The impact of running intensity on stress and anxiety in university students

Stress is defined as ‘A state of worry or mental tension caused by a difficult situation; stress is a natural human response that prompts us to address challenges and threats in our lives’ (World Health Organization, 2023). Stress is most common in university students due to adapting to their new social and academic environment (El Ansari et al., 2011; Denovan & Macaskill, 2016).

Anxiety is defined as ‘What we feel when we are worried, tense or afraid – particularly about things that are about to happen, or which we think could happen in the future’ (Mind, 2021). Undergraduate students mostly report feelings of anxiety throughout their time at university (Ladejo, 2021). This can be due to being in an unfamiliar place, being accountable for their academic career, finances, and health (Ladejo, 2021).

According to a 2022 study conducted by the mental health charity Student Minds, 57% of students reported a mental health issue, whilst 27% had been diagnosed with a mental health condition (UK Parliament, 2024). Within a survey led by The Tab in 2023, 4,000 students were asked about their mental health. 61% of these students suffered from anxiety, and 41% of students said they felt stressed more than seven times a week (The Tab, 2023; UK Parliament, 2024). In the general population of the UK, one in six individuals will experience a common mental health condition like anxiety, with six in 100 individuals being specifically diagnosed with an anxiety disorder (Mind, 2020).

University is known for a drastic change in students’ lives due to their new level of independence, social factors, and taking on a higher, advanced academic workload compared to compulsory education (Roberts et al., 2024). Due to this transition, research suggests that students engage in high volumes of sedentary behaviours, as a result of living on campus, long lectures, and no compulsory physical education, which can impact an individual's mental health and well-being (Castro et al., 2020). Sedentary behaviours are defined by The World Health Organization (WHO) as when an individual is sitting, lying or reclining with low energy expenditure while awake (World Health Organization, 2020). A study conducted at The University of Northampton concluded that university students averaged eight hours of sedentary behaviours, showing that 37% of students do not meet the weekly physical activity guidelines and are more at risk of developing anxiety (Carballo-Fazanes et al., 2020; Roberts et al., 2024).

Regular bouts of physical activity can help improve individuals' physical and psychological functioning (Maselli et al., 2018). WHO defines physical activity as any bodily movement that requires energy expenditure (World Health Organization, 2024). Physical activity is categorised into two main types of intensity: moderate and vigorous (NHS, 2024). Moderate intensity is characterised by individuals completing 150 minutes of movement per week, which raises their heart rate but still allows them to hold a conversation while completing activities, such as walking and dancing (NHS, 2024). Vigorous intensity is characterised by individuals completing 75 minutes of movement within a week, which can leave them feeling out of breath and unable to speak clearly while engaging in the activity, such as running or weightlifting (NHS, 2024).

When university students engage in physical activity, it can cause positive psychological changes, which can include lower stress levels (Herbert et al., 2020). This shows how essential exercise is in university students' lives and why it is important to understand the positive impact physical activity can have on university students' mental health. Also, bringing attention to this issue could help current university students evaluate what changes need to happen to improve their stress and anxiety levels and build on healthy habits that can follow them into later life (Brown et al., 2024). This links to Li et al (2024), who identified that intensity of exercise differentially impacts mental health outcomes, with vigorous exercise being identified as the most effective in reducing stress. Herbert et al (2020) and Li et al (2024) both show the importance of university students engaging in physical activity, whether vigorous or moderate in intensity, and how it can be effective in improving students' psychological well-being.

Izquierdo et al (2021) and Walther et al (2021). Reports that several components of physical fitness tend to reach their peak during early adulthood; however, gradual declines have been observed among those who do not engage in regular physical activity. Evidence suggests that continued exercise engagement is associated with better physical and mental outcomes (Izquierdo et al., 2021).

