Are You Listening to Your Body, or Just Tracking It?

Before your feet even hit the floor in the morning, you can know how long you slept, how much deep sleep you got, your resting heart rate, your HRV, your recovery score and, depending on how deep you’ve gone down the wellness rabbit hole, perhaps your glucose level too. We have become incredibly good at collecting information about our bodies. But have we gotten any better at actually listening to them?

It’s a question worth asking as wellness becomes increasingly personalized, measurable and data-driven. Functional lab testing, wearables, hormone panels, gut testing and a seemingly endless stream of health metrics can offer information we didn’t have access to even a decade ago. Used thoughtfully, that information can be valuable. But there is a line between becoming informed about your body and feeling as though you need to constantly monitor it.

For Nicole Glassman, founder of Mindful Health in New York City, the answer isn’t choosing between data and intuition. It’s learning how to use both. “I actually came into holistic health because of my own health issues and my experience of not always feeling heard,” Glassman says. “I knew something was going on in my body, but I didn’t feel like anyone was really looking at the whole picture.”

That experience has shaped the way she works with clients today and, perhaps more importantly, the way she listens to them.

When “Doing Everything Right” Still Doesn’t Feel Right

One of the promises of personalized wellness is the ability to look beyond a symptom and gather more information about what may be contributing to it. Glassman recently added a Functional Diagnostic Nutrition certification to a practice that already incorporates nutrition, EAV testing and nervous system work. But her interest in understanding the whole person began long before another certification was hanging on the wall.

Glassman says functional testing has given her another tool for doing that. “Sometimes someone can be eating really well and doing so many of the ‘right’ things and still not feel good,” she says.

Depending on the test being used, functional testing may examine markers related to areas such as digestion, hormones, inflammation and metabolism. Glassman stresses that these tests are not intended to replace conventional medical testing. Instead, she sees them as an additional source of information that can be considered alongside a client’s symptoms, lifestyle and medical care.

That distinction matters, because more testing isn’t automatically better testing.

“I don’t believe in testing just for the sake of testing,” Glassman says. “I want there to be a reason for the information we’re gathering and for it to help guide what we actually do next.”

It’s a refreshingly restrained idea in a wellness culture that can sometimes make us believe that if one metric is useful, 37 metrics must be even better.

Maybe There Isn’t One “Root Cause”

Spend enough time in wellness circles and you’ll inevitably hear someone talk about getting to the “root cause.” The phrase sounds wonderfully definitive. Find the culprit. Fix it. Feel better. The human body, unfortunately, did not get that memo.

“I actually think the term ‘root cause’ can be a little misleading because it makes it sound like there is always one thing at the bottom of everything,” Glassman says. “In my experience, there usually isn’t.”

Instead, she looks at health as a collection of interconnected factors. Nutrition may matter. Sleep may matter. Hormones, digestion and inflammation may matter. So can relationships, emotional patterns, stress and the way someone moves through their everyday life.

“There may be things happening in someone’s life that need attention or that they have the ability to shift,” she says. “How much stress are they carrying? What is draining them? Are there patterns in their relationships or their life that are affecting how they feel? Are they constantly pushing themselves without giving their body a chance to recover?”

In other words, there may be several roots. That perspective also challenges one of wellness culture’s more seductive ideas: that if we could just find the perfect diet, supplement protocol, morning routine or set of numbers, we could optimize our way out of feeling bad.

Sometimes the problem isn’t that we haven’t found enough things to do. Sometimes we’re already doing too much.

Your Nervous System Is Part of Your Health, Too

This is where Glassman believes nervous system regulation becomes an important part of the conversation.

“You can be eating all the ‘right’ foods, taking the right supplements, and doing everything you think you’re supposed to be doing, but if your body is constantly under stress, that matters,” she says. Chronic stress can influence sleep, digestion, immune function and other physiological systems. But Glassman is also quick to point out that stress doesn’t always look like an overflowing inbox or a terrible commute.

Sometimes it is the constant pressure to produce. The relationship that leaves you depleted. Patterns you have carried for years. The inability to truly recover. And, ironically, sometimes the thing stressing us out is our attempt to become less stressed.

“If your health plan has become another full-time job and you’re anxious about doing everything perfectly, we have to look at that too,” Glassman says. “Sometimes adding more isn’t the answer.”

