Stress and Outdoor Activity in Early Adolescence: Examining Prospective, Directional Associations Over One Year

Adolescence is often a stressful developmental period, and adolescents are more vulnerable to lasting effects of heightened stress than children or adults. Spending time outside and in nature is a promising strategy for reducing stress. Yet, when stressed, adolescents are prone to withdraw from health-promoting behaviors, like engaging in outdoor activity. It is unknown how these phenomena are in tension during adolescence. To address this question, we used random intercept cross-lagged panel modeling (RI-CLPM) to examine the reciprocal effects of changes in outdoor activity and stress among young adolescents from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study across 7 waves from May 2020–May 2021, during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, a period of heightened and continued stress. We find that stress and outdoor activity fluctuated over the year, exhibiting relative stability early on, but peaking and dipping (respectively) during December 2020. We demonstrate that youth who reported lower stress tended to engage in outdoor activity more frequently. Furthermore, we find that when an adolescent experienced increased stress in fall 2020, they subsequently engaged in outdoor activity less frequently in winter 2020-2021. These dynamics did not differ according to the perceived safety of an adolescent’s neighborhood or whether they returned to in-person schooling. These findings align with past research suggesting stress in adolescence can lead to withdrawal and avoidance, as well as declines in physical activity. We discuss the importance of reducing barriers to outdoor activity during periods of heightened stress, and the need to examine such processes at varying time scales.