a place where you sense clarity, peace, resistance, or direction.

For Dr. Brook, that signal often shows up in her chest as peace. For others, it may show up in the gut, low back, shoulder, or another area of the body.

The goal is not to force an answer.

The goal is to begin listening.

Final reminder:

• You do not need to chase every new health tip.
• You do not need to fix everything at once.
• You do not need to outsource every next

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

✨ 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)

You need to figure out where your body's antenna is. Think about the old school antennas that cars would have for the radios. You had the antenna that you would pull up and you would move it a certain way to get a certain signal, to be able to hear things without static coming in, right? You have to find where your body's antenna is.

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)

Hello and welcome. If you fast forwarded through that intro thinking it was the same thing that you've been hearing from episode to episode, I want to tell you, on the other side of this, that this is the first episode of Beyond Wellness Culture. That's right, your body speaks just went through a full rebrand and the show now is going to be called Beyond Wellness Culture. This is the first episode you're listening to.

I am so excited you are here. For those of you who have been with us for a while now, for the last 43 episodes, I want to give you a little background as to where this name change came from and why. I talk a lot about the body and how we have so much noise in the wellness space, and how it makes it very difficult for us to be able to hear what our body is saying. So I really spent a lot of time in prayer and really asking the Lord, what direction are we going to be taking the show?

Because He told me earlier this year that my focus for 2026 was to be the podcast. And with that, this whole rebranding direction came and we've been working in the background, getting this all set up. So I'm really excited that you are going to be partaking and understanding this. The reason for this, beyond just the body speaking and talking about signals, which we are still going to be doing, I'm gonna still be helping you really understand how your body is speaking to you and what is going I'm also going to be taking an extra little angle here and talking about how to really quiet the noise, how to quiet the external noise that's coming at us from all angles.

We may get a body signal in our body. We may have a symptom pop up. But we also may be exposed to something. Now, when I say that, I'm sure a lot of you can go, oh yeah, that's happened to me. I just opened up my Instagram, and all of a sudden I saw an ad or someone's account that was promoting this health product, or this thing, this protocol to do to receive certain amount of benefits or whatever the struggle is, or you can live a long life if you do this, or you can age way better than the rest of the people next to you, right, if you do these top three things. And then all of a sudden, we don't realize how much stress and how much pressure we've put, not only ourselves, but our body under.

So that is why Beyond Wellness Culture exists, to cut through that information and quiet the noise around you so that you can begin, as we've been talking about, building a beautiful relationship with your body, so that you can develop the superpower to really understand what it's asking you for and how to support it, so that you can live that long life, so that you can age gracefully and beautifully the way that God intended, and not have all the aches and pains and all of the things going on or trying so many different things to make things work when our bodies have been designed so beautifully to tell us what is going on, we just need to learn how to listen. 

On that note, welcome to Beyond Wellness Culture. I'm so excited for the journey, and we are going to be talking about today all about this noise, and why health advice is making you stuck, and how to get out of that stuckness, right? We don't want to be stuck. We don't want to be not knowing where to go in all of this.

To begin, I wanna talk about the three ways that too much health advice makes us stuck. Now, the first way is it becomes too many different starting points. So maybe a signal pops up, maybe a symptom, maybe the body is whispering to us and we don't know where to start because we're looking up, "how to help with gut disorders." Now, the gut is a very, very vast complex system.

The entire body is complex and vast. I don't say that to worry you. I don't say that to overwhelm you. But when we really make these blanket statements, "how to fix gut distress," what is gonna happen is you're going to have so many different things pop up.

You're gonna have so many conflicting health advice show up. You're going to have all this stuff that's telling you, you just need this probiotic. You just need to have this food. You just need to do this thing and this thing and this thing, when it doesn't really understand you. Now, I know we have a lot of technology and there's a lot of different tools that we have at our disposal.

But if those tools are used incorrectly, it can actually make more problems for us than not. So we do have a tool like AI that can easily help us "diagnose" whatever's going on. So when we say, hey, we're experiencing bloating, and it's giving us a whole host of different things that we can do, I think that's great, but also something to be very cautious about in the sense of going after every little thing that it's saying, because you really need to bring it down. You really need to focus.