Brief periods of exercise have been associated with reductions in anxiety among university students, particularly during academically demanding periods. For example, Pascoe et al. (2021) reported that even short-term interventions, such as three weeks, were linked to improvements in anxiety levels. This suggests that beneficial effects on anxiety may be achieved through relatively short-term engagement in physical activity. Similar findings have been reported in earlier research. For instance, Broman-Fulks et al. (2004) demonstrated that both vigorous and low-intensity exercise significantly reduced anxiety levels following six 20-minute sessions over a two-week period. This was also discussed by Mikkelsen et al (2017), who also demonstrated that 20-minute sessions can be enough to reduce individuals' anxiety levels for several hours. Therefore, this indicates that even short bouts of exercise, regardless of intensity, may lead to rapid improvements in anxiety, which is beneficial during stressful academic periods.

However, the duration of exercise engagement may also play an important role. Kong et al. (2022) suggests that maintaining exercise over a longer period is associated with a lower risk of anxiety symptoms among university students. While short-term interventions have been shown to reduce anxiety (Broman-Fulks et al., 2004; Pascoe et al., 2021), these effects may not be sustained if exercise is discontinued. Therefore, long-term engagement in physical activity may be more beneficial for maintaining reduced anxiety levels throughout university.

Exercise has been shown to reduce academic stress over time, particularly during periods of increased academic pressure (Wunsch et al., 2017). Wunsch et al. (2017) found that over the course of a university semester, students experienced changes in stress levels as academic demands increased, suggesting that exercise may help buffer stress during high-pressure periods. Similar findings were observed in Yuan et al. (2022), where adding regular bouts of exercise to their schedules decreased their academic stress by increasing positive emotions while also building healthy habits.

Exercise, particularly running, has been associated with improved mental health outcomes. For example, Oswald et al. (2020) found that runners reported significantly lower stress and anxiety levels compared to non-runners. Additionally, even a single bout of running was shown to positively impact anxiety and overall mood in most participants, highlighting the immediate psychological benefits of physical activity. Previous research has highlighted the benefits of how exercise can help reduce anxiety and stress in university students. However, many of these studies had methodological limitations. For instance, Tyson et al (2010) completed an observational design, which limited their control over participants' behaviour and may have influenced the validity of the results (Ramji, 2022). Additionally, several other studies failed to specify an age range of their university participants, despite the fact that physical fitness can vary in different age groups (Stauder et al., 2025), and university students can be any age over 18 (Izquierdo et al., 2021).

Although existing literature demonstrates an association between physical activity and reduced stress and anxiety among university students, the literature is characterised by several methodological limitations. These include limited experimental designs, mostly focusing on observational designs, and variability of intervention duration. Additionally, several studies had unspecified age ranges for their participants. To address these limitations, the present pilot study employs an experimental design to examine the effects of moderate and high intensity running, on university students' stress and anxiety levels within the ages of 18-25 years. By isolating exercise intensity within a defined age group, this study aims to provide more precise insight into the relationship between running intensity and its impact on stress and anxiety. In light of past research suggesting that exercise can be beneficial for university students' stress and anxiety levels, this current study will investigate how different exercise intensities via running will impact university students' stress and anxiety levels. It is hypothesised that there will be reductions in stress and anxiety levels from pre-test to post-test scores in both intervention groups, and the high-intensity group will show greater improvements than the moderate-intensity group.

Methods

Design

This experimental study was a between-group design to examine the effects of how running intensities can impact stress and anxiety levels. The independent variable (IV) was running intensity, including three levels: High-Intensity, Moderate-Intensity and a Control group who were asked to continue their usual exercise regime. Participants were randomly assigned to these three groups by a random number generator. The two dependent variables (DVs) were the stress and anxiety subscales from the Depression Anxiety Stress Scale-21 (DASS-21).

Participants

All participants for the study were recruited via social media using a purposive sampling method. The reason for using this method is that all participants needed to be already engaging in physical activity to minimise potential injuries and health risks, and ensure they could safely complete the exercise intervention. They were also required to be a university student aged 18-25 years. 22 participants took part in the experiment, six being male, 12 being female, and four being non-binary.

