Optimism Tracks With Better Well-Being in Youth, Study Finds

Stress, well-being, eating habits, how do these shift as young people grow up, and do they look different for young men and young women? Researchers surveyed nearly a thousand Portuguese adolescents and young adults to find out, and a hopeful thread ran through their results: optimism kept turning up on the favorable side of the equation.

What the researchers wanted to know

Stress has long been linked to "changes in eating behaviors and psychological well-being" among adolescents and young adults. But the researchers noted that the evidence remained fragmented on a key question: how do gender, developmental stage, and a person's psychological resources jointly shape these outcomes?

Drawing on stress-coping models, self-regulation theories, and a life-span developmental perspective, they set out to examine age- and gender-related differences in stress, well-being, optimism, and eating quality, and to do so specifically in a post-lockdown context, at a moment when young people's lives had been unusually disrupted.

The aim was to see not just whether these factors differ by age and gender, but how psychological resources like optimism fit into the picture.

How they studied it

The study was cross-sectional, surveying 951 Portuguese adolescents and young adults between the ages of 15 and 26. Data were collected across three post-lockdown periods spanning 2020 to 2022, and the researchers aggregated them after confirming that time-related effects were negligible. They used validated self-report measures to assess perceived stress, well-being, optimism, and eating quality.

To analyze how gender and developmental stage related to these outcomes, both on their own and in combination, they applied statistical methods including ANOVA and MANOVA, which are designed to compare groups and examine main and interaction effects across several outcomes at once.

What they found

Clear patterns emerged for gender and age. "Female participants reported higher stress and lower well-being and optimism than males," with effect sizes described as small to moderate. Age mattered too: young adults displayed lower stress and higher well-being and optimism than adolescents, a gentle reassurance that the teenage years, often the tougher stretch, may ease with time.

Eating quality behaved differently, showing no significant gender differences and only limited variation by age. Interaction effects between gender and age were modest. But the standout thread was optimism: "Higher optimism was consistently linked to more favorable well-being and eating profiles."

Together, the results support an integrative view in which stress-related outcomes are shaped by gender, developmental stage, and psychological resources working together.

What this means for you

For young people and those who support them, the most actionable insight concerns optimism. Across this large group, a more optimistic outlook was tied to better well-being and better eating, which points to psychological resources as something worth nurturing, not just measuring. Optimism here isn't naive cheerfulness; it's a general expectation that things can work out, and it's a resource that tends to travel with healthier patterns overall.

The finding that young women, on average, reported more stress and less optimism and well-being is also worth taking seriously, as a signal that support may need to be attentive to these differences rather than one-size-fits-all. And the news that stress tended to ease and well-being tended to rise from adolescence into young adulthood offers genuine reassurance to teenagers in a hard season: for many, the pressure does tend to lighten with time.

It's worth dwelling on why optimism, in particular, stands out here. Unlike age or gender, an optimistic outlook is something that can be encouraged and practiced. The study links it to both better well-being and healthier eating, which suggests that helping a young person build a more hopeful, expectant stance toward the future may pay off across several parts of their life at once.

That doesn't mean papering over real difficulties with forced positivity; it means gently strengthening the belief that challenges can be navigated and that better times are possible. For parents, teachers, and mentors, that's a concrete place to focus, and for young people themselves, it's a reason to tend their own outlook as carefully as they would any other part of their health.

The honest caveats

The design carries an important limitation: this was a cross-sectional study, capturing young people at a point in time rather than following the same individuals as they aged. So while it can show that young adults reported better outcomes than adolescents on average, it can't prove that growing up caused those improvements in any given person, nor can it establish that optimism directly produces better well-being, only that the two were consistently linked.

The findings come from self-report among Portuguese youth in a specific post-lockdown window, so they may not transfer neatly to other countries, times, or age groups, and the gender and age differences, while statistically meaningful, were often small to moderate in size. Read as a well-measured snapshot, the study makes a clear and encouraging case that optimism deserves a place among the psychological resources we help young people build.