How Travel Can Become Part of Your Self-Care Tool-Kit with Emma Lovell

Listen to the full episode.

For a lot of people, travel sits in the “nice one day” bucket. Something you’ll do when work calms down, the kids are older, your health improves, or you finally feel like you’ve earned it. But what if travel wasn’t a reward at the end of burnout… what if it was part of the prevention plan?

In this episode, Chris and Filly from Chris and Filly Functional Medicine chat with Emma Lovell (The Bleisure Coach and founder of Rest & Receive) about travel as a genuine self-care tool — not in a fluffy way, but in a practical, grounded, “this actually supports your nervous system” way. Emma shares her own body burnout story (from breaking her back to breaking her mind), what she learned from a mental breakdown, and why taking a break before you break is one of the smartest forms of preventative health you can practise.

This blog pulls the key ideas into a standalone SEO-friendly read, with a focus on holistic health, mind body medicine, and root cause medicine — because travel can be more than a getaway. It can be part of your WellnessJourney, your health optimisation, and your healing from within.

Why Burnout Isn’t Just About Work (and Why “Rest” Can Feel Hard)

Burnout functional medicine looks at burnout as more than tiredness. It’s a whole body health pattern — nervous system dysregulation, hormone disruption, gut issues, mood changes, inflammation, and that wired-but-exhausted feeling that makes it hard to switch off even when you have the chance.

One of the most frustrating parts is that many people know they need rest, but they can’t access it. They sit down and their brain keeps racing. They take a day off and feel guilty. They go away and spend the whole time thinking about what they should be doing.

That’s why this conversation with Emma matters. It’s not just “take a holiday”. It’s about creating conditions that help your system receive rest — physically, emotionally, and neurologically. In integrative medicine terms, it’s about shifting your state, not just your schedule.

Emma Lovell’s Body Burnout Story: From Breaking Her Back to Breaking Her Mind

Emma’s story is a reminder that burnout doesn’t always arrive with a neat warning sign. Sometimes it comes through the body first (injury, fatigue, pain). Sometimes it comes through the mind (anxiety, overwhelm, emotional shutdown). Often it’s both.

She shares her experience of body burnout — and the growth that came from her mental breakdown. Not in a “silver lining” way, but in a real way: the kind of breakdown that forces you to re-evaluate how you’re living, what you’re prioritising, and what you’ve been ignoring.

At Chris and Filly Functional Medicine, this is a familiar pattern. Symptoms are often messengers. They’re not random. They’re the body’s way of saying: something needs to change. That’s the heart of root cause medicine and healing naturally — listening to what the body is communicating, then responding with compassion and strategy.

Self-Care Isn’t One-Size-Fits-All (and That’s the Point)

One of the best parts of this episode is the reminder that self-care looks different for everyone. For one person, self-care is quiet and slow: reading, walking, early nights, gentle movement. For someone else, self-care is adventure: novelty, exploration, new environments, a change of scenery.

This matters because a lot of people try to copy someone else’s self-care routine and then feel like they’re failing when it doesn’t work. But personalised medicine teaches us something important: what regulates one nervous system might dysregulate another.

Emma’s approach is about helping people design a lifestyle they love now — not “one day”. That’s a key shift for holistic wellness. If your life only works when you’re on holiday, the goal isn’t more holidays. The goal is a life that supports your health and wellness most days of the year.

Travel as Nervous System Medicine: Why a Change of Environment Helps

From a mind body medicine perspective, travel can be powerful because it changes your inputs.

Different environment. Different pace. Different sensory cues. Different routines. Different expectations.

When you’re in the same space where you’ve been overworking, overgiving, and running on adrenaline, your brain has learned to associate that environment with “go mode”. Travel can interrupt that pattern. It can create a reset — not because you’re avoiding life, but because you’re giving your nervous system a new reference point for safety, ease, and presence.

This is one reason retreats can be such a beautiful self-care tool. They’re structured enough to feel safe, but different enough to create change. And for people stuck in chronic stress patterns, that combination can be exactly what helps the body exhale.

