How to listen to your body when health advice feels overwhelming

I went into this conversation for a selfish reason. I'd just turned 41, I'm perimenopausal, and I was being hit by everything at once. Eat more protein. Exercise this many times a week. Lift this. Optimise. Prioritise. It felt relentless, and I wanted someone to tell me, plainly, what I should actually be paying attention to.

Brigid Fox describes herself as a reformed technology executive. She spent about 12 years in tech sales, which she calls "burnout central", watching peers in their 40s have heart attacks and people in their 30s get signed off with digestive and heart problems. She is now a health coach and a nutritionist in training, and she wants to help people be well without giving up their careers or their ambitions.

What I got from her wasn't a new list of rules. It was a different question.

Overwhelmed by health advice? Knowledge isn't the same as action

We have never had more information about our bodies. Brigid's point is that this hasn't made looking after ourselves easier. Science has given us a better understanding of how complex the body is, and social media has turned that into endless chatter about the one thing, or the ten things, you need to do. Conflicting nutrition advice comes at you from every direction, and it's too much for a brain to process.

Information and knowledge does not equate to action.

The part we've lost, she says, is self-knowledge. Knowing that the body needs protein for repair is one thing. Asking whether you actually feel you need ten chicken breasts today is another. We've outsourced knowing ourselves to science, to wearables and to monitors.

That landed hard. I check my step count or my ring before I check how I feel. My first instinct with everything is: how do I outsource this efficiently? Just tell me X, Y and Z, I'll do all of it, and there I'll be. That's wellness overwhelm in a sentence, and it doesn't work.

How to listen to your body: start with ten breaths

So how do you get out of your head? Brigid thinks we live in a world that encourages us to be very cerebral. Most of our work is screen-based, we barely meet in person, and the economy wants us productive and online. We've reached a point where the body feels like an inconvenience: it gets hungry, tired, cranky and achy, while we act as if the mind could go on forever without it.

Her starting point, which she uses with nearly all of her coaching clients, is simple. Put both feet on the floor. Close your eyes. Take ten breaths and notice where each breath reaches in your body. Then try breathing into your toes, ankles, knees and all the way up to your head. The point is just to realise your body is still there.

Here's the uncomfortable bit. Many of her clients feel a strong urge to reject the stillness, sometimes something close to anger. I recognised that straight away. I've finished yoga classes furious because things came up that I wanted to push down. Brigid sees that reaction as a sign of how far into our heads we've gone: the body finally gets a small window to tell us something, and we're afraid to hear it.

Her suggestion is to keep doing it, gently. You don't need half an hour of meditation or a somatic class. Set a timer once a day, or take a minute between meetings. She does the breathing at the start of every coaching session, and by the sixth session her clients are asking for it.

How to understand what your body needs (when nobody else can tell you)

I gave up alcohol three years ago, after realising I'd used it to numb out and disconnect. I haven't given up sugar. Most days I hit a three o'clock slump and reach for something sweet. So I asked Brigid what my body was telling me.

Her honest answer was that she can't tell me. Brigid is six years sober herself and had a long stretch of swapping alcohol for sugar, so she gets it. She offered possibilities: a sugary breakfast could set off a glucose rollercoaster, so the afternoon dip is your blood sugar dropping. It could be hunger. It could be fatigue, because you've worked since 8am without a break and you're not going to take a nap. Working out which it is means learning the language of your body, which none of us were taught.

She was clear that she isn't anti-science or anti-testing. Someone who is chronically unwell needs professional help, and blood tests have their place. But for the average stressed, tired person, she thinks a lot of progress could come from learning to read the body's signals, and then being brave enough to act on them. Hearing "I'm tired" is one thing. Blocking out your calendar to take a nap is another.

How to listen to your body when eating

Food is more complicated, because you can't stop eating. I grew up in the 90s and 2000s, when skinny was in, and I came out of it with a warped sense of food and body image. I thought I'd done the work. Then GLP-1s arrived, skinny was back, and I found myself having triggering moments, labelling foods as bad and wanting to restrict and control again.

Brigid admits she has the same battle most times she sits down to eat: is this the right thing, the right amount, the right nutrients? Part of the answer is questioning those beliefs. The more useful part is having a picture of how you want to feel in your body, not how you want to look.

• If you reached your goal, what would you feel like?
• What would it mean for your energy?
• What would it mean for your self-esteem?
• How would it change the way you show up at work, with your family and with friends?

Setting an intention around how you want to feel, she says, lets you choose what goes on your plate from a better place than a target weight or a dress size. For me, that intention is health span. I want to be a really old woman running around in chaos and having the best time possible, strong and mentally sharp for as long as I can. That isn't about deficit. It means getting the nutrients and protein I used to deny myself when all I counted was calories. It's about nourishment and enjoyment, not survival.

