Shelly's Shares: What If Rest Is Your Best Travel Hack?

Travel can be fun and meaningful, but it can also quietly wreck your energy. When Shelly shares about bouncing between airports, late flights, and busy weekends (especially during baseball season in her family), she's noticed one choice makes the biggest difference: protecting the day after travel. That “buffer day” helps her reset physically, mentally, and emotionally, and she truly believes it supports her immune system too.

Shelly walk us through what this looks like in real life, including how she handles arriving home late, sleeping in without guilt, and keeping her schedule intentionally light. It’s not about being unproductive. It’s about giving your body time to acclimate, lowering stress, and letting your routine come back online without pressure. If you’re an empty nester, a parent traveling for sports, or anyone who feels worn down after trips, you’ll leave with practical ways to make this work even when you can’t take a full day off.

Shelly also shares some exciting personal news: She completed a longevity certification through the Longevity Institute. Longevity isn’t just about living longer, it’s about living well with strength and vitality, and the foundations are consistent: better sleep, smarter stress management, high-quality nutrition, and daily movement. She is opening a small number of exclusive one-on-one coaching spots for listeners who want support improving overall wellness and longevity, with a special listener discount and bonus sessions.

If this resonates, reach out to Shelly at Wellnesswith ShellyJ on Instagram, and please subscribe, share this with a friend, and leave a review so more people can find Words of Wellness.

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High quality, clean nutrition and beauty products: https://shellyjefferis.isagenix

Clean-crafted wine, free from chemicals & pesticides:
https://scoutandcellar.com/?u=healthyhappyhours

Cayla Gray- Non-toxic cologne & perfume: https://caylagray.com/wellnesswithshellyj (10% discount)

JuJu Non-toxic candles & air fresheners:
https://goodjujucandles.com/?ref=mrtgnygh
Coupon code for 10% off: ShellyJefferis

Thank you for listening to the Words of Wellness podcast with Shelly Jefferis. I am honored and so grateful to have you here and it would mean the world to me if you could take a minute to follow, leave a 5-star review and share  the podcast with anyone you love and anyone you feel could benefit from the message.

Thank you and God Bless! And remember to do something for yourself, for your wellness on this day! 
In Health, 

