<strong>Sutton Foster Says This Habit Is a Daily Non-Negotiable for Wellness and Stress Relief </strong>

Reported by Women's Health Magazine.

Sutton Foster — Tony Award winner, Broadway leading lady, and apparently certified fitness instructor — has a lot to say about what it actually takes to stay well. And it's not a supplement stack or a 5 a.m. wake-up call. At a recent Women's Health Lab panel titled The Science of Staying Strong: Longevity, Movement & Resilience, Foster joined ABC News chief medical correspondent Dr. Tara Narula to break down the real mechanics of resilience, stress, and the small daily choices that add up to something bigger, according to Women's Health Magazine.

Foster, who teaches fitness classes at New York studio The Limit and now leads a women's wellness retreat called "Leading Women" at Canyon Ranch, was refreshingly honest about the work involved. "Do I feel strong today?" is a question she asks herself constantly — framing physical strength not as an achievement but as an ongoing, imperfect practice. Her Canyon Ranch retreat grew out of a chance reunion with an old classmate, and a question she almost talked herself out of: Who am I to lead a wellness retreat? She flipped it. The retreat centers on community, creativity, nature, and the radical idea that women in power don't have to compete for space. "There's room for more than just one of us," she said. As for her non-negotiable daily ritual? A bath. Every single night, candles lit (some fake, color-changing, unapologetically so), because winding down isn't weakness — it's strategy. She also journals and gets outside daily.

Your Nervous System Is Keeping Score

Dr. Narula went deeper on the biology of what stress is actually doing to your body. It starts in the brain — the hypothalamus triggers a hormonal cascade that floods your system with cortisol and adrenaline, driving up blood pressure and heart rate, and raising the risk of heart attacks, strokes, and arrhythmias. "We just don't think about all of this stuff that's happening inside," she said. The fix isn't to eliminate stress (impossible) but to build what she calls "micro-moments" — small, intentional acts that dial the stress response down. Exercise, time in nature, holding your partner's hand on the couch. Not grand gestures. Deposits.

On resilience, Dr. Narula reframed the whole concept. Strength isn't about staying unbroken — it's about being reshaped by hard things and still finding joy, meaning, and forward motion on the other side. "We are clay," she said. Things happen; you allow yourself to bend, reform, and emerge different but not diminished. Foster echoed this with her own metaphor: life as a stovetop — what's cooking, what's burning, what needs to come off the heat entirely. She's saying no more. She's taking the conscious pause before burnout forces her hand.

The throughline across all of it: resilience isn't a trait you either have or don't — it's a practice built from sleep, movement, community, micro-moments of joy, and the discipline to protect your own energy before the crisis hits.

Read the original at Women's Health Magazine.