Because what ends up happening when you get all that information is you freeze. Your nervous system doesn't know what the starting point needs to be. So there could be one, it could be two, it could be three, it could be four. It could be all these different things. You know how ChatGPT likes to list things out. One, two, three, four, five, or all your different bullet points. Which one do you start with?

I'm gonna go through all of the ways to correct this, but first I wanted to talk about these three ways that health advice, too much health advice makes you stuck, and then we'll go into how to correct everything, okay? So bear with me, I just want you to hang on for the ride and understand first the three ways. So we talked about too many different starting points that causes your body to freeze.

The next thing can be too many changes at one time. So if we're trying to add in all these different foods or all these different supplements to try to correct an issue, and I've talked about this on other episodes in the past, is you can inadvertently impact another system by trying all of these things. And your body really cannot give you a clear response when we're throwing so much at it, in it, around it, on it.

All of the things. We're gonna try this lotion, we're gonna try this cream, we're gonna rub this oil on, we're going to eat this food. Take a deep breath first, take a deep breath. We're gonna talk all about the pause in just a second. The third way we stay stuck is we start to outsource our next step, right? So we might've been exposed to something on the internet and we feel like that is going on with us, or we may be experiencing this body signal and we're trying to find resolution for it.

And you listen to one doctor and they're saying this, and another doctor and they're saying that, and this person saying this, and I heard on that podcast, and maybe Dr. Brook said I really try to do, I wanna pull my own name out of that mix, is because I never wanna come on to this podcast and tell you point blank that you need to do X, Y and Z.

Now the only time you ever hear me giving you any sort of framework of what needs to be done is if I'm talking about the bodyOS framework, which teaches you how to build this beautiful relationship with your body. But also when I talk about the body signal in sneezing and I say, hey, get some rest. Hey, drink more water. Hey, also, cut out all sugar out of your diet, right?

There's those steps that I give you but you will never hear me say, woman, lady, beautiful friend, I need you to take this many things of this and this many things of that. And I need you to eat this in this podcast, I'm talking to an array of different people. You might be in Chicago. You could be in Africa. You can be in Europe. Your body is so unique. Your environment is so diverse. It is so different. And I can't just point blank at a big blanket statement across the board.

The only, and I will say this here and we're going to deep dive into this in future episodes, the only thing I say that is relevant to every single human being is adequate sleep is healthy sleep. Now that looks different for a lot of people, the sleep aspect, but making sure and prioritizing your sleep is vitally important for your body to function. So I digress. I was on a little tangent there, little rabbit trail that I went on, but it's important to understand that if you're outsourcing this information and getting it from all different experts, you are living in a very loud, crowded space.

Now, can you imagine yourself at Disneyland during the hot day of the summer, when everybody is out of school, and the lines are long, and you're sweating, and there's rides all around you, and there's fans blowing, people walking around with those handheld fans? There's so much noise.

It's so chaotic. You can't even hardly think for yourself. It's just like, what ride are we going on next? Okay. That's the only we're living in this crowded space, we don't allow our body to speak. Okay. We don't allow it to tell us what it means.

To recap, the three things that keep our body stuck with too much health advice is too many starting points, too many changes at one time, and outsourcing the next step. Now what are the three ways to gain clarity without more tips? We don't need more information. We have information overload at our fingertips. We don't need more information. What we need to do, number one, is pick one signal. And when I talk about signal, I'm talking about body symptoms.

For instance, if you are experiencing that GI distress that I spoke about in the beginning of the episode, that is one signal. If you're having difficulty sleeping, to me, that would be the signal I would prioritize, but I want you to ask your body which signal to prioritize. Allow it to speak to you. Now, something I share a lot, for those listening who may not be able to see me, a lot of times, and I would say a lot of people, now, we're all very, very unique, but you need to figure out where your body's antenna is, right?

Think about the old school antennas. For those of you who might be in their over 40s, 50s, listening to the show, there was actual antennas that you guys know, any of the younger generation has no clue, that cars would have for the radio stations or radios, like those big boom boxes that we had. You know, you had the antenna that you would pull up and you would move it a certain way to get a certain signal, to be able to hear things without static coming in, right? You have to find where your body's antenna is.

