Abstract
Adolescents’ daily life has dramatically changed during the COVID-19 era due to the social restrictions that have been imposed, including closures of schools, leisure centers and sport facilities. The purpose of this study was to examine levels of well-being and mood and their relations with physical (in)activity and eating behaviors in adolescents during a lockdown period in Greece. A total of 950 adolescents (Mean Age = 14.41 years ± 1.63) participated in a web-based survey while education was conducted online and organized sport activities were interrupted. Participants showed poor well-being, insufficient physical activity levels and moderate scores of healthy eating behavior. Hierarchical regression analysis showed that, after controlling for the effect of gender and body mass index, increased physical activity and healthier eating behavior predicted better well-being (b = 0.24, p < 0.01 and b = 0.19, p < 0.01, respectively), whereas sedentariness predicted worse well-being (b = −0.16, p < 0.01). Furthermore, it was revealed that days of physical activity per week was a stronger predictor of well-being than minutes of physical activity per week, and that both in-house and out-of-house physical activity were beneficial. Considering that well-being in our study was below the threshold recommended by the World Health Organization as indicative of possible depressive symptoms, measures to increase physical activity, decrease sedentariness and improve eating behavior should become a priority for communities and policy makers.
Highlights
Physical activity is defined as “any bodily movement produced by skeletal muscles that results in energy expenditure” [1] and includes various subsets such as walking, cycling or sport
Moderate and vigorous physical activity combined were below the 50% of the recommended by World Health Organization (WHO) physical activity
Discouraging findings were found for young people and/or parents in the previous lockdown period in Italy [40,41] or in Greece; for example, University students in Greece showed considerable reduction of mental health, including increased anxiety and depressive symptoms corresponding to a threshold for clinical depression [28]
Summary
Physical activity is defined as “any bodily movement produced by skeletal muscles that results in energy expenditure” [1] and includes various subsets such as walking, cycling or sport. Large-scale cross sectional studies in adults have linked physical activity to lower risk of depression [2] and sedentariness to higher risk of depression [3]. Systematic reviews or cross sectional studies found that exercise is related with lower depression [4,5] or anxiety [6] in adult samples. Various systematic reviews of cross sectional and empirical studies in young people (
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