Table 1

Demographic data

Materials

DASS-21 is a self-report questionnaire designed to measure an individual’s symptoms of depression, anxiety and stress (Gomez, 2016). Within this study, only anxiety and stress were measured. The DASS-21 possesses adequate validity with values of 0.82 for stress and 0.74 for anxiety (Adu et al., 2025). There were 14 items that the participants had to answer before and after exercising, and these items did not change and were set in the same order for both questionnaires. DASS-21 uses a rating scale from zero (does not apply to me) to three (applies to me very much), These points were added up over the items and multiplied by two to give a score of normal, moderate and severe. The DASS-21 severity rating includes anxiety, Normal zero-seven, Mild eight-nine, Moderate 10-14, Severe 15-19, and Extremely Severe 20+. For stress, Normal 0-14, Mild 15-18, Moderate 19-25, Severe 26-33, and Extremely Severe 34+.

For safety, all participants completed the Physical Activity Readiness Questionnaire (PARQ+). The PARQ+ is a questionnaire designed to be a self-screening tool to determine if participants are at risk while exercising. The questionnaire measures health history, current symptoms, and risk factors (Quinn, 2024). To ensure the participants were deemed healthy, they answered yes or no questions, and if they had to answer the follow-up questions or answered yes, it meant they were unable to participate due to existing conditions. The Gorilla Experiment Builder (Gorilla, 2025) was used to administer the DASS-21 questionnaire at two time points, with a 7-day interval, to ensure participants completed the DASS-21 before and after the exercise intervention. The PARQ+ was completed once prior to the exercise intervention.

Intervention

The participants were randomised to condition by a random number generator. The high-intensity group were instructed to complete 75 minutes of high-intensity running, these were to be completed in short bursts where they feel out of breath and cannot hold a conversation. The moderate-intensity group were instructed to complete 150 minutes of running at a comfortable pace, and being able to hold a conversation, these runs could be as long or as short as they needed. Both the high-intensity and moderate-intensity groups were asked to continue their usual exercise routine in addition to these runs. The control group participants were instructed to follow their usual exercise routine. The participants had to complete seven days of running or their normal exercise routine in the control group over one week. All participants were asked to keep a set exercise diary provided at the start of the experiment. In these diaries, the participants were able to record what different exercises they did that did not involve running and how long each activity was. The control group were given a separate exercise diary from the moderate and high-intensity groups and were asked to continue logging their usual exercise routine for the seven days.

Once the participants accessed the online questionnaire using their unique identifier code, they were asked their age, gender and the university they attend. Once they completed the first DASS-21, they completed their seven days of running or their usual exercise routine before completing the second DASS-21. The participants were also asked to track their runs via Strava. Strava is a fitness tracking app designed for runners to track the location of their runs via GPS (Strava, 2025).The participants were asked to inform the lead researcher of the times they were running and track them to ensure they were kept safe and the lead researcher could contact them via email or Strava if the run was not uploaded between these times to check on their safety. Participants were able to contact the lead researcher via email or Strava if they had any questions about their runs. Once the two DASS-21 forms were completed, the participants were sent a debrief form, which detailed what the experiment was, what it was for, how they could withdraw, and helplines for if they were affected mentally during this time.

Ethics

Ethical approval was granted by the University of Salford Ethics Committee in December 2024. All procedures were conducted in accordance with the institutional ethical guidelines, including informed consent, the right to withdraw, confidentiality of data, and appropriate screening using the PARQ+ to ensure participants' safety.

Data Analysis

The data of this study were analysed in SPSS (Version 30) (IBM SPSS Statistics, 2024). Eight paired sample t-tests were used to compare pre- and post-intervention scores. In each t-test, the pre- and post-test scores were entered as the two variables. Two ANCOVAs were used to assess any between-group differences in pre-test and post-test on the two dependent variables, anxiety and stress. In each ANCOVA, the exercise intensity group were entered as the independent variable, the post-test scores were entered as the dependent variable, and the pre-test scores were entered as the covariate.

