Financial anxiety and later psychological distress among Chinese university students: a three-wave time-lagged study of worry and physical activity

Abstract Background Financial anxiety is a subjective appraisal of uncertainty, threat, and worry concerning one’s financial circumstances. Although it is related to university students’ mental health, less is known about whether content-general worry helps account for its association with later psychological distress and whether physical activity alters this association. This study examined these questions while distinguishing subjective financial threat from objective financial hardship. Methods University students recruited from four universities across three regions of China completed online surveys at three time points separated by approximately five-week intervals during the first half of 2026. The final analytic sample comprised 1,034 students who completed all waves and met prespecified quality-control criteria. Financial anxiety, physical activity, and baseline psychological distress were assessed at Time 1 (T1), worry at Time 2 (T2), and psychological distress at Time 3 (T3). A four-factor confirmatory factor analysis was compared with a single-factor model as an additional assessment of common method variance. Time-lagged conditional process analysis was conducted with demographic covariates and T1 psychological distress controlled. Bootstrap confidence intervals were based on 10,000 resamples. Heteroscedasticity-consistent HC3 standard errors and influence diagnostics were used in sensitivity analyses. Results T1 financial anxiety was positively associated with T2 worry (B = 0.497, SE = 0.050, p < .001), and T2 worry was positively associated with T3 psychological distress after baseline distress was controlled (B = 0.244, SE = 0.019, p < .001). The indirect association through worry was 0.121 (95% bootstrap CI [0.092, 0.153]). Conventional OLS estimation produced a small financial anxiety × physical activity interaction (B = − 0.006, SE = 0.003, p = .019; ΔR² = 0.0037). However, the interaction did not remain below the conventional 0.05 threshold with HC3 standard errors ( p = .051) and was similarly borderline after conservative influence screening (p approximately 0.05–0.06). The moderated mediation index was small (− 0.00149, 95% bootstrap CI [− 0.00298, − 0.00003]). Conclusions Financial anxiety was associated with later psychological distress partly through subsequent content-general worry in this short-term, time-lagged study. Because worry was not measured at baseline and the design was observational, this indirect association should not be interpreted as a causal mechanism or within-person change. The physical activity interaction was small and sensitivity-dependent and should be regarded as exploratory rather than evidence of a practically meaningful buffering effect.