Stress shows up for everyone at some point in life. A new job, becoming a parent, buying a house, losing a loved one, stress is woven into many of the experiences that make us human. There is no way to truly avoid stress if you plan on living a full and meaningful life. While some stress is essential for growth and productivity, too much stress without healthy recovery can be detrimental to both the body and mind.
Local wellness practitioners Lara Ferrarotti and Lisa Ewan hosted a talk on stress at Golden Library on Thursday, May 21, offering insight into how stress affects the nervous system and sharing tools for recovery that many people may not have considered before.
I attended the talk thinking I already had a solid understanding of stress and what recovery looked like, but I was surprised by how much I learned.
“The nervous system is essentially a surveillance system. Its main job is to make sure we’re safe, collecting information, deciding what to do with it, and helping us survive. In many ways, we’re still like basic organisms moving toward what nourishes us and away from what harms us, constantly searching for balance, or homeostasis,” Lisa explained, framing the conversation.
I vaguely understood how the nervous system processes information from high school biology, but what I heard next surprised me even more.
“The nervous system cannot really differentiate between good stress and bad stress. Physiologically, the body responds in much the same way whether you’re public speaking, skydiving, training hard, or facing something painful. The difference comes in how we perceive it, the meaning we attach to it, and whether we have the tools and our nervous system has the capacity to return ourselves to rest and recovery afterward.
For many people in Golden, outdoor exercise feels therapeutic. Exercise often seems like a healthy way to relieve stress, not create it, but Lisa explained that this is not always the case. If you are maxed with daily stressors, challenging, high-performance or intense activities can be harmful to a nervous system that is already running in survival mode. That being said, certain forms of stress can be beneficial when balanced with proper recovery.
“Good stress, like exercise or anything that challenges us, is short-term and can actually build the strength and resiliency of our nervous systems so that we can actually handle or manage more daily stressors… the key is in the rest and recovery… that the body, or more specifically the nervous system, gets a chance to come back into the rest and digest mode.”
Without giving ourselves opportunities to recover, stress can become chronic.
“Chronic stress is like an engine that’s constantly red-lining. Eventually, the system overheats, the lubrication breaks down, and the strain starts showing up physically, as tension, inflammation, high blood pressure, exhaustion, or disease. Our bodies were never designed to stay in survival mode all the time.”
So what can we do to better manage stress?
While the practitioners covered general strategies such as breathing exercises and spending time in nature, they also introduced therapies they use with clients to support deeper nervous system recovery.
Lara shared a brief Yoga Nidra exercise with the audience, guiding us through a meditation while we rested with our eyes closed. Before beginning, she encouraged everyone to set an intention. Once the group had settled into a deeply relaxed state, we were asked to silently repeat that intention to ourselves.
“There’s a spaciousness that returns when the body comes out of contraction. More room, more fluidity, more ease. Healing often isn’t about adding something new; it’s about creating the conditions where the body can remember the state of openness and balance it already knows,” Lara explained.
I felt the impact of the exercise deeply. When the meditation ended, the entire room felt calmer. The atmosphere had noticeably shifted.
Afterward, Lisa introduced Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy (BCST), a hands-on practice focused on helping the nervous system settle into a deeply relaxed state. During the demonstration, the practitioner gently placed their hands on the participant’s body to support relaxation and awareness. Although I had never seen the therapy before, I could sense the participant’s calmness from across the room.
Both therapies are designed to help the body recover from chronic stress or prevent reaching that state in the first place. At the center of both approaches is the idea that healing begins when we allow ourselves time to truly rest and reconnect with ourselves.
“So many people believe rest has to be earned through productivity, but deep rest is actually restorative medicine for the nervous system. Sometimes even fifteen minutes of true surrender can clear mental fog, restore energy, and reconnect you with a sense of yourself that stress had buried.”
By letting go of the belief that rest must be earned, it becomes possible to reconnect with parts of ourselves that stress may have pushed aside.
Both Lisa and Lara offer sessions of their respective therapies in Golden. To learn more about Yoga Nidra or to book a session with Lara, contact her at thebluelotusmeditation@gmail.com. To learn more about Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy or to book with Lisa, visit goldenwellnesshub.com.
