Association between Postural Awareness, Physical Activity and Perceived Stress in Young Adults

Description

Aastha Mehrotra and Priya Ahuja (Department of Clinical Psychology, Suresh Gyan Vihar University, Jaipur, Rajasthan)

Young adulthood is a life stage of competing pressures: academics, social navigation and the early grind of professional life. This results in perceived stress running high. Less obvious is how physical and somatic components (e.g., how aware someone is of their own body’s posture, or how active they are in their day-to-day existence) fit into that picture of stress. To investigate just that, this study was a quantitative correlational study. 335 young individuals (aged 18-25 years) were recruited using convenience sampling to complete three validated measures online: the Postural Awareness Scale (PAS; Cramer et al., 2018), the International Physical Activity QuestionnaireShort Form (IPAQ-SF; Craig et al., 2003), and the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS-10; Cohen et al., 1983). The results were quite telling. There was a strong negative association between perceived stress and postural awareness and physical activity, indicating that higher levels of awareness and activity were related lower stress levels (rs = −.617 & rs = −.478, respectively, both p <.001). A multivariate linear regression revealed that when both factors were put into the model, they explained 55.2% of the variance in felt stress (R2 = .552, F(2, 332) = 204, p <.001). Postural awareness was the stronger of the two predictors (β = −.616). Together, our results imply that therapies addressing body awareness and physical activity may be effective strategies for stress management in young adult populations, a facet of well-being that requires more attention than it now receives.