Mind Your Goals, Mind Your Emotions: Mechanisms Explaining the Relation Between Dispositional Mindfulness and Action Crises

Abstract

Action crises describe the intra-psychic conflicts people face when deliberating whether to continue pursuing or to give up a goal for which difficulties keep accumulating. Action crises lead to negative consequences such as elevated distress and depression. Less is known about their predictors. We propose mindfulness as a negative predictor of action crises because mindful people should set more autonomous goals and better regulate their emotions. Three prospective studies examined the relation between mindfulness and action crises and explored goal motivation and emotion regulation as mediators (Study 1, N = 137 students, mean age 22; Study 2, N = 79 students, mean age 24.27; Study 3, N = 236 workers, mean age 40.71). Results showed that mindfulness predicts action crises over time and that this relation is mediated by goal motivation and emotion regulation. We discuss how mindfulness can affect action crises in the phases of the Rubicon Model of goal pursuit.

Coping with the crisis: A mindfulness manipulation positively affects the emotional regulation of action crises

“…It also aligns with previous theoretical propositions and empirical findings by Garland et al (2015Garland et al ( , 2017 that mindfulness meditation increases the use of positive reappraisal coping during stressful events. This finding extends previous research, which had shown that higher dispositional mindfulness helps to prevent action crises (Marion-Jetten et al, 2022), by showing that state mindfulness also helps people regulate their emotions more positively during a visualized action crisis. Our results support further exploration to test the influence of mindfulness on emotion regulation during real, lived, action crises.…”

“…The present study showed that a short mindfulness exercise, in the form of a body scan meditation, enhanced adaptive emotion regulation following the presentation of a personalized action crisis scenario. This finding provides preliminary support for the proposition that mindfulness might also help people cope with action crises as they are happening in the action phase of the Rubicon Model (Marion-Jetten et al, 2022). It also aligns with previous theoretical propositions and empirical findings by Garland et al (2015Garland et al ( , 2017 that mindfulness meditation increases the use of positive reappraisal coping during stressful events.…”

“…This suggests that mindfulness training over the course of several weeks (e.g., mindfulness-based stress reduction pro grams) should also promote the adaptive emotion regulation of real, full-fledged, action crises. Considering that mindfulness training increases dispositional mindfulness over time (Brown et al, 2007), future action crises should also become less likely (Marion-Jetten et al, 2022). Mindfulness training thus appears to be a viable option to both prevent action crises and possibly help cope with those that might still arise.…”

“…They have numerous consequences, positive and negative respectively, for well-being and affect (see Ryan & Deci, 2017 for a review). Given this and previous research associating goal motivation with action crises (Holding et al, 2017;Marion-Jetten et al, 2022), we determined that they might also influence how people cope with action crises. For instance, a person with a highly controlled goal might more readily blame themselves or others, that is, use maladaptive coping strategies, due to resentment from feeling pressured to pursue such a goal (e.g., Assor et al, 2004).…”

Mindfulness Is Associated With Lower Stress and Higher Work Engagement in a Large Sample of MOOC Participants

“…As previously mentioned, work engagement has three dimensions of vigor, dedication and absorption and it commonly has an inverse relationship with burnout. Many of the work-related health benefits of mindfulness are likely because of its ability to reduce burnout as well as other negative outcomes of demanding or insecure work environments like action crises (Marion-Jetten et al, 2021). This interrelationship between burnout and work engagement is important with one review concluding that burnout is more strongly related to health outcomes, whereas work engagement is more strongly related to motivational outcomes (Bakker et al, 2014).…”