Brigid's view on GLP-1s is that they may be a great option for some people with medical obesity who have struggled for a long time, but for the average person they could be problematic, with muscle loss and digestive side effects alongside the weight loss, and long-term effects we don't yet know. That's her opinion, not medical advice. If you're considering them, talk to your GP.

Feeling guilty about resting

Sleep is everywhere right now. Everyone is talking about how much it matters. I have also been conditioned, deeply, to believe that rest is bad. There is no way I'd take a nap in the middle of the day, even if my body was screaming for one, because I'm supposed to be on, efficient and optimised.

Brigid is pleased when trends like fibre and sleep come round, because those are the basics. The harder part is the conditioning around rest, especially for women, who are taught to always be doing something, serving someone, creating perfect Christmases. Her suggestion is to question it:

• Where does the belief that rest is unproductive come from?
• Who told me that?
• Do I actually believe it?
• Who is watching, and who is actually judging me? Is it just me?

Then try an experiment of one. Take a half-hour break you wouldn't normally take, do nothing, and notice what comes up. The discomfort is the point. She thinks it's normal to see rest as unproductive, especially when an employer wants to see eight hours, but the pandemic and the four-day week trials suggest a lot can be done in less time.

She also told me about the "how to work with me" document she posted on her Slack profile as a consultant: no Wednesdays, these hours only, talk to me before booking anything outside them. Full-time colleagues started writing their own. One checked Slack only between 10 and 12. Others said to call if it was urgent. Boundaries spread when someone goes first.

Nutrition basics for beginners: nourishment on and off the plate

Brigid is an integrative health coach, which for her means there is nourishment on the plate and nourishment off it. We obsess about the first and forget the second. She owns a million cookbooks and loves learning about food, but she was blunt about it.

If you're eating really well, but you're stressed to hell, it doesn't matter.

Off the plate, she means social connection, time off, creative things done purely for enjoyment, sunlight, fresh air and gentle movement. Without those, she says, a lot of the nutrition work won't count for much. Stress is what links them.

When healthy living becomes stressful

Stress is one of the most overused words we have, and Brigid thinks people would take it more seriously if they knew what it does physically. In fight or flight, cortisol switches off everything you don't need to escape a tiger. Digestion is one of the first things to go. She links many digestive problems, including IBS, bloating and constipation, to stress, and says you can lose nutrients such as zinc, magnesium and vitamin C quickly.

Cortisol also tells the liver to release stored glucose so you can run. But you don't run. You sit at your desk answering emails. Brigid says that constantly raised blood glucose is being linked to insulin resistance and diabetes, and that stress is also connected to infertility and heart disease. Hearing that, I was frankly terrified. I spent my twenties and thirties very stressed, I had fertility problems and IVF, and I've had IBS. It was a lot to take in.

She said she went through a kind of mourning when she understood this about her own health. You can't change what's already happened. You can change what you do now, and the body repairs itself quickly when it gets the right conditions. That's why she puts stress first, before nutrition or movement.

This is also where wellness can make things worse. Brigid explains that a little stress, which she calls hormesis, can help the body adapt: cold water, a short fast. Our ancestors dealt with cold winters and lean spells that eventually ended. Modern stress doesn't end. Phones ping, laptops stay open, cities are loud. On top of that, ice baths and fasting can deplete someone who is already running on cortisol. When I asked whether fasting was a good idea for someone as stressed as me, her answer was: probably not.

Health habits without perfectionism

I'm terrible with boundaries. I say yes, I'll take that on, and I end up driving my own stress. Brigid thinks it can be both the job and you, and that nobody else will set those limits for you. For her, that took therapy. As an anxious perfectionist, deciding to do one thing today and finish it, and only take on more if there's capacity, can feel like letting people down or being slow and underperforming. She doesn't think that's true. It just feels true for a while.

Then she told me about her burnout. In her high-pressure job she was numbing herself with alcohol, caffeine and late-night food, while running, lifting heavy and always on some extreme diet. In 2019 her body stopped. She was signed off and off work for seven months. Most days, the best she could manage was to walk a few steps into her small garden, sit in the sun and watch a tree change in the light.

She had always thought health meant doing the most you possibly could. What she found was that a little was enough. Over the months she started to crave the sunshine and the walking, built up to two laps of the park, and found herself waking at seven and wanting to go to bed around nine. It was the first time she'd ever enjoyed exercise.

Simple is better. Don't do things you don't like.

She still won't run. She hates it. She goes to yoga for the breathing, because it reminds her that her body is there. And she believes that if more of us respected each other's need for this kind of nourishment, we'd put less pressure on each other to be always on.

So if we stopped chasing optimisation and went back to sleep, nourishment, movement, rest and feeling safe in our bodies, would it change our lives? Brigid's answer was everything can change. I found that brought me a lot of hope.

This article shares personal experiences and a coaching perspective, not medical advice. If you have persistent symptoms, concerns about nutrition or questions about medication, speak to your GP or an appropriately qualified healthcare professional.