Lifestyle Habits and Mental Health in College Students: New Study Reveals Who Thrives

The transition into higher education is one of the most demanding developmental passages a young adult can face. Students must simultaneously navigate academic pressure, new social environments, financial strain, and, for many, the first taste of independent living. A new cross-sectional study from Portugal, published in BMC Psychology, offers a detailed snapshot of how lifestyle behaviours and psychological well-being intertwine in this population, drawing on responses from 1,159 students at the Polytechnic of Porto. The findings paint a picture that is broadly reassuring but also nuanced, revealing subtle fault lines in the mental health of a cohort that, on the surface, appears to be coping well.

The research team, led by Inês Conceição together with Raquel Simões de Almeida and Maria João Trigueiro, set out with three goals: to describe lifestyle patterns among Portuguese higher education students, to examine how those patterns relate to well-being and mental health, and to assess the influence of sociodemographic and contextual variables. The sample had a mean age of 21.51 years, with a standard deviation of 2.65, and was predominantly female at 69.70 percent. A striking 71.00 percent of participants still lived with their families, a detail that matters because living arrangements shape everything from diet and sleep to autonomy and stress exposure.

Methodologically, the study leaned on three well-established instruments. The FANTASTICO Lifestyle Questionnaire captured a broad spectrum of lifestyle domains, from physical activity and nutrition to social relationships and stress management. The Depression, Anxiety and Stress Scale, known as DASS-21, quantified emotional distress across three dimensions. The CORE-18 provided an additional measure of psychological problems and symptoms. This triangulation of validated psychometric tools is one of the study’s strengths, allowing the researchers to cross-reference self-reported lifestyle quality against clinically oriented measures of distress rather than relying on a single instrument.

The headline result is encouraging: students reported overall favourable lifestyle profiles and relatively low psychological distress. Yet the researchers were careful not to overstate the rosy picture. Mild symptoms of depression, anxiety, and stress were present in the sample, and these scores were approaching the threshold for moderate severity. In other words, the average student is doing reasonably well, but a meaningful portion of the cohort sits uncomfortably close to the zone where symptoms begin to interfere with daily functioning and academic performance. That proximity matters for universities designing early-intervention programmes, because the window between mild and moderate symptoms is precisely where prevention is most cost-effective.

The statistical architecture of the study was correspondingly thorough. Descriptive analyses established the baseline profile of the sample. One-way ANOVA and independent Student’s t-tests compared lifestyle and psychological variables across sociodemographic groups, testing whether factors such as gender, age, academic year, and school of enrolment produced meaningful differences. Pearson’s correlation coefficients quantified the associations between lifestyle scores and continuous variables including age, body mass index, and self-rated health. Finally, a multiple linear regression model built with a stepwise method identified the variables that best explained variation in lifestyle scores, effectively distilling the many measured factors down to the most predictive combination.

The regression results form the analytical core of the paper. Higher self-rated health, the absence of depressive symptoms, lower stress levels, lower body mass index, female gender, younger age, and enrolment in the School of Health Sciences were all significantly associated with healthier lifestyle scores. Each of these associations carries interpretive weight. The link between self-rated health and lifestyle is bidirectional in principle: students who feel healthy may invest more in healthy behaviours, while those behaviours in turn reinforce that subjective sense of vitality. The inverse relationship with BMI aligns with a large body of literature linking diet quality, physical activity, and weight status, though cross-sectional data cannot disentangle cause from consequence.

Two demographic patterns deserve particular attention. The finding that women scored higher on healthy lifestyle measures is consistent with international research showing that young women often report greater engagement with health-promoting behaviours, even as they also tend to report higher rates of internalising symptoms such as anxiety. The younger-age effect suggests that lifestyle quality may erode as students progress through their degrees, accumulating academic load and possibly adopting coping strategies that trade short-term convenience for long-term health. Meanwhile, the advantage enjoyed by health sciences students is intuitively plausible: students training for healthcare careers are immersed in curricula that repeatedly emphasise nutrition, exercise, and preventive health, and this knowledge may translate into practice more readily than in other disciplines.

Academic seniority told a similarly interesting story. Fourth-year students reported better lifestyle and mental health indicators than their peers in earlier years, a result that runs counter to the common assumption that stress accumulates monotonically across a degree programme. One plausible reading is that senior students have adapted to the demands of higher education, developed more effective routines, and gained confidence in their academic identities. First- and second-year students, by contrast, are still absorbing the shock of transition, and their lifestyle scores may reflect that instability. The cross-sectional design, however, means the researchers cannot rule out cohort effects, in which the senior students simply differ from juniors in ways unrelated to their year of study.

Perhaps the most intriguing result is the one the authors themselves flag as unexpected: a positive association between the CORE-18 problems/symptoms subscale and lifestyle scores. At first glance this seems paradoxical, since one would expect more psychological symptoms to accompany worse lifestyle habits. The researchers propose a compensatory explanation: students who are more aware of their psychological symptoms may deliberately adopt healthier behaviours as a coping strategy, exercising more, eating better, or structuring their routines to manage distress. This interpretation resonates with a growing literature on compensatory health beliefs, in which individuals offset perceived psychological strain with deliberate self-care. It also serves as a methodological caution, reminding researchers that simple linear assumptions about the relationship between distress and behaviour can miss genuinely adaptive dynamics.

The authors are candid about the limitations that bound these conclusions. The cross-sectional design captures a single moment in time and cannot establish causal direction; it remains unknown whether healthy lifestyles protect mental health, whether better mental health enables healthier lifestyles, or whether both are driven by unmeasured third factors. The sample, while sizable, comes from a single institution, and the authors call for more diverse samples in future work. They also note that important contextual variables, including social support, economic pressures, and the physical environment, were not incorporated and could substantially modify the observed relationships. Longitudinal designs with objective measures, such as activity trackers or dietary records, would help move the field beyond self-report and toward a clearer causal picture of how lifestyle and mental health shape each other during the university years.

For universities and policymakers, the practical implications are nonetheless concrete. The identification of specific high-risk profiles, including students with elevated stress, higher BMI, or early-stage academic standing, offers a targeting strategy for campus wellness programmes that is far more efficient than blanket interventions. The near-moderate levels of depressive, anxiety, and stress symptoms argue for routine mental health screening rather than reactive counselling alone. And the compensatory behaviour finding suggests that symptom awareness itself may be a resource: teaching students to recognise psychological distress early could activate the very self-care behaviours that the study found associated with better lifestyle scores. As higher education continues to expand and diversify, understanding the behavioural architecture of student well-being is no longer a peripheral concern but a central determinant of both academic success and lifelong health.

Subject of Research: Associations between lifestyle behaviours, psychological well-being, and mental health among higher education students

Article Title: Lifestyles, psychological well-being, and mental health: A cross-sectional study in a higher education sample

Article References: Conceição, I., Simões de Almeida, R., & Trigueiro, M. J. (2026). Lifestyles, psychological well-being, and mental health: A cross-sectional study in a higher education sample. BMC Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-026-05448-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40359-026-05448-8

Keywords: lifestyle, mental health, higher education, psychological well-being, college students, depression, anxiety, stress, DASS-21, cross-sectional study, Portugal, health behaviours