Stress is a critical issue in organizations, research suggesting that it has even reached epidemic levels, although, it may have some benefits (Podsakoff et al., 2023), because not all stressors are alike and not everyone responds the same to a certain stressor (O'Brien & Beehr, 2019). Emotional demands are one of those stressors, with some researchers categorizing them as challenges and some as hindrances (Li et al., 2020), which is why it is important to understand the mechanisms through which they lead to different outcomes by integrating two major theoretical frameworks - Transactional Theory of Stress (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984) and Process Model of Emotion Regulation (Gross, 2015) - to propose emotion regulation as a new mechanism linking stress to job satisfaction and job performance. Furthermore, the path from appraisals to emotion regulation may be mediated by affect, and given that not all emotion regulation strategies yield the same results, more research is needed regarding their link to work-related outcomes. Thus, we investigate the serial mediation of appraisal, affect and emotion regulation in the relationship between emotional demands and work outcomes. We conducted a daily diary, in which 193 employees responded to an online questionnaire, for three days, after the workday was finished. The sample size met the guidelines recommended in the literature for data-intensive longitudinal studies, meaning 83 participants (Gabriel et al., 2019). We expect this study to help advance stress theories by integrating emotion regulation and thus, contribute to the occupational health literature, enhance the understanding of the predictors of emotion regulation, while also researching what strategies might be more adaptive in workplace contexts. From a practical standpoint, the findings may assist supervisors in fostering employees' challenge appraisals and guiding them toward more adaptive emotion regulation strategies, leading to more favorable outcomes for both organizations and individuals.