Read that one again.

Because somewhere along the way, taking care of ourselves became another arena in which we could feel like we weren’t doing enough.

Drink the water. Hit your protein. Get your steps. Meditate. Strength train. Take the supplements. Avoid the inflammatory foods. Optimize your sleep. Regulate your nervous system. Get outside first thing in the morning. And whatever you do, apparently, don’t stress about any of it.

It is a lot.

Glassman’s philosophy is that a health plan should support someone’s life rather than consume it.

“I don’t want someone to feel like they’ve been handed another list of things they have to do perfectly,” she says. “I want us to create an approach together that supports their health and that they can actually live with.”

When Health Data Stops Being Helpful

Perhaps nowhere is the conflict between information and intuition clearer than in the explosion of wearable technology. Glassman gives a simple example.

“We’ve gotten to a point where you can wake up in the morning and have a device tell you how well you slept before you’ve even had a chance to ask yourself how you actually feel.”

Anyone who has ever woken up feeling pretty fantastic only to have a watch inform them that, actually, they are a sleep-deprived disaster knows exactly what she means. The technology isn’t inherently the problem. The question is what happens next.

Does the information help you recognize a pattern and make a useful change? Or does it make you question your own experience?

“The right information at the right time can be incredibly valuable,” Glassman says, “but we have to ask what we’re actually going to do with that information.”

That same philosophy guides the way she approaches testing. Data should create context, not fear.

“Ultimately, I want the information we gather to help someone understand their body better, not make them afraid of it.”

Awareness Is Not the Same as Hypervigilance

This may be one of the most important distinctions in modern wellness.

Paying attention to your body can be helpful. Becoming consumed by every fluctuation, symptom, ingredient and number is something else entirely.

Glassman often works with people who have spent years trying to feel better. They have removed foods, added supplements, visited practitioners and researched their symptoms extensively. Understandably, they can become highly attuned to every change in their body.

“At some point, trying to be healthy can actually become another source of stress,” she says.

Her goal is to shift clients away from fear and toward curiosity.

“I think there’s a big difference between being aware of your body and being afraid of what your body is doing,” Glassman says. “Symptoms are information. Instead of immediately thinking, ‘Something is wrong,’ I want someone to become curious about what their body may be communicating and begin to recognize their own patterns.”

That doesn’t mean ignoring symptoms or assuming every physical problem can be solved through greater self-awareness. Persistent, severe or concerning symptoms deserve appropriate medical evaluation. It means that alongside seeking care, we can begin noticing patterns without treating every sensation as an emergency or every imperfect metric as a problem requiring immediate optimization.

The One Thing a Lab Can’t Measure

For all the sophisticated information available through testing, Glassman keeps coming back to something decidedly low-tech: listening.

“I never want someone to become a collection of lab results,” she says.

A test can provide data. It can’t tell a practitioner everything about the human being sitting across from them.

“It can’t tell us what gives someone energy, what drains them, how their body responds to stress, or what may be happening in their life that is affecting how they feel.”

And maybe that is the piece of personalized wellness worth paying more attention to.

Not just What does my data say? But How do I feel?

What consistently gives me energy? What leaves me depleted? What happens in my body when I am overwhelmed? What helps me recover? What am I tolerating that isn’t working anymore? What do I already know about myself that I keep overriding?

None of those questions require a wearable, an app or a lab panel. Glassman doesn’t see that as an argument against testing. She sees it as an argument for context.

“The labs help give us direction and can help us understand why someone may be feeling the way they do, but they’re not the whole story,” she says. “I want the data and the person’s lived experience to inform each other.”

And perhaps that is where the next evolution of wellness needs to go. Not toward rejecting data or collecting more of it simply because we can, but toward becoming more discerning about the information we gather and more connected to the person all that information is supposed to serve.

Because the goal of wellness shouldn’t be to spend your entire life thinking about your wellness.

As Glassman puts it: “Ultimately, I want someone’s health plan to fit into their life, not for their whole life to revolve around their health plan.”

Maybe feeling well isn’t about tracking everything. Maybe it’s knowing which information matters, which doesn’t, and when to put down the numbers long enough to listen to yourself.