Shelly

Transcript

Why Travel Drains Your Body

SPEAKER_00 0:00

That really helps me with not just my energy, but my immune system, right? Because we all know when we travel and we're in airports and we're around all sorts of people and probably all kinds of germs we're being exposed to. It's so important to keep our strength up and to take care of ourselves physically and mentally and emotionally. Do you get confused by all of the information that bombards us every day on ways to improve our overall health and our overall wellness? Do you often feel stuck, unmotivated, or struggle to reach your wellness goals? Do you have questions as to what exercises you should be doing, what foods you should or should not be eating? How to improve your overall emotional and mental well-being? Hello everyone, I am so excited to welcome you to Words of Wellness. My name is Shelly Jeffries, and I will be your host. My goal is to answer these questions and so much more. To share tips, education, and inspiration around all of the components of wellness through solo and guest episodes. With 35 plus years as a health and wellness professional, a retired college professor, a speaker, and a multi-passionate entrepreneur, I certainly have lots to share. However, my biggest goal and inspiration in doing this podcast is to share the wellness stories of others with you. To bring in guests who can share their journeys so that we can all learn together while making an impact on the health, the wellness, and lives of all of you, our listeners. The ultimate hope is that you leave today with even just one nugget that can enhance the quality of your life, and that you will, we all will, now and into the future, live our best quality of lives full of energy, happiness, and joy. Now let's dive into our message for today. Hi, my friends. Welcome back to Words of Wellness. My name is Shelley, and I will be your host. And this is our Shelly's Shares episode where I hop in here and I share some information, perhaps some education with you all, or I share something that I have experienced that has helped me somewhere along the way in my personal wellness journey. And today I want to share something. I've spoken about this on occasion, and I was just sharing about this the other day. Some of you who know me know that we are in the middle of baseball season, and this is the case for some of you out there. If you have sons who are playing baseball, whether it's high school, college, or any athlete that you might have, son or daughter, and you're in the middle of the season. And for us personally, we have our youngest Braden playing baseball at Michigan, and then our older son, Cody, coaches for Northwestern. And so we are always you know watching the games, whether we're there in person or we're home. And as much as we can be there in person, we do, we do go and attend the games. And with that being said, there has been more travel than normal in these last couple months. And sometimes it's driving distance, uh, but many times we we have to fly there and jump on, jump on the airplane and fly. So we're gone for a good long weekend. And something that I started doing quite a while ago, in fact, this is something that became a part of my routine once we started taking our our kids to college. Once they started living away from home, and we would go to visit them wherever they were, and same thing applies now, you know, whether they're in college or they they are having their adult life happening and they're no longer living at home, so we go to visit them as much as we can. And one thing that I want to encourage all of you to do if you do travel frequently or even even after a vacation, I find this really beneficial. And I was talking to someone the other day who said they intentionally will plan to come home from a trip on a Saturday so that they have the entire day Sunday to just rest up and get ready for the week ahead. And I have found that to be very beneficial that whatever day we arrive back home from a weekend of travel, whether it's a Sunday or a Monday, I make a point to keep that following day pretty open. I really am in intentional with not scheduling anything on that day, with keeping my schedule very light. So for that very reason, to be able to just get back into the routine to let my body acclimate and rest and kind of rejuvenate from the traveling, because as we all know, the traveling can be a little bit tiring, and especially when you are changing time zones, which we are doing frequently at the moment. So I just wanted to share because I really believe that's something that I am very intentional about, and I really believe that that really helps me with not just my energy, but my immune system, right? Because we all know when we travel and we're in airports and we're around all sorts of people and probably all kinds of germs we're being exposed to. It's so important to keep our strength up and to take care of ourselves physically and mentally and emotionally. And I mentioned that recently as well that many times it's we're we're coming back from maybe saying goodbye to our kids, and that can always be an emotional experience. So I just will always say, give yourself a day to just be, just be able to relax, rest. I know we recently got back from being away, and the following Monday, I literally just gave myself the day. I let myself sleep in. I gave myself the day, the morning just to relax, and I gave myself the day just to kind of get things done around the house, but really I didn't have any appointments scheduled, I didn't have anything scheduled. I took a nice relaxing walk in the afternoon. So it doesn't necessarily mean to sit around and do nothing, it just means to you know take care of yourself. And I'm just saying, give yourself permission to take that day to rest and just let and just be basically just kind of be and let let the day unfold however it's meant to. And I understand not everyone has the luxury to do that, or maybe you don't have a schedule that allows you to do that. So I am just encouraging you to give yourself. Maybe you don't have a full day, but maybe you can give yourself, you know, sometime in the morning. Maybe you can arrive back from traveling on a Sunday, and perhaps maybe Monday you can go into work a little bit later, or you can start your workday a little bit later than normal, just so you don't have that stress and pressure of getting back into the routine. I just, you know, again, I know it's not realistic for everyone. I'm just sharing what I started to