Future anxiety and academic burnout among university students: a short-term three-wave longitudinal conditional...

Future anxiety may be relevant to academic burnout among university students, but its short-term temporally ordered association with burnout and the cognitive processes involved remain unclear. This study tested whether brooding rumination mediated this association and whether physical activity habit automaticity moderated the first stage.

A short-term three-wave longitudinal questionnaire survey was conducted among 1271 university students recruited from five provinces in China. Future anxiety and physical activity habit automaticity were measured at Time 1, brooding rumination at Time 2, and academic burnout at Time 3. Pearson correlations, time-lagged mediation, first-stage moderated mediation, simple slope tests, and sensitivity analyses were conducted using SPSS 26.0 and PROCESS 4.2.

Future anxiety was positively associated with later brooding rumination (B = 0.275, p < 0.001), and brooding rumination was positively associated with later academic burnout (B = 0.432, p < 0.001). The indirect association from future anxiety to academic burnout through brooding rumination was significant (effect = 0.119, 95% CI [0.092, 0.147]). Physical activity habit automaticity moderated the association between future anxiety and brooding rumination (B = -0.072, p = 0.019), but the increase in explained variance was very small (ΔR² = 0.0037). The index of moderated mediation was significant (index = -0.031, 95% CI [-0.055, -0.007]).

Brooding rumination statistically accounted for part of the short-term time-lagged association between future anxiety and academic burnout. Physical activity habit automaticity showed a statistically significant but very small moderating pattern. Because the study was observational, the follow-up period was short, and autoregressive controls for brooding rumination and academic burnout were unavailable, the findings should be interpreted as time-lagged statistical associations rather than causal or intervention effects.