The “Bleisure” Concept: Blending Business, Travel, and Self-Care

Emma is known as The Bleisure Coach for a reason. “Bleisure” is the blend of business and leisure — and it’s not about turning every trip into work. It’s about designing work in a way that doesn’t require you to sacrifice your wellbeing.

For many high-achievers, the idea of taking time off feels unrealistic. There’s always something to do. Always someone who needs you. Always another deadline. Bleisure offers a middle ground: you can keep momentum in your professional life while still building in restoration, novelty, and space.

From a health optimisation lens, this is huge. Because chronic burnout isn’t usually caused by one big stressful event. It’s caused by a thousand small “no breaks” moments. Bleisure is one way to stop stacking those moments year after year.

What Travel Teaches You (That You Can Bring Home)

Travel isn’t only about the trip. It’s also about what you learn about yourself when you’re out of your usual patterns.

Emma shares learnings you can take from travelling to improve your wellbeing and life. Things like:

• noticing what you actually enjoy when you’re not in survival mode
• remembering how it feels to be present
• realising you don’t need to earn rest
• seeing how quickly your body responds to a slower pace
• learning what nourishes you (food, movement, connection, solitude)

In functional nutrition and holistic health, we often talk about “data”. Travel gives you a different kind of data: lived experience. It shows you what your system feels like when it’s not constantly bracing.

And that can become a compass for healing from within.

Taking a Break Before You Break: A Preventative Health Strategy

This line from the episode is worth repeating: take a break before you break.

Most people wait until they’re falling apart to rest. Until symptoms force them. Until they can’t keep going. But preventative health is about doing the opposite: building recovery into your life before your body has to scream for it.

This doesn’t mean you need fancy trips or big budgets. Sometimes “travel as self-care” is a weekend away, a day trip, a night somewhere different, or even creating micro-travel experiences locally — anything that disrupts the stress loop and reminds your nervous system what ease feels like.

In burnout functional medicine, those small resets can make a big difference over time.

Bringing It Back to Your Healing Journey

If you’re in the middle of body burnout, travel might feel impossible. Or it might feel like the only thing that helps. Either way, the bigger invitation here is to look at what travel represents for you: freedom, space, novelty, rest, play, connection, silence.

Those are not luxuries. They’re nervous system nutrients.

And when you start treating them as essential — alongside sleep, food, movement, and emotional support — your whole body health improves. That’s holistic wellness. That’s alternative medicine with a practical edge. That’s healing naturally, with intention.

A Gentle Next Step (If You Want Support)

If this conversation has you thinking, “Yep… I’m overdue for a break,” you don’t have to figure it out alone. If you’d like support to connect the dots between your symptoms, your stress patterns, and what your body is asking for, you’re warmly invited to book a Discovery Call or connect the dots with us.

And if you’re curious about a deeper, structured approach that blends functional testing, personalised medicine, and mind body medicine, you can learn more about the Ending Body Burnout Method — the holistic program designed to help you rebuild energy, resilience, and a life that actually feels good to live.

Listen to the full episode [here]

Chris & Filipa Bellette are the Founders of multi award-winning health practice Chris & Filly Functional Medicine, which is best known for ending body burnout (for good!) in “busy” people with energy, mood and gut issues. They have worked with over 2,000+ burned-out clients in the past combined 25+ years, with their own passion for ending body burnout coming from their own personal experience of body, mind, family & business breakdown, after a prolonged period of physical and mental stress.

Filipa is an accredited Clinical Nutritionist, Functional Medicine Practitioner, Coach & Trauma Therapist. She is also a Ph.D. Scholar, author & regularly featured the media, such as Forbes, Body+Soul and The Daily Telegraph. Chris is a Burnout Recovery Coach & an accredited Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) Master Practitioner, with a Bachelor of Human Movement Science. He has existed in high-performance realms of the sporting (think national athlete) & business industries and knows what it takes to get out of hustle-and-grind culture to thriving. 

They were recently awarded as the Tasmanian State Winner & National Finalist for the Telstra Best of Business Awards 2022, and Winner of the Australian Women’s Small Business Champion Awards 2022.