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Anxious Teens Barely Remember Positive Moments. That May Be Key To Understanding Youth Mental Health
In A Nutshell
- A study of 1,442 young people found that more than 83% of the life events they described as most meaningful were positive, including school milestones, friendships, travel, and sports.
- Teens and young adults with higher anxiety and depression symptoms were more likely to name difficult relationships or personal struggles as their defining moments, and less likely to cite achievements or positive experiences.
- Mood likely shapes which memories feel most significant, meaning struggling youth may not simply have harder lives but may be recalling their experiences through a more negative lens.
- Researchers say the findings point toward giving more attention to building positive experiences in young people’s lives, not only reducing stressors.
When researchers asked more than a thousand young people to describe the single most important event in their lives, not once but at four different points over nearly a decade, the results defied the usual story told about youth mental health. The overwhelming majority of those defining moments were positive. Not crises or traumatic episodes , but major milestones like graduation, new friendships, travel, sports, and celebrations.
The finding adds weight to an idea researchers are increasingly taking seriously: mental health support may need to pay more attention to the positive experiences young people value, not just the harms they face.
A new study published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry followed 1,442 young people at ages 15, 17, 20, and 24, asking them each time to write about the most meaningful thing that had happened to them. Researchers analyzed nearly 5,700 written responses using software that groups large volumes of text by shared themes. More than 83% of the life events described were classified as positive.
Yet the study also uncovered a telling gap: young people who showed signs of anxiety or depression were more likely to describe their most important life events in negative terms, focusing on relationship troubles, personal struggles, and loss, and less likely to point to achievements, school milestones, travel, or sports. That difference in what mentally healthy and struggling young people chose to describe as most important offers a new clue about what youth mental health support might be overlooking.
A Decade of Data, Told in Young People’s Own Words
Data came from a long-running research project based in Zurich, Switzerland, the Zurich Project on Social Development from Childhood to Adulthood, which has followed a large group of young people since first grade. Participants came from an urban, ethnically diverse community, with roughly three-quarters having at least one parent born outside of Switzerland.
At each of the four checkpoints, participants answered one open-ended question: thinking back over the past few years, what was the most important event in your life? To make sense of the thousands of answers, the team used natural language processing software that groups text by shared themes, identifying 12 distinct topic categories across five broader areas: education and career development, social relationships, leisure activities and successes, mental health and well-being, and other life transitions and independence.
School Dominates, but Life Is Bigger Than Academics
By far the most commonly mentioned subject was school, education, and job training. Nearly 45% of all responses fell into that category. Romantic relationships and friendships came in second at just over 12%. Mental health, personal development, and change accounted for nearly 8%, and travel, vacations, and time abroad made up about 7%.
Most of these events were ordinary, the kind of things most young people go through as part of growing up. This sits in sharp contrast to how mental health research has traditionally approached the topic. Most standard tools used to measure life events in young people focus primarily on stressful or traumatic experiences. Positive milestones like making a close friend, winning a sports competition, or traveling abroad rarely appear on those checklists.
Age also shaped what topics came up. School-related events dominated throughout adolescence and into early adulthood, while work and employment became more prominent as participants got older. Sports, going out, and celebrations faded somewhat with age, while getting a driver’s license, moving out, and marriage or parenthood became more common in the early-to-mid twenties.
How Anxiety and Depression Shape What Teens Remember Most
Young people who reported higher anxiety and depression symptoms were more likely to name difficult relationships, family stress, or personal struggles as their most important life event, and less likely to point to achievements, travel, sports, or school milestones. Part of what may be driving that gap is how mood shapes memory itself. People in low moods more readily call up negative memories over positive ones, a well-established pattern in psychology, meaning the same young person might describe the same event very differently depending on their mental state at the time. These are associations, not proof of cause and effect, and the study cannot determine which came first.
The Case for Building More Joy Into Young People’s Lives
Mental health research has long focused on what goes wrong in young people’s lives, identifying risk factors, preventing trauma, treating symptoms. This study does not dismiss that work. But if most of what young people find meaningful is positive, and those positive