Mastering Stress: Practical Daily Tools to Build Resilience with Barry Winbolt | BlissTalk Podcast

In this insightful episode of BlissTalk, we sit down with psychologist, therapist, and author Barry Winbolt to explore how everyday stress can be transformed into an opportunity for growth, clarity, and emotional balance. With over 30 years of experience helping people thrive under pressure, Barry shares powerful, practical techniques for managing stress in real-time — no complicated systems or long retreats required.

Whether you're feeling overwhelmed at work, juggling responsibilities at home, or simply searching for more peace in your everyday routine, this episode delivers clear and actionable tools you can implement immediately. Barry explains how small shifts in thinking and simple changes to your daily habits can dramatically reduce stress and build personal resilience — starting today.

Discover the science behind stress and how to work with your mind and body instead of against them. Learn how mindset, routine, and language patterns affect your stress response, and how becoming aware of these patterns can put you back in control. Barry also discusses the importance of self-talk, micro-habits, and emotional flexibility in maintaining a healthy and productive lifestyle.

In this episode, you’ll discover:

•  Proven techniques to manage stress without overhauling your life
• How to break the cycle of negative thinking and overwhelm
• Small daily practices that increase resilience and wellbeing
• Why mindset and self-awareness are critical for lasting change
• The role of emotional agility and balance in personal and professional life

If you’ve ever wished for a more balanced, grounded approach to stress management — one that actually fits into your real life — this episode will empower you with the tools to take charge of your mental wellbeing and thrive under pressure.

✅ Links & Resources:

Ready to Take Control of Stress and Build Lasting Resilience?

Explore Barry Winbolt’s full collection of expert-led courses designed to help you manage stress, improve communication, and build emotional strength in everyday life. Backed by decades of experience in psychology and personal development, these courses offer simple, effective tools to support your mental and emotional wellbeing — at your own pace, in your own time.

Start your journey to a calmer, more resilient you today:
 👉 Discover Barry’s Courses on Blisspot

Transcript

Speaker 1 0:00
 Welcome to the Bliss Spot podcast series where we interview global well-being leaders to share ideas to invite more joy and happiness into your life.

Speaker 2 (Deborah) 0:14
 Absolutely delighted to be here today with Barry Winbolt. Barry is Bliss Spot's most popular author, and people resonate with his work, and I believe it's because it’s so practical and offers so much—it really does work. Barry is a psychologist, coach, therapist, and writer. He has built his career around sharing information that helps people sort out the things that trouble them. There is always something you can do if you have the right information and guidance. I love that philosophy because I believe it too. You don’t have to struggle in life and feel like you’re alone; we can always reach out and get that support when needed. He provides personal and professional training to help you get a better handle on yourself and relationships. A lot of us struggle with relationships, and it can be a lifelong learning process, so it’s amazing to have practical skills and strategies. Barry’s strapline, “Life doesn’t have to be like that,” comes from the idea that, with the right information and a bit of encouragement, we can fix a lot of life’s irritants ourselves. And I’m passionate about that message because it’s so empowering to think that when you know and have the right skills and strategies, you can make positive changes yourself. His courses are plentiful, with work that can help people in various formats to suit different learning styles—such as podcasts for the auditory, video courses for the visual, or handouts for those who like to write things down and personalize the experience. But that vast body of wisdom always includes practical advice you can apply right away, which is great because when you’re in the moment and ready to make a change, you want to get on with it straight away. Barry uses a solution-focused problem-solving approach based on years of wisdom, theoretical research, and practical experience. He does this because he wants everything he delivers to be useful, practical, and effective. That’s why we love having Barry as part of the Bliss Spot community. So

Unknown Speaker 2:52
 Barry, without further ado, I will hand over

Speaker 2 (Deborah) 2:55
 to you by asking just to share a little bit about your journey, and I have heard this story before, and every time, I'm completely in awe of what you've done and the experience that you bring and how your life's unfolded. But if you could share that with our audience, I think that would be most useful and inspiring.

