Brief lifestyle practices for stress management in mental health: a scoping review of theoretical assumptions, mechanisms of change, and methodological implications

This study aims to map and analyze brief lifestyle practices for stress management in mental health through a scoping review of the scientific literature. The review adopts a conceptual, process-oriented, and methodological perspective, focusing on low-complexity interventions characterized by short duration, minimal guidance, and a direct focus on reducing stress, anxiety, or depressive symptoms. Rather than restricting the scope to a single technique or theoretical approach, the review examines a heterogeneous set of practices commonly investigated in the literature, including controlled breathing, brief mindfulness or meditation practices, short bouts of physical activity, simple relaxation techniques, and guided imagery. These practices are treated as empirical anchors rather than as an exhaustive list, allowing the review to identify additional interventions that fit the proposed scope. The field of brief lifestyle-based stress management interventions is marked by conceptual heterogeneity, methodological diversity, and fragmented empirical traditions, with different intervention families often studied in isolation and with limited integration across theoretical frameworks. As a result, key issues remain insufficiently addressed, including the identification of shared mechanisms of change across practices, the possibility of functional comparisons based on processes rather than techniques, and the establishment of minimal methodological criteria for investigating and implementing brief interventions. Given this context, a scoping review is methodologically appropriate, as a systematic review focused on effectiveness or effect size estimation would be premature and overly restrictive. The primary objective of the review is to identify and synthesize the theoretical assumptions, proposed mechanisms of change, intervention formats, and recurrent methodological challenges associated with brief lifestyle practices for stress management in mental health. Specifically, the review will classify practices according to their functional characteristics and implementation modalities; examine how “briefness” is defined and operationalized; describe intervention parameters such as total duration, number and length of sessions, delivery format, and degree of guidance; and identify psychological or physiological mechanisms discussed or empirically examined in relation to these practices. The scoping review will be conducted in accordance with the methodological guidance of the Joanna Briggs Institute and reported following the PRISMA-ScR guidelines. The PCC framework will be used to structure the research question, focusing on adult populations, brief lifestyle practices targeting stress, anxiety, or depressive symptoms, and mental health contexts across community, educational, occupational, and outpatient settings. Comprehensive searches will be conducted in major biomedical and psychological databases (Web of Science, PubMed/MEDLINE, PsycINFO, and Scopus), without restrictions on publication date and limited to studies published in English. Grey literature will also be considered when eligibility criteria are met. This study does not involve the collection of primary empirical data and constitutes a secondary synthesis of the literature. Expected outcomes include a structured conceptual map of brief lifestyle practices for stress management, an integrative synthesis of proposed mechanisms of change, the identification of key methodological limitations and gaps in the field, and the development of a process-oriented conceptual framework to inform future comparative intervention studies, without empirical implementation at this stage.