35 Awesome Stress Management Resources

35 Best Stress Management Resources According to the latest American Psychological Association study, almost 50% of Americans report that their stress levels are on the rise and as much as 30% of the public reports their average stress levels as extreme.

Luckily for us, there is a growing number of great resources out there to help us manage our stress. We've compiled a list of some of the best ones on the web, from comprehensive university portals to interactive guides that assess your personal stress level and provide specific feedback and advice.

University Resources - Interactive & Multimedia Resources - General Resources

University Resources

101 Strategies for Coping With Stress (University of Minnesota): This great resource can be downloaded as a pdf for printing. It also has a sidebar with 23 other stress-related resources like "General Relaxation Techniques," "Systematic Desensitization of Test Panic," and "The Positive Side of Stress."
Anxiety and Stress Management (University of Notre Dame): This resource is comprehensive and has great links to relaxation exercises, desk stretches, stretches specifically to relieve stress, and more.
Healthy Ways to Handle Stress (Carroll College): While this resource only tackles how to handle stress (not how to indentify it or what causes it), it goes into more details than any of the other resources we found in describing how to tackle stress. It clearly separate short- and long-term methods.
How To Manage Your Stress (University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill): This is a great, multi-page resource. The first page offers an introduction and a great, clear outline of everything you will find in the resource, like a Stress Managment Fact Sheet, Do's and Don't for a Good Night's Sleep, and a Nutrition Survival Guide. UNC-Chapel Hill also offers a great resource on being resilient in the face of stress.
Managing Stress (Brooklyn College): This is a nice resource because it covers all of the basics in bullet-point fashion and then ends with a quiz assessing your vulnerability to stress. It is also in a printable form to be used for fliers.
Managing Stress: A Guide for College Students (University of Georgia): This is one of the best university resources out there. There is a nice introduction then a link to an overiview of a stress-free (or reduced) lifestyle approach with 11 components. Each of these components has a short description and then a link to an entire page dedicated to that topic. Each of those pages provides more links to things like worksheets and exercises.
SELF-HELP: Stress Management (Northern Michigan University): This resource offers all of the basics, but it also offers a section called "Stressor During The Academic Year," which outlines the biggest stressors for each of the seasons. For example, value crises are more likely to occur at the beginning of a new academic year.
Self-Help: Stress Management (The University of Texas at Dallas): This is one of the shorter university resources, but it covers some great tactics for dealing with stress without overloading the reader with information. It also has links to other resources like Test Anxiety, Time Mangement, Procrastination Prevention, and Self Care.
Stress (Brown University): This resource is part of Brown's Health Education program, which provides information about common college health issues. It covers the basics and has a good section on warning signs for people who should seek help to deal with their stress.
Stress (University of Maryland): The university's medical center provides this seven page resource complete with extra resources and a multi-part video. It also has a health center resource on managing stress and anger.
Stress Management (Harvard University): This resource goes over the basics of stress, burnout, and swimming upstream, and has a nice section called "Stop-Breathe-Reflect-Choose," a four-step technique for dealing with stress. Harvard also offers a cool interactive graphic about how stress affects the body.
Stress Management (University at Buffalo): This resouce is made up of several lists of bullet points, which makes it extremely easy to digest. It also has a nice list of related resources at the end.
Stess Management (Villanova University): This resource starts out with a nice overview of stess and college. It is comprehensive, but easy to digest because of bullet points and lists. It also has a good list of useful websites at the end.
Stress Management - The Challenge of Balance (University of Missouri): This resource goes beyond many others by providing a daily stress record to be filled out and by also listing general community resources and national resources that most people have access to.
Stress Management Links (Suffolk University): This is a great web portal all about stress. The warning signs section is laid out nicely in four boxes and there is a nice link to time management tips.
Strategies for Stress Management and Tactics for Managing Stress and Anxiety (University of Victoria): These resources are short, but packed full of great information. They do a nice job boiling down all the information to clear, concise points. Both resources are broken up into multiple sections with meaningful names.

