The purpose of this project was to inform the presentation timing of coping strategies during an acutely stressful task, to be integrated into a visual real-time biofeedback display for stress management. We gathered skin temperature, electrocardiography, and electroencephalography data, and presented a coping instruction on various time schedules while participants played a first-person shooter computer game. Heart rate variability (HRV) preceding and following significantly elevated peaks of stress at times when a message was presented was compared to times of comparable stress when a message was not presented. In general, around times of significantly elevated heart rate (HR), presenting a coping instruction resulted in an increase in HRV. At analogous times of elevated HR when a message was not presented, the downstream results indicated a decrease in HRV in most cases. These results support that HRV over relatively short time windows before and after a peak of elevated stress can be a sensitive indicator of acute stress. We can confirm that the presence of a message at a physiologically-relevant time reduced physiological stress within the subset of peaks analyzed. The findings imply that presenting coping instructions at the time of an acute stress response restores downstream physiological indicators representative of stress, and that not doing so can be detrimental.