Now, for me personally, working with the body the way that I have over this last decade, and more specifically over these last six years, seven years now, is my antenna, I feel it like in my chest.

It's not tightness. It's not this pingy, loud signal. It's just this gentleness, like this peace, peace that I feel. I've had other clients and people tell me during workshops and things that they feel it more in their lower back, that they can feel it there, or they feel it more in their gut. You have to work on spending a little bit of time. This does not take long.

I'm not about making health a full-time job. This is what we are stepping out of. We are stepping out of the health overwhelm. So what I would ask you to do is in those quiet moments, if you're driving right now, if you're taking a walk right now, Just pause me, Tune into your body and say, where's my antenna? Maybe ask it that specific question. And you might get a little ping in a certain area on your elbow or your fingertip or somewhere and go with it.

It could shift over time as you develop this skill. So don't feel like you have to stay stuck to that as your antenna, right? Some antennas back in the day would be more powerful than just your typical radio boombox antenna. Things can shift. So understand that the body is very dynamic, is very wise, things do change. And as you develop this skill, it's going to get fine tuned more and more, that you are going to be so tuned into it really, really well. But take that moment to just tune into your body, find your antenna. Now when you find that antenna, again, go with it. Don't overthink this, don't make it a thing.

Now, when you are coming back to that very first thing on how to get clarity with your body, when you're picking one signal, and I mentioned, if you have multiple things going on, like a lot of knee pain and a lot of this and frequent headaches and I just, body's such a mess, pick one, pick one signal to start with. And if there is a lot, tune into that antenna and say, body, do you want to tune into the knee or the gut? Do you want to talk about the head or the sleep? A couple options, figure out exactly which one. There is no wrong answer here. Please understand. There is no wrong answer.

You are simply going to help support that one area of your body based on what your body may be seeking. So I want you to do that. Choose that one signal for a week. Okay, so if you are focusing on the knee, choose the knee for a week and really just tune in and figure out a way to help support your body through that knee pain. Maybe you're doing strenuous workouts and your body is having a hard time working through those.

Maybe you're not drinking enough water because the knee is a body mapping point for your kidneys. Now there's very specific points that's a very general statement that I'm making there. There are very specific points to the knee depending on where the pain is that actually be related to your adrenal glands. Your adrenals live on top of your kidneys. So if you're supporting your kidneys by drinking more water, you're going to help in turn, impact other areas of your body, because your body is just wise like that.

It's asking, hey, just do these very simple little things for me and I will function and I will do amazing things for you because that's the way I'm built. That's the way the Creator made me. So, choose one signal, do something for it for that week, whether it's I'm going to just take a walk because I'm exercising too hard on the knee. I'm going to drink more water.

Again, starting to work on building this relationship with your body. You're not choosing 10 different signals. You're just choosing one. The next thing is to pick one basic, a basic for support. Now, a basic can be things like you're waking up at the same time every day, or going to bed at the same time every day, creating some sort of routine and rhythm for these basic items, right?

Getting a certain amount of protein in in the morning to help sustain your blood sugar. Your blood sugar is the foundation for so many things. Being in patient care and in clinical practice, one thing that I see over and over and over again is so much of dysregulated blood sugar that impacts so many different systems. And people will be like, Dr. Brook, my hormones are out of crazy. I'm breaking out. And it's so interesting because the body is just like, man, if I just got stable protein coming in, if I had stable macros and water coming in, I would function so much better. So when I'm talking about the basic and maybe the basic for your knee is drinking more water. Maybe the basic for your knee is not working out so hard or going for a 10 minute walk versus trying to do all of this stuff because someone else told us to.

What I want you to start thinking about as you're learning these tools and we're going into this journey more and more is, how do I honor my body? Stop and ask it questions. You may never get the response right away, but as you build the relationship, trust builds, your body starts to talk to you. If you're a believer and you have the Holy Spirit, take it to the Boss. I say this all the time. The Holy Spirit is the Boss of the body. The body speaks to us.