do years ago, what I started to incorporate into my routine, and I really believe it has served me really, really well. And again, going back to to avoiding getting sick and keeping our immune system strong, I know that there are a lot of people that after they travel, that's when they get sick. And has that happened to me? Of course it has, but it's been very, very rare. I think the last time that that happened was a year and a half, two years ago. So I just want to encourage you, if you have the the ability, you have the flexibility, give yourself that permission, give yourself that time to to rest. And and maybe you're you're one, maybe in your schedule right now, you're not traveling very much. I'm just kind of sharing from personal experience and what has worked for me because I find that once our kids are out of the house, we we do travel more so that we can go see them. And again, it's in in my personal situation, it's to be able to go see my boys and see our youngest play baseball. So everybody has a different experience and everyone is in a different season of life. And I I'm speaking mostly right now to my empty nester moms and dads out there, and then also my moms and dads out there who have athletes, and that does always involve some sort of travel, uh, not always far from home, but sometimes it's far from home. And I just want to say I think it's really very, very beneficial for our overall wellness to take that time, to take the time to recover from the travels to rest. And I'm going to share with you all. We a week ago flew home from Washington, so not very far from our home. The flight's not very long, it's a couple hours. However, it was a later flight, it was delayed by the time we got into the airport, by the time we got our car, by the time you know we we got home, it was after midnight, I think 12:30. I think I got to bed around 1 a.m. So I know for me personally, I said I I knew I knew we were gonna get home late. I didn't realize it was gonna be that late. So thankfully I had nothing planned or scheduled for that next morning, and I allowed myself to rest and to sleep in. And it was heavenly. And again, I know that's not always going to work for everyone, but as you know, when you are traveling and you have to get to the airport and you're taking a shuttle here and you're taking a shuttle there, and you're just taking all these different means of transportation, it makes for a long makes for a long day. So this again is just my advice to you to take care of yourself, your body physically, um, yourself mentally, emotionally, it helps to regulate, I believe, your stress. If you know coming home that you have a day to just chill, unpack, and just, you know, kind of come down from the travels. It's huge. It really is huge. So for those of you who hate who can do this kind of scheduling, if you can incorporate into your routine, maybe you're doing it already, but I just want to encourage you to give it a try. It really is beneficial for our overall, overall wellness and again, overall levels of stress and our immune system. So I just wanted to share that with you all. And I also wanted to share some exciting news. Something that I have been sharing about for quite some time, and I and I share about it on my podcast here with you all, and I make reference to it all of the time, is our longevity. I talk about things we can do to help with our sleep, things we can do to help manage our stress, what we need to do to ensure that we're getting high-quality nutrition, and also what are we doing for our movement, for our exercise. These are all different areas that contribute to not just our overall complete wellness, but contribute to our overall longevity. And I always have said, and I will always say, that what I do and what I encourage others to do is to be proactive with your health and your wellness so that you can live a life of vitality and energy. Live until you're 80, 90, or 100. Not just live, but live feeling good. And that's the whole purpose, and that's something that I share all of the time. And I most recently completed a certificate from the Longevity Institute in the area of longevity. So now I'm actually certified in longevity, and I'm very happy that I did that. And again, it's information that I already knew, it's information that I speak about, but it was just something that was on my heart. I knew I wanted to complete this. It was just another tool in my toolbox so that I can serve all of you even better. And I am always one of those people who I'm always striving to learn more, to grow as a person, but also in my field, so that I can pass information on to all of you to the best of my ability, so that I can serve all of you to the best of my abilities. So I wanted to share that. I definitely have a couple offerings I'm going to be sharing, but right now I'm opening up just a couple exclusive one-on-one coaching programs for those who are wanting to learn more about ways to improve their overall wellness but also their longevity. So if that is something that you are wanting to do, then I encourage you to reach out to me at Wellness with Shelly J on Instagram. And for my listeners, I will be definitely offering you a special discount, and I will also be adding in a couple extra coaching sessions at no additional charge to my listeners. So if this is you, reach out as soon as possible because I have limited spots that I'm opening up because I have some other other offers in the works. So let's see how we can work together and how I can serve you. And with that being said, take some time for yourself and your wellness on this day. And until next time, have a beautiful, blessed rest of your week. And I'll see you next time on Words of Wellness. Thank you so much for tuning in to today's episode. I hope you gained value and enjoyed our time together as much as I did. And if you know someone who could benefit from today's episode, I would love and appreciate it if you could share with a friend or rate and review Words of Wellness so that more can hear this message. I love and appreciate you all. Thank you for listening. And if you have any questions or topics you would like me to share in future episodes, please don't hesitate to reach out to me through my contact information that is shared in the show notes below. Again, thank you for tuning in to Words of Wellness. My name is Shelley Jeffries, and I encourage you to do something for you, for your wellness on this day. Until next time, I hope you all have a healthy, happy, and blessed week.