Results

Shapiro-Wilks tests (x12) of normality showed that scores across all three groups (high intensity, moderate intensity, and control), both pre-intervention and post-intervention, and across both dependent variables (stress and anxiety) were normally distributed with the exception of the post-intervention stress scores in the high intensity group, which deviated from a normal distribution (p<.001). To account for this, while all differences between pre and post intervention are assessed using paired t-tests, we also provide a non-parametric assessment of the difference in stress levels between pre and post intervention for the high intensity group.

Table 2

Means (standard deviations) and t-test results of pre- and post-exercise scores within intervention groups.

Table 2 shows that there were significant reductions (indicating improvement) in stress and anxiety levels across all conditions and for the full sample, with the exception of anxiety in the control group. The effect sizes were high across all conditions in this small pilot sample, indicating likely improvement for all participants including controls. The additional non-parametric assessment of the difference in stress levels between pre and post intervention for the high intensity group supports the finding that there was a significant improvement here ( z =3.92, p <.001). The results of the one-way ANCOVAs showed no significant effect of intervention on change in anxiety, F (2, 18) = .13, P = .877, η²ₚ = .015 or stress, F (2, 18) = .56, P =.581, η²ₚ = .058. The main hypothesis, that exercise intensity would be related to a decrease in stress levels, was not supported.

Discussion

The present pilot study examined whether different running intensities would impact stress and anxiety levels in university students. Overall, the results of the t-tests showed a significant difference in stress and anxiety scores from pre-intervention to post-intervention, indicating that the hypothesis of an improvement in post-intervention scores was supported. However, the hypothesis that high-intensity would show greater improvement than moderate-intensity was not supported. Furthermore, the ANCOVAs revealed that there were no between-group differences in the reductions of anxiety or stress. These results indicate that exercise intensity was not associated with participants’ stress or anxiety levels. The improvements in the control group indicate that these changes in stress and anxiety levels were not the result of intervention and may be attributable to one or more extraneous variables. One example of this could be that at the point of pre-intervention data collection, students anxiety and stress levels were high due to assessment deadlines or exams, which had passed by post-intervention. These surprising results could also be explained through demand characteristics where the participants were aware of what the study included and this influenced their responses to align with study aims. Also, the participants were exposed to the DASS-21 questionnaire twice, which could have led them to understand what improvement was needed to be addressed in the study.

Previous research has demonstrated that anxiety and stress are among the biggest issues affecting academic performance, and assessment periods, including exams, are associated with increased anxiety and stress levels among university students (Kumari et al., 2021). Kumari (2021) found that students reported significantly higher levels of stress and anxiety in assessment periods, suggesting that academic evaluation periods can negatively affect psychological well-being. Consequently, participants in the current study may have been experiencing heightened stress and anxiety levels due to ongoing academic demands, which could have influenced their responses independently of the variables under investigation. Furthermore, the findings may have been affected by demand characteristics. This is where participants modify their behaviour based on the perceptions of the study's aims (Leustek, 2017). As the current study relies on self-reporting measures, such as the DASS-21, participants may have inferred that the research was examining stress and anxiety and consequently responded in a manner consistent with the expectations. This may have contributed to biased reports of psychological distress, thereby affecting the validity of the findings.

In addition, according to the DASS-21 scale, moderate-intensity stress scores decreased from moderate and severe to normal, which was the biggest change seen in the DASS-21 scale. This was a small pilot study, which means it was not sufficiently powered to detect a significant improvement due to its small effect size. However, stress was close to being a medium effect size, which could suggest that this study is heading in the right direction for improvement (Watson, 2021).

