When faced with stressful situations – whether delivering a speech, dealing with criticism, or navigating tense social encounters – most people focus heavily on negative thoughts and sensations.
But what if we could also notice positive moments amid stress?
New research suggests mindfulness training, particularly practices centered around acceptance, can significantly increase people’s awareness of positive experiences even under pressure.
A study by Emily K. Lindsay, published in Emotion (2024), highlights how mindfulness training can enhance the ability to recognize positive moments during acute stress.
This finding could offer valuable strategies for boosting emotional resilience in everyday life.
The researchers explored how mindfulness – being intentionally attentive and nonjudgmental toward present-moment experiences – affects emotional responses during stress.
While past studies show mindfulness helps improve general emotional wellbeing, the specific ability to notice positive experiences in the middle of stressful events had been less clear.
In their experiment, Lindsay and her colleagues recruited 153 adults experiencing moderate-to-high stress.
Participants were randomly assigned to one of three groups:
- traditional mindfulness training (Monitor + Accept),
- mindfulness without acceptance training (Monitor Only),
- control group practicing general coping techniques.
Each group received remote lessons via smartphone over two weeks, ensuring consistency across training conditions.
The study concluded with a challenging laboratory stress test, where participants had to defend themselves against a fictional accusation of shoplifting and perform mental arithmetic tasks under evaluative scrutiny.
Participants reported their experiences using a new Stress-Affect Experiences Checklist, capturing both positive and negative sensations, thoughts, and emotions during the test.
Remarkably, those trained in full mindfulness with acceptance (Monitor + Accept) reported significantly more positive experiences during stress than both the mindfulness without acceptance and control groups.
Specifically, the Monitor + Accept group noticed positive thoughts and sensations nearly twice as often as others, despite experiencing a similar level of negative feelings.
Interestingly, the researchers found that mindfulness didn’t reduce negative thoughts and feelings during stress.
Instead, mindfulness helped individuals hold negative experiences without becoming overwhelmed, allowing them to simultaneously notice more positive aspects of their experiences.
This balance appears essential, as previous research indicates that the presence of positive emotions, rather than simply the absence of negative emotions, better predicts long-term health and wellbeing.
The implications of these findings are meaningful, especially in contexts of everyday stress and mental health.
Mindfulness training emphasizing acceptance may equip people with a valuable tool for coping with daily pressures, potentially lowering stress-related health risks over time.
However, the study does have its limits.
The participants, mostly female and highly educated, may not reflect the broader population, and adherence to the training regimen was unusually high compared to typical real-world conditions.
Further research could examine whether similar benefits occur with shorter or less structured mindfulness interventions and whether these positive emotional responses during acute stress translate into long-term improvements in health outcomes.
Nonetheless, this study significantly advances our understanding of mindfulness by highlighting the importance of acceptance training.
The simple act of learning to accept, rather than resist, stress-related feelings could pave the way toward greater resilience and emotional wellbeing, providing valuable insights into how mindfulness can practically support mental health.
Citation
Lindsay, E. K., Young, S., & Creswell, J. D. (2025). Mindfulness training fosters a positive outlook during acute stress: A randomized controlled trial. Emotion, 25(4), 815–826. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0001452