But if we're not getting information from the body, then take it to the Holy Spirit and say, hey, how can I best support this vessel that You've given me? What do I need to do in this time frame? So that is a beautiful thing. The other thing, the third thing that we can do to support our body without adding more tips and adding more things in is to use a simple filter before trying anything new. Now, I really don't want you to do step three until you've really dialed in on one signal that you're going to focus on and then also adding in that basic. So if the one signal coming back to the example is the knee and then you're going to pick the one basic of drinking more water or maybe going up for a light walk every single day for the week versus doing this crazy leg workout because your trainer is saying you have to do it or all of these things

I want to get us out of this tight tangle of feeling like we have to do certain things a certain way because someone else is telling us to. Recently, my husband had hip surgery and the surgeon has a lot of, recommendations and protocols for him to follow post surgery. And then we had the PT, the physical therapist coming into the home and doing exercises and working with him.

And it was all beautiful. It's so important. That stuff is so important, especially rehabbing after the injury. But I always told him from the very beginning, we're gonna listen to the surgeon, we're gonna listen to the PT, but ultimately your body trumps all of that. So if there is something that's happening where the PT is giving a certain exercise and your body is not responding well to that, we're not going to do it. Now, I get it. When you're hearing that, you're probably like, well, how the heck do I figure out?

Building on this relationship with it is going to be the best thing you can do because when you really need to have the body tell you what to do, in the instance with my husband's surgery, that came through obvious years of practice for me and as he's learning this same stuff that I've been teaching him on a daily basis, he gets to walk this out with his own body too.

So he gets to go, yeah, my body's not responding to this food really well. My body is not responding to this type of exercise. So yes, it's nuanced, but really what I'm getting at is focus on those first two before you really add in the third. And that third piece being use a simple filter before trying something new. So does it fit your body right now? Can you do it for seven days? Does this reduce the pressure or does it add to pressure?

What are we doing with Beyond Wellness Culture? We are cutting out the noise. We are reducing the pressure. Something should not add more pressure to your routine. If you've picked something and it's a basic thing to start with, adding more protein and/or doing the 10 minute walk, but all of a sudden it feels more pressure to get that done. Take a step back, take a breath, and make adjustments. Maybe it's five minutes.

Maybe it's literally walking around the house. Maybe it's having 10 to 15 grams of protein for breakfast or only drinking 20 ounces of water for the morning and then drinking the rest of your water for towards the evening. Because, maybe you are working in a work environment where you don't have access to the bathroom. Every single one of us has something so unique in our day-to-day lives. We don't live the same lives. We have to wrap these routines around our schedules and what our lives look like. It's not about trying to fit it in based on somebody else.

So wrapping everything up and landing the plane for today's episode is, over the next seven days, I want you to do no new health content. If you see something on Instagram, if there's a product being given to you or shown to you and you feel like you need it because man, that woman lost 20 pounds from taking that pill or she did these certain steps and received this benefit turn off Instagram, even just jump out of there for a minute, turn the podcast off, do what you need to do to just regain control of your space, okay? Regain control, get really quiet.

Pick that one signal I talked about of watching, like watching that knee pain over the next week, putting in that one basic thing to support it. So we're gonna keep it very simple. We're not gonna do more than that. And this is not about perfection. It's about practice. We build this practice over time.

I'm so excited for the adventure to come. I'm excited for you to learn how to quiet this noise. We're gonna hear from guest experts. We're going to hear from people who embody this in their work, in their day-to-day lives, and how they too have cut through the wellness noise.

It's not about perfection. It's about practice. It's about building that beautiful relationship with your body. So I hope over the course of this next week that you take a moment just to tune in to figure out A, where's your antenna? And two, how can I support my body in those little areas? And even if that is waking up every single morning and offering your body a dose of gratitude. "Thank you so much for taking care of me. Thank you so much for loving me. Thank you so much for being so incredibly wise to do what you do every single day, even when I don't understand what's happening." And that, my friend, will help shift things so beautifully for you.

And if you're struggling with any specific signal that needs to be decoded, I did do a Body Signal Decoder assessment. There is the top eight signals that people experience in their day to day lives that can be found there, and it will help you walk through the bodyOS framework to figure out how best to support that. Use it as a tool to help support your journey, but if it does feel like pressure, don't do it. On that note, I will see you all next week. Thank you so much for being here, beautiful friend. Have a blessed 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.