Interactive & Multimedia Resources

Four Steps to Managing Your Stress (Stanford University): This is an interactive guide that gives a personal assessment of your stress level based on your answers to a series of questions, then walks you through the four steps to reducing the stress in your life. The steps are Understanding Your Stress, Chaning Stress Thinking, Reducing Stressors, and Nurturing Your Mind and Body. Each of the steps is broken down into a series of pages and points, and there are also Introduction and Summary sections. Stanford's Psychology department also published an informative and amusing document on why we should all stay stressed.
Managing Stress (MedlinePlus): This interactive slideshow has 66 slides taking you through all of the steps of stress management. You can walk through at your own pace and there is audio to accompany the slides.
Mind/Body Health (American Psychological Association): This is an interactive graphic from the American Psychological Association. It lets you click on different parts of the body, then gives explanations about how your mental health can affect your physical health. It also has links to useful related articles like Six Myths About Stress and a general article about stress.
Stress (Radiolab—NWYN and NPR): This is an excellent, extremely compelling podcast all about stress. The hosts of Radiolab—a science-focused radio broadcast—talk to neuropsychologists, the president of the American Institute of Stress, and more.
Stress Management (Mansfield University of Pennsylvania): This is a 28-page PowerPoint presentation created by the university's student services department. It is very clear and comprehensive, and does a nice job illustrating common situations for college students.
Stress Management (University Life Cafe): This 9-page web resource includes interactive quizzes, diagrams, slideshows, tips, and more.
Stress Management Workshop (Georgia Southern University): This online workshop has 31 pages and takes about 20-40 minutes to complete. There are interactive activites and assessments among the descriptions, suggestions, and resources. The university also provides online relaxation exercies, self-help topics and more here.
Stress Much? (West Virginia University): This is an interactive quiz that assesses your level of stress and then gives you advice depending on how you answered each question.
Welcome to Stress Recess (University of Texas at Austin): This is an excellent portal completely focussed on stress management. The left navigation gives you answers to all of your basic questions and an interactive guide will give you a tailored immersive experience. First you take a quiz to assess your level of stress, then the guide walks you through understanding your situation and dealing with stress. It has videos and games along the way.

General Resources

Helping Teenagers With Stress (American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry): This resource for teens covers the basics like sources of stress, how to cope with stress, and how parents can help teens deal with stress. You can download a PDF version of the document for printing or e-mailing.
How to Cope With Stress (Learnthat): This online course is broken down into eight sections, plus two sections with stress exercises and stress worksheets. Some of the topics include Stress Recovery, Replacing Negative Self-Talk With Positive, and Stress Busters.
Manage Stress (National Health Information Center): This is a well-organized guide to stress managment. It's all presented in a nice, multi-page tool. It does a particularly nice job of linking out to detailed resources throughout the guide. For example, in the "Take Action!" section, it recommends deep breathing and stretching and links out to detailed descriptions of each on other sites.
Stress (Medicine.net): This 18-section resource is quite comprehensive and has a Patient Discussion section where users submit their thoughts about stress and stress management.
Stress (TeensHealth): This resource was designed for teens, and it has many other related resources for teens like "Abusive Relationships" and "Depression."
Stress: How to Cope Better With Life's Challenges (FamilyDoctor.org): This resource is one of the more basic resources on our list, but it is very clear, concise, and helpful. It is a good starting point, as it covers the essentials without being overwhelming.
Stress and Your Health (The Hormone Foundation): This PDF does a nice job describing stress and how it affects your health. It also discusses recognizing stress in your life and how to eliminate it. It has both an English and a Spanish version, each one page. It works great as a hand-out for students.
Stress Management: How to Reduce, Prevent, and Cope With Stress (Helpguide.org): This resource is part of Helpguide, a non-profit dedicated to helping people overcome life's challenges. The resource does a nice job highlighting important information in blue boxes and also provides tips in easy-to-remember formats, like the Four A's of dealing with stressful situations.
Stress Managment Blog: This comprehensive site is completely dedicated to stress management. It has entire sections devoted to different kinds of stress, like family stress, work stress, and student stress.. There are stress management kits, techniques, news, and more.
Stress Management Resources (Mind Tools): This site is broken into 12 sections, laid out nicely and clearly on the main page of the resource. It includes sections like Understanding Stress, Your Environment, Building Defenses, Avoid Burnout, and more.