Speaker 3 (Barry Winbolt) 3:16
 Okay, well, hello, Deborah, and thanks so much for this opportunity. It's great talking to you as ever, and thanks for that build up. I didn't recognize myself, you know, there was quite a bit of ad-libbing in there. So, so thank you. I really, I genuinely appreciate that. And one of the things about being a kind of an online author, presenter and all of that stuff today is that we do it alone. So feedback and commentary and all of that stuff is so important because it validates what we do. You know, what keeps us I'm sure the other experts would use what you get up in the morning and you think to yourself, Am I just speaking into silence here? You know, I'm putting this stuff out every day, so any feedback, and I would say that to any listeners as well, you know, if you are interacting with anybody me or anybody else, just remember, there's a human being at the end of that. And we like to know you're out there, you know, send us a sign. It doesn't have to be money, even, although that's good. But seriously, you know, a like, a thumbs up, a subscriber, whatever it happens to be, yeah, my journey well long, and because I'm of a fairly advanced age now, and actually, I have to say, I have to big up the oldest. You know, it is great being old. I have to say that, you know, there are a few, few drawbacks, like constant pain and doubt about how much longer you're going to be here. But apart from that, that's negligible compared with the opportunities of being an active older person, and I think that goes very much in hand with attitude. Well, I know it does. I know the research says that so. So I've had a long, a long time to learn stuff, and I was a serial entrepreneur till I was in my late 30s. Well, I have been all my life. I've started many, many small businesses, and I actually managed to sell one and made quite a lot of money out of it. At one point, all gone now, of course, but, but through my entrepreneurship and running a business, I became a consultant, because people my clients, were giving me grief, and I was giving them grief back. And one of them said to me, Well, you know, if I had somebody like you working for me, this problem wouldn't arise. And I said, Well, keep talking, you know. So I, as well as running my business, I became a consultant, and that took me abroad, and I worked in in France and in Russia and various other places. And during all that time, I was having good results. I was in my mid, mid age. By then, I was in my 40s, and I thought, why is this happening? You know? How come I don't know anything. I walk in with a clipboard. Now I've got this label consultant, but I didn't know. What the hell consultants? Did you know? I just walked around looking consultant like, trying to make friends with people genuinely. That's how I did it. And, and, and I found out that I kind of was forming opinions that I didn't realize not everybody had, you know, obviously I had something going for me. I didn't know what it was, so I went and studied partly through I had a major road accident on my motorcycle, so partly through self development following that accident, which I believed I could have avoided. So I felt guilty about that. Nobody else was hurt. But, you know, I just felt that was a mistake. I had a warning before I went out on my bike, and I didn't heed it. I didn't listen to that inner voice, and I nearly killed myself, and a passenger, by the way, who fortunately wasn't hurt at all seriously. So that got me thinking on the personal development journey, which actually I'd already started through interest. I'd done a homeopathy course, I'd done a massage course, I'd done various other things. I've looked into Alexander Technique, Feldenkrais, things like that, to kind of find out what was going on. And in parallel, I was this business person, but I didn't really fit everybody knew, you know, except Well, I thought they did. I thought they sussed me out pretty quickly. But I was getting consultancy work, and it was working, and I was doing very well at that and so I went off and studied psychology. Cut Long story short, I ended up officially studying conflict resolution at the University of London, where I ended up teaching conflict resolution, because, in parallel with everything else my work in Russia, I had been involved in conflict resolution in Russia. That was one of the reasons I was sent there. So in the business sense, business conflicts. So that all came together in the 90s, I suppose, 1990s and and so for the 30 years, I qualified as a family therapist around that time as well, and a mediator. And so for 30 years, I've been doing that sort of stuff, and it's come down. You know, people talk about a sales funnel. Well, I think there's a life funnel. You know, I've done such a broad spectrum of things, and I'm trying now to kind of funnel it down to what really gives me value to the world and what gives me a sense of value in myself. But what gives, you know. I know so much is fixable. And I know, you know. And I was listening to your introduction, I know there must be people out there who are in a really, in the pit and struggling, and they hear, life doesn't have to be like that. And they probably stick up two fingers and think, What does this guy know? You know, he’s not in the position I’m in, but, and I sympathize with that, but I also know that time and again I speak to people and one conversation helps somebody turn a corner and radically improve their life or begin the journey too, because we're not taught this stuff. And so when you've got somebody like me or one of your other experts who's focused on something, let's talk about relationships for a minute. You know, I've had a few, I've had a few breakdowns as well as my professional training as a family therapist and psychologist and mediator, and I've met thousands of people who I've talked to in that context, in seminars, workshops, and as clients. So I've, you know, this comes down, this funnels down to something that's pretty useful, without being at all arrogant about it. And I constantly underestimate how useful it is to people. They tell me this, you know, I have what I think is a conversation at a bus stop, and then I get an email saying that this really helped me. Thank you for that 20 minutes, you know. And if you think about it, humanity has been solving its own problems. We didn’t have psychologists 150 years ago, you know, we had the church. We had a few philosophers. We had the wise woman of the village, our mums, if we were lucky, our parents, you know, and our extended family. And we hacked it, we sorted it out, but we've now pathologized everything, everything, everything. Don’t get me started on the damage done by social media, where words like trauma—well, let’s just take trauma—these have become, I can't think of the word they’ve become kind of standard tropes, oh, I'm suffering from trauma. In fact, I was listening to an Australian podcast just this week about trauma on TikTok, and the damage it’s doing because it’s not trauma. Trauma is a very definite thing, you know, but you shouldn't use trauma as a diagnosis to stop you looking any further if you have been traumatized, God knows enough people are, and if you’ve suffered the effects of trauma, because going through trauma doesn’t mean suffering from trauma later. Two-thirds of people don’t. Most people don’t get PTSD when they go off to war. Some do tragically. Anyway, I bet you wish you’d never asked, you see you can’t shut me up, can you? No,

