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.