A key limitation of this study is that participants were already engaging in regular physical activity, which may have reduced the likelihood of detecting large intervention effects. Exercise interventions may produce more pronounced changes in stress and anxiety among sedentary individuals, who may experience greater improvements when introduced to structured physical activity (Maselli et al., 2018). The findings of the current study did not provide clear support for the argument proposed by Pascoe et al. (2021) that short-term exercise can improve anxiety levels among university students during stressful periods. Although previous research suggests that brief bouts of physical activity can reduce anxiety, the anticipated improvements were not clearly evident within the present findings. However, this does not necessarily indicate that exercise was ineffective. Rather, it is possible that other factors influencing participants' stress and anxiety levels may have obscured the beneficial effects of exercise. For example, participants may have been experiencing heightened academic pressures, which have been shown to significantly increase stress and anxiety among university students (Kumari et al., 2021).

Similarly, Broman-Fulks et al. (2004) reported that high-intensity exercise produced greater reductions in anxiety than low-intensity exercise. While the current study did not observe substantial reductions in anxiety following the exercise intervention, this may reflect the influence of uncontrolled variables rather than the lack of effectiveness of exercise itself. Consequently, the potential effects of exercise may have been masked by external stressors that strongly influenced participants' psychological well-being during the study period.

This study focused solely on participants’ randomly allocated condition and their scores on the DASS-21. While this experimental design may be seen as a strength of this study, it did not also consider busy university schedules and other factors such as sleep and diet (Wunsch et al., 2017). These factors could contribute to stress and anxiety levels, diminishing the impact that exercise can have on these outcomes. Future research should aim to control for these kinds of extraneous variables by conducting the study during a time of year where students do not have assessment deadlines, and by collecting data on quality of sleep and diet and statistically controlling for these factors.

However, those who were busy academically or had high stress/anxiety levels may not have taken part due to not wanting the extra pressure. Further studies should take this into account by possibly conducting this type of experiment in less stressful periods, for example, the summer. This could invalidate the results due to students not having academic stress.

Another strength can include having a set age range and activity status. 18–25-year-olds are at their peak physical health, adding individuals over the age of 25 could drastically change the data due to being less physically active on average, but also, there could be a rise in withdrawals due to participants becoming injured while taking part (Izquierdo et al, 2021).

The next stage for future research regarding this pilot study would include redesigning the study, possibly taking into account the different factors students struggle with, e.g. exams and deadlines. Also, changing the stress questions to the Student Stress Inventory (SSI) could help understand why students are experiencing stress, which supports the researcher taking these factors into account (Arip et al., 2016).

Further research is needed to establish if short bursts of different running intensities can have an impact on university students’ stress and anxiety levels. Following the recommendations within redesigning the study, and to run it as a pilot study again could help understand the potential impacts of running intensities on university students taking into account the factors that could influence their stress and anxiety levels.

Conclusion

The present pilot study aimed to examine whether different running intensities over a seven-day period would affect stress and anxiety levels among university students. Overall, the stress and anxiety scores decreased from pre- to post-intervention; however, these reductions could not be attributed to the exercise intervention, as similar improvements were observed in the control group, and there was no significant difference between moderate and high intensity.

These findings suggest that the reductions in stress and anxiety were most likely caused by extraneous factors, such as assignment deadlines or other academic stressors. The results could also be related to factors such as repeated exposure to the DASS-21 questions, and demand characteristics may have contributed to improvements. As participants were aware that the study was based on reducing stress and anxiety.

In conclusion, this study can add to existing literature by demonstrating the feasibility of conducting controlled exercise interventions with university students. The findings indicate that future research would benefit from redesigning and rerunning the study as a pilot, with a larger sample, to minimise demand characteristics. This would allow the researchers to accurately determine whether differences in running intensities produce changes in stress and anxiety before progressing into a trial intervention.

Acknowledgements

I would also like to thank all the participants who kindly gave their time to take part in this study. Their contributions were invaluable and made this research possible

I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my supervisor, Dr Alan Price, for their guidance, support, and encouragement throughout this project.

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