The role of consumer mindsets to reduce health‐related stress

Abstract Medical professionals often struggle to persuade patients to adopt a healthy lifestyle. Despite consumers' increased interest in adopting a healthy lifestyle, the pursuit of wellness could make consumers feel stressed, which can cause or lead to many diseases. To reduce their stress, consumers can use either a problem‐focused or emotion‐focused coping strategy. A problem‐focused coping strategy focuses on potential actions one can take in response to stress. In contrast, an emotion‐focused coping strategy focuses on the emotional consequences of the situation and regulating the resulting emotions. Based on implicit self‐theories, this research suggests that consumers' different mindsets, either a growth or fixed mindset, influence their preferences for coping strategies to mitigate stress. The results of this study indicated that consumers with a growth mindset (vs. a fixed mindset) prefer to use a problem‐focused coping strategy (vs. emotion‐focused coping strategy) to reduce health‐related stress. Process evidence suggests that the findings are driven by differences in consumers' mindsets and how much they attribute their stress to controllable factors. Practical implications are discussed and include approaches medical professionals can use to implement a tailored messaging strategy based on the patient's mindset.