The COVID-19 pandemic has been profoundly taxing. Psychological distancing is an emotion regulation strategy where one takes an objective, distant perspective, and is uniquely suited to addressing COVID-19 stress. My first aim was to examine how emotion regulation strategy use is associated with pandemic-related stress across individual differences. Study 1 found that psychological distancing predicts lower overall COVID-19 stress. My second aim was to examine causality between psychological distancing and COVID-19 stress. Study 2, a remote emotion regulation training, showed no significant effects. My third and fourth aims were to examine how perceived vulnerability and emotion polyregulation may moderate emotion regulation success. Exploratory Analysis 1 found that fear of COVID-19 moderated the impact of emotion regulation on COVID-19 stress. Exploratory Analysis 2 found that multiple strategy use reduced the impact of psychological distancing on COVID-19 stress. The studies discussed here offer psychological distancing as a generalizable, adaptive tool during COVID-19.