Speaker 2 (Deborah) 11:17
 It's good. And some things, I’ve got some little takeaways from there that I’ve written down because I love, you know, I pick up on things, and I get really excited, but I can’t interrupt. So I write them down so I can feed it back to you. And just to expand on a little bit more, I think, from what you're saying. So you are qualified as a therapist, and you've got loads of skills in your toolbox, and I, from what I hear, you're saying that it's good to get support when you need it, like don’t just struggle alone. And I always get support when I've kind of done the best I can with my own skills. And I think I’m just, I’m stuck, and then I will reach out, I’ll read a book or look at a podcast or go to a seminar or buy the course, do whatever I need to do to kind of move through that. But from what I hear, you're saying, and I have to say, Barry, you are very humble, like you always sort of, I think, don’t, you know, talk yourself up enough, in my opinion, for what the value you bring to people. But what you're talking about is, like, it's sort of a combination of common sense. You're saying people do have the answers inside. They might need, sometimes,

Speaker 3 (Barry Winbolt) 12:24
 Some of the answers. I think humanity has the answers. If you don’t, somebody, you know, maybe I

Unknown Speaker 12:32
 Love that we should make a

Unknown Speaker 12:37
 Quote of the day out of that humanity. Yeah, thank you.

Speaker 2 (Deborah) 12:44
 But I what I was going to say, it's like a combination of common sense life skills, which you might have to look further outside to go and get life skills and wisdom. And I think that's what you bring. So when you're saying you have that conversation at the bus stop, that is actually because I feel, yeah, you this is your gift. This is what you can share with people. You've got the toolbox, you've got some life skills you can share. You've got the wisdom to not pick what to share with them. And a lot of it is common sense and very practical. It's not some airy fairy, theoretical thing that they just can't go home and think about that they can actually try it and then feel the positive difference in their life. So I think that's really beautiful work. And I think I also believe this another little personal philosophy of mine, but I've studied, I read a book, and it was about people that thrive, and they're saying that the people that live the longest, I think it might have changed since then, but when I read the book, was it I'm going to pronounce it probably Okinawans. Okinawans or something in Yes,

Unknown Speaker 13:52
 Yes, they live

Speaker 2 (Deborah) 13:54
 To about 120 but that is because age is revered, like people think the older you get, the more beautiful you are, the more wisdom you have to share. And I love that, because I think that's natural, like, why wouldn't we think that? Wow, look at my grandfather. He has so much to share. He's lived, you know, how many ever years on this earth, and he's got all that wisdom to share. So I think that's really beautiful. And yeah, just Yeah. Anyway, I just picked up on those three things. But so leading on, from your incredible story and background, what is the work that you do now, we've touched on a little bit already, but it'd be really interesting just to expand on that a little bit more.

