Physical Activity, Sedentary Behaviour, Sleep Quality, and Psychological Well-being among Female College Students: A Narrative Review of Current Evidence

DOI- https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22647910

Abstract

The stage of higher education is a decisive developmental transition in the lives of young women. During the same period, habits related to physical activity, sedentary behavior, sleep quality, and psychological well-being are stabilized in the long term. In the present narrative review, the interrelationships of these four concepts have been synthesized in the context of female college students under the 24-hour movement behaviour framework. For the literature collection, a Boolean search strategy was adopted for the period 2015 to 2026 on PubMed/MEDLINE, Google Scholar, ScienceDirect, SpringerLink and EBSCOhost/PsycINFO, and the quality-evaluation of the selected material was done on the criteria of SANRA (Scale for the Assessment of Narrative Review Articles). According to synthesized evidence, the prevalence of inadequate physical activity among university students is approximately eight percentage-point higher than that of men globally (Guthold et al., 2018). Device-based measurements show that students spend an average of about 9.8 hours of sedentary activity per day (Castro et al., 2020). The prevalence of poor sleep quality has ranged from 26% to 70% in different regional groups (Mahmoud et al., 2026; Whitehead & Horton, 2025; Zhang et al., 2026). Intervention-based evidence confirms that the exercise employed has a meaningful impact on students' overall mental health (SMD = 0.91), well-being (SMD = 0.41), anxiety (SMD = −0.62), depression (SMD = −0.67) and perceived stress (SMD = −0.46) (Liu et al., 2025). Is temporal substitution also reveals that replacing sedentary time with moderate or intense physical activity leads to quantitatively improved sleep quality and symptoms of anxiety and depression (Barbosa et al., 2025; Menezes-Júnior et al., 2024). The review concludes that student health interventions should be based on a gender-sensitive and holistic 24-hour approach rather than a single-behaviour approach.

Keywords: physical activity; sedentary behaviour; sleep quality; psychological well-being; female college students; 24-hour movement behaviour; narrative review