Top 5 Stress Management Tips to Build Your Toolkit [Round Up]

Text your thoughts and questions! Have you ever waited until you were completely overwhelmed before trying to figure out how to manage your stress? Lisa wants you to try something different. In this episode of the Positively Living podcast, she’s building a stress management toolkit before you desperately need it—and showing you why managing stress is about much more than simply trying to make it go away. Stress relief matters, but understanding your stress, recognizing your body's signals, and having personalized tools ready to go can give you far more options when pressure hits. Lisa brings together five essential episodes from the Positively Living podcast to create a curated starting point for building your own stress management toolkit. She begins with the foundation: understanding what stress actually is. In episode 180, What Stress Really Is and How to Manage It, she explores the two types of stress, three categories of stressors, and what happens inside your body when stress hits. The key insight is that stress management doesn't always mean stress reduction. Awareness comes first—understanding what's happening, why it's happening, and how you're responding so you can choose an approach that works for you. Next, Lisa turns to the body. In episode 70, How Your Body Responds to Stress with Christa Bevan, listeners learn to recognize physical signs of stress such as muscle tension, shallow breathing, disrupted sleep, and digestive changes. Your body often knows what's happening before your mind does, and learning to recognize those signals early can make stress much easier to manage. Lisa also explains why our bodies are designed to respond to short-term threats, even though modern life often gives us chronic, low-grade pressure instead. The third piece of the toolkit is reframing your relationship with stress. In episode 205, Why Some Stress Actually Helps You Perform Better, Lisa explores eustress—the type of stress that can sharpen focus, motivate action, and help you move toward something that matters to you. Rather than assuming all stress is harmful, she encourages you to get curious about your own relationship with pressure: What level of stress helps you take action without pushing you toward exhaustion? She also emphasizes that this is personal. Trauma, exhaustion, and other circumstances can change what you're able to tolerate, so the goal isn't to push yourself to handle more stress, but to understand what works for you and when. From there, Lisa gets practical. Episode 256, 10 Tips to Help You Stress Less, offers a checklist of accessible strategies for reducing the stress you're carrying, including familiar tools like movement, nourishment, and meditation, along with options you might not immediately think of, like laughter and music. Lisa emphasizes that it's a checklist rather than a rigid set of steps because not every strategy works for every person or every moment. Some tools are better for preventing stress from building, some help with recovery, and some can do both. The goal is to have options available when you need them. Finally, Lisa introduces a tool that's already built into your body: the vagus nerve. In episode 257, The Special Nerve That Helps with Stress, she explains the role of the vagus nerve in stress regulation and shares simple practices that can activate it, including slow intentional breathing, humming, cold water on your wrists or face, and gentle movement. These practices can turn stress management from a vague instruction into something concrete you can do almost anywhere, using nothing but your own body. Lisa brings all five pieces together into a simple framework: understand your stress, listen to your body, reframe your relationship with stress, keep a practical checklist of tools available, and use the built-in regulation system you already have. You don't have to tackle everything at once—and Lisa strongly discourages that. Start wherever you are, choose what feels useful, and build your toolkit one tool at a time. Stress will always be part of life. What can change is your understanding of it and your relationship to it. By the end of this episode, you'll have a clear starting point for creating a stress management toolkit that's personal, proactive, and ready when you need it. Key Takeaways: Understand why stress management isn't only about reducing stress and why awareness is the foundation of an effective approach. Learn to recognize your body's personal stress signals before they escalate. Explore the difference between distress and eustress, including how some stress can support focus, motivation, and action. Discover why your relationship with stress—and your mindset about it—can influence how you respond to pressure. Build a practical checklist of stress-management strategies that you can adapt to different situations and different kinds of stress. Learn how simple practices such as movement, meditation, laughter, music, and nourishing yourself can help reduce the stress you're carrying. Discover the vagus nerve and simple ways to activate this built-in stress-regulation tool through breathing, humming, cold water, and gentle movement. Understand why there isn't one universal stress-management strategy and why your toolkit should be personalized to you. Learn how to start building your toolkit without trying to change everything at once. Find the full Stress Management playlist and the Stress Less Checklist to continue building your collection of tools. Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this episode, take a screenshot of the episode to post in your stories and tag me!  And don’t forget to follow, rate, and review the podcast and tell me your key takeaways! Learn more about Positively LivingⓇ and Lisa at https://positivelyproductive.com/podcast/ Stop trying to fit into someone else’s productivity rules! Grab my free Productivity Toolkit, a collection of workbooks designed to help you explore how you work, uncover what truly matters to you, and create your very own energy-friendly systems. Get it here: www.positivelyproductive.com/plpkit CONNECT WITH LISA ZAWROTNY: Facebook Instagram Resources Work with Lisa!  LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE: Episode 180 What Stress Really Is and How to Manage It [Re-release] Episode 79 How Your Body Responds to Stress with Christa Bevan Episode 205 Why Some Stress Actually Helps You Perform Better Episode 256 10 Tips to Help You Stress Less Episode 257 The Special Nerve that Helps with Stress Stress Management Playlist Positively Productive Resources Library  Book a Clarity Call Async Coaching (Find links to books/gear on the Positively Productive Resources Page.) Dance Song Playlist V1, V2, V3 Music by Ian and Jeff Zawrotny Start your own podcast with Buzzsprout! This is the sign up period