Speaker 3 (Barry Winbolt) 14:42
 Yeah, well, I talked about a funnel, didn’t I use the funnel analogy of funneling it down. I'm trying to, you know, my spectrum of work has been very broad. I've covered a lot of subjects because I’m a bit of a, you know, butterfly. In that respect, I liked, I'll be working on resilience for a couple of months, and I write. A book on difficult people. And then I think, right, I finished that topic, I'll put that away. Although actually, the difficult people book, which I wrote in 2002 that topic, and that content keeps coming back. Keeps coming back. People still want it. I do a lot of work in solution-focused, brief therapy training as well. And that's kind of coming to the fore again. So, you know, I float about but I try, and I'm trying to make sense of it in some way at this stage in my life, so that, where can what I do do the most good out there without being at all fancy about it. But you know, where can it benefit people the most, and we saw this in the pandemic. I'll touch on that in a minute. But where can that be the most useful? How can I get it to the right sort of people? It may be a few people where I do a little bit of stuff, or it may be a lot of people where I do even less stuff, you know, but, but who's my audience, this is what I'm kind of trying to, who is my audience, and how do I get stuff to them? Because I get very little feedback about that. And I think that what I'm really coming down to is that the various things I do my website, my blog, your platform, you know, various other places I want to produce stuff that I know is useful to people. And it seems to me that my courses, my webinars, my podcast, this, this type of thing, other quickest way and the simplest way to to share that information in terms of topics. You know, I, we you, and I have talked about resilience, and it's a very important topic. And I think that one of the tragedies of the modern age since the pandemic is many people have not used them, and I include the media in this have not used the panda in general. I mean, there's some bits the media are different, but many people have not used the pandemic as an example of human resilience. They've used it as a trigger for catastrophizing, an alarmist talk, which continues to this day. And you had the fires in Australia, and you had, you know, every country is having its stuff and floods, yeah, and of course, it's horrible, of course it's tragic, and God knows, we don't want to go through that again. But we also have survived it, and we learned a lot, a lot of good stuff came out of the efforts of various governments during the pandemic, and yet all we hear on the news is the bad stuff, and I think we should big up our successes far more and in terms of resilience at a personal level, an exercise that I recommend regularly to people. I've got it written as a free download on, you know, I send it out to people all the time. Is when you go to bed at night, if you just before you doze off. Or if you've got a 10 minutes in the evening when you get home from work, you know, write down your successes that day. Make a list of your successes, because your mind is going to be feeding you all of those. Suppose, Oh, I did that wrong. Oh God, I hope I did all right in that meeting. Oh, my goodness, I was late. And all of these criticisms that our mind throws up at us, excuse me, it isn't helpful in terms of our robustness and our resilience. You know, we need to counter that. So if you start to review your successes each day, what did I do? Right? And it doesn’t have to be Mother Teresa, you know, or feeding millions, or climbing Mount Everest, it can be, it can be a getting across the road in one piece. It can be getting through the day, you know, it can, I mean, it's just endless, the successes we have every day. I mean, the very The mere fact that we make it through the day and are still breathing, you know, it's, it's pretty good. And celebrate it, you know, because when you do that, you're educating your mind. So So that's So resilience is is quite a big topic, but I underlying that, and coming back to what I was talking about earlier, the resources to be resilient. I wouldn't say that we have always have them in us, but a lot more is in us than we know about. And you know, I was talking to somebody yesterday who's going through a perennial mini crisis in later life. They're they're busy, busy, busy with grandkids and kids and business and all of all of the stuff that's going on in their lives, and I hear this quite a lot, and the answer to that for them is to sort their life out. These things that are making demands on them are coming out of from around them. They're coming out of the world, out of the environment, out of the universe, whatever you want to call. It. But the only person who can control that is you. You know, if you, if you sit passively, like a leaf on a stream, life will take you where the stream is going to take you. But if you say, Well, hang on a minute, every just, every now and again, stop every day, a couple of times, how am I doing today, or at the end of the day, how have I done today? Where do I, you know. And above all, when you've had a busy day before you go home to your partner, your children, whatever you go home to, take 10 minutes for yourself to chill and just switch off, you know. Because so what I'm trying to say is it's very easy to, in theory, to get control of your life, but we don't do it. We blame life for not treating us well, but actually a little bit of common sense, little bit of what your grandmother did, or, you know, never knew mine, but whatever and humanity has the wisdom built into it, because we've come this far, yeah, and mostly we ignore it.

Unknown Speaker 21:04
 So exactly, I

Speaker 2 (Deborah) 21:06
 Just love that, like I love I love doing this work, because no matter, I've been doing personal development work for 30 years, but I always learn new things, always, always, always. And today, Barry, I've spoken to you. We must have into, you know, spoken together in interviews and things at least five times by now. And, you know, I always learn something new. And I think there's a lot of stuff about gratitude, which I think is a very important, beautiful skill, but actually writing down your successes every day before you go to bed, that just must change up your whole neurology, because you're putting good endorphins in and feeling good, you're not going in with cortisol and, you know, stressing and your mind so switched on. And I've heard about, you know, taking little micro breaks throughout the day so we don’t get totally depleted, and then we're trying to make our body go to sleep. But I think that 10-minute gap like that, that is just common sense as well. We just do nothing, because I think we keep piling things on on. Us keep doing more and more, and as you say, we're not even taking care of ourselves and going, oh my gosh, I'm feeling very overwhelmed, or I don't sleep properly, but we're not doing the actions that we need to do to actually take care of Yeah.

Speaker 3 (Barry Winbolt) 22:20
 Amazing, absolutely, yeah. I was reading recently some Italian research, and these guys were saying that work-life balance won't work. And the reason work-life balance can work, but it doesn’t mostly because we don’t devote the energy and the time and the thought to our life, our home life. In other words, as we do to work. So you think about you going to work. You get there on time, you have a meeting, you prepare. You maybe up the night before, preparing for etc, etc, etc, all that stuff we do. We think about our career. We think about where we want to go, and then we go home, and we just do home. You know, now, for years, I would, I would stop on my way home, because I traveled a lot and I commuted, and I'd be eager to get home, but I was also pretty eager to get to the pub, and so I built the two in, and I would have a 10-Minute stop, which was usually about 20 minutes, and I'd read, and I'd be in a cafe or a pub to come down from work and to switch off from work, and then I'd go home. And I can remember one time getting home after a long trip, and I got to the front door and my wife said, You're not fit to come home go to the pub. You know, I can see you're zoned out. You don’t come in yet. And I learned this from my dad. He he, he would come home from business trip, and he would we were little ones, you know, with 2345, I mean, I was me and my younger sister and my older sister, and we would be dying to see our dad. And he would shut himself in the living room with my mum with a glass of wine for half an hour seemed an eternity to us, you know, and then, and then we'd be unleashed, and he could deal with us. But, you know, they needed their time. He'd been away. They needed their time. They loved each other, you know, have a glass of wine. Shut the brats out of the room for the moment. And you know, we had a great home life. Hope, no doubt about that. I'm not. It wasn't at all. It was authoritative, disciplinarian even. But it was a great upbringing, and I’m grateful for it every day. And this, this idea of actually protecting yourself, probably was instilled in me very, very young, that it was okay. I think so. I think so, yeah, yeah, so. So, you know, there's a lot we can do anyway.

Speaker 2 (Deborah) 24:50
 I think that's really, just really good food for thought, and so practical as well, like with our nervous system, because I know myself, if you're. Piling on stress after stress. Sometimes you'll get to that thing and it's just the little thing that sets you off, because you didn't have the capacity to deal with it. Yeah, having that 10-minute break, you're filling yourself up so you've got the capacity to be properly present with your loved ones when you get home, rather than half the foot still back in work and half the foot in the new place. It's like a

Unknown Speaker 25:22
 Reason. He said

Unknown Speaker 25:25
 We were talking about which

Speaker 3 (Barry Winbolt) 25:26
 The other, the other thing about that is, if, like me, you go to a cafe or a pub, you're helping the local economy too, you know, you're doing good all around. I mean, I'm being a bit flippant, but, but, you know, spread it around. Be nice to people. You know, we're so much on the treadmill that we don't very often see the commute and and the getting home, and then the key goes in the door, and we're through the door, and we're straight into family life, and they don't get the best of us if we've had a stressful day, and we don't get the best of them. So, you know, I mean, this was brought home to me years and years ago when we had two children, and they were at the time, kind of five and 12, around that age, and I got home from work early one day, and my wife was was was there just as she brought the youngest one home from school, and then, and I was used to coming in and talking to my wife, you know, because I'd had a day out and I needed her attention in a sort of, rather typically, I'm not altogether proud of that now. But anyway, at the end of that would be me walking in, hey wife, where are you? Of course, I didn't use those words, but what my love, my darling, come and speak to me. I need your attention and so. But I couldn't get nearer, because she had a five-year-old who's just home from school, you know, have a snack. And then just as I was going to get my shot, the older one came in, and it was his turn, and I had to wait in line, you know, and I got an insight into her life, but also it taught me that actually, we shouldn't all just come in and dump it on whoever's at home holding the fort, you know. And it because I was coming home to relax, but she probably wasn't ready to have that conversation either, yes, so full-on workday, yeah, mode with her children and doing what she needed to do at that time. Yeah, exactly. Well, I think timing is everything, isn’t it? When it comes to wanting to connect, you've got to have that space and be able and, yeah, amazing. I guess we have, well, you spoke about wisdom earlier. You know, we don't have to be old to gain wisdom, but, and it sometimes sounds a bit a bit highfalutin, but that is what has kept humanity going. And there are some gaps in the wisdom. You know, there are some big gaps, like, for example, how we deal with conflict. It's always puzzled me that if my kids want to do maths at school or geography or religion or medicine, you know, there's a body of work we can point them to to start them off. There will be the books, there'll be the experts. If you want to know about conflict, that body of work, unless you're a specialist, you don't know about that. Where are the books? Where are the books on conflict? Where are the books telling kids you're going to have fights in your life, kids, you're going to get married, you're going to have domestic arguments, you're going to have kids who argue with you the way you argue with your parents. You know, what are you going to do about it? Where's the where's the wisdom, the body of work that we hand to those young people to prepare them. The same happens with resilience. The same happens with all of these kind of I heard them called the other day, human skills, rather than soft skills.

Unknown Speaker 28:57
 I think they're like, yes, yeah,

Speaker 2 (Deborah) 29:00
 They are life. It's funny, Barry, when you were talking about your background, I thought I studied HR at the applied School of Applied Psychology, and the first topic that I studied was conflict resolution, and I just felt like I was home, like I loved it. I thought, oh my gosh, there's a different way that's not adversarial to you know, deal with you. I was so passionate about I became a teacher, and I told I used to teach people conflict resolution skills. I used to teach everybody my business. So I'm right with you, and they're so passionate, and I think they should be taught at school, which I think they are to into a more or less extent in certain places. But I think people, I don't really like the term soft skills. I think it's a bit dismissive of these skills, which is, you know, can underpin happiness in life. So I love it that's was your best. Background as well, and you've shared work, and I think it can make such a difference to people's quality of life, if you're not getting along well in your relationships with your loved ones, that can really overshadow all other enjoyment. I've heard of people even in extremely wealthy companies, people that are doing succession planning to hand down the family business, but if they don't get along with their children, you know, they're not even in actually enjoying all that wealth. So we're really realizing, I think, the value of those connections, and how important it is to be able to relate to each other and to repair enough in an effective way and be able to move on. Which brings me to my next point, because we were talking a little bit in the lead-up to this podcast about how you're saying that the humanity is in a very difficult situation right now. And I think your idea of focusing on success and the positives is really important, but it'd be good to expand a little bit more on that, because I found