A recent statistic on India’s mental health indicates that psychological distress accounts for the highest mental disorder prevalent in the country. In addition to prevalence, distress is also known to cause physiological and cognitive impairments that could affect day-to-day activities. This necessitates studies to understand the variability in coping strategies for different stressors that contribute to the development and maintenance of distress. Electrophysiological studies have reported a shift from right to left frontal alpha asymmetry and higher vagal tone to be an indicator of adaptive coping. However, observations of existing studies are based subject’s response to single shift from baseline to a stressor and have failed to report the variability across a gradient of stressors. This study attempts to bridge the gap in literature by measuring behavioral avoidance (the key coping strategy in distress) and its association with its markers (vagal tone and frontal alpha asymmetry) across conventional stressor (CS) and context-relevant stressor (CRS). We hypothesized that resting and intra-individual variability (IIV) in cardiac vagal tone across multiple situations is believed to predict the behavioral avoidance. To test this hypothesis, 35 subjects (mean age = 21.62, SD= 1.77) underwent a mock test (CRS) and a mental arithmetic task (CS) two weeks before and after examination respectively. An optional 15-minute continuation of the test was offered to the subjects. Declining this continuation was considered to be behavioral avoidance. RMSSD and HF-HRV were indexed as cardiac vagal tone. The intra-individual variability (IIV) is calculated as SD of vagal tone across three conditions (rest, CRS, CS). Greater IIV was associated with higher vagal tone during rest, and decrease in avoidance. The vagal tone metrics of subjects with avoidance was significantly correlated to changes in right frontal alpha asymmetry during the tasks. Findings of this study suggest that vagal tone metrics (at rest and IIV) together predict the avoidance-approach adaptation in context relevant stressors. These findings are supported by the capability model of alpha symmetry and neurobehavioral theories of vagal function.