Why do people abandon an emotion-regulation technique even when they have been instructed to use it? A study published on October 14 in the journal Mindfulness by researchers Almaz Mesghina and Lindsey Engle Richland examines that question through the experiences of 290 American university students dealing with pandemic-related distress.
The researchers focused on two familiar approaches. Cognitive reappraisal involves reconsidering the meaning of a stressful situation, while mindfulness asks people to notice and accept their present experience. Both are widely discussed in psychology and wellbeing education, but being taught a strategy does not mean someone will use it when distress becomes personally significant.
The participants, drawn from two large minority-serving institutions, had been assigned to use either mindfulness or reappraisal in an earlier study. The newly published analysis examined their written explanations of why the assigned approach did or did not seem useful, then explored how those explanations related to following the instructions.
Most participants expressed mixed feelings rather than unequivocal enthusiasm. Mindfulness was associated with greater compliance than reappraisal, but participants also identified limits to its usefulness. Among those assigned mindfulness, people who did not follow the instruction were more likely to discuss circumstances and individual differences as reasons a technique might not fit.
One finding stood out: after accounting for the assigned condition and pandemic-related distress, participants who mentioned individual differences had substantially lower odds of complying with their assigned strategy. The reported odds ratio was 0.31, equivalent to approximately 69 percent lower odds. This is an association, not evidence that discussing individual differences caused noncompliance.
The practical question for coaches, mindfulness teachers and wellbeing educators is not whether one method deserves to be declared the winner. It is how people decide which skills feel usable in the situations they actually face. A person may understand the rationale for reframing a problem and still find that approach difficult to apply during a particular stressful moment.
The study also has important boundaries. Its participants were undergraduates reflecting on COVID-19-related stress, and the authors analyzed previously collected responses. Although the original study had been preregistered, these specific qualitative analyses were not. The findings cannot establish how all populations choose between mindfulness and reappraisal, nor do they measure the long-term clinical effectiveness of either approach.
For professionals designing practical emotional-skills programs, the research offers a useful prompt: teach a technique, but also ask participants when it feels appropriate, when it does not and what they notice about their own responses. The researchers specifically call for more investigation of how people perceive and choose emotion-regulation opportunities in everyday life.
Source: Almaz Mesghina and Lindsey Engle Richland, Mindfulness (Springer Nature)
Web: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12671-026-02995-4
