<p>Ambulatory assessment research on emotion regulation (ER) must balance the trade-off between capturing the complex ER process without overburdening participants. One way to reduce survey time would be to use binary rather than ordinal- or interval-scaled ER items. However, this would only capture ER frequency, missing potentially important information about ER intensity. Furthermore, it is unclear whether ER frequency and intensity are differentially associated with well-being in daily life. We addressed these two questions by reanalyzing 12 ambulatory assessment datasets (<i>N</i> = 1674 participants, <i>N</i> = 154,982 prompts) and found that ER frequency explained 10 percentage points less of well-being than the standard ER items, which mix ER frequency and intensity. Moreover, while frequent use of adaptive strategies was significantly associated with poorer affective well-being, intense use of these strategies was significantly associated with better affective well-being. These findings highlight the importance of distinguishing between ER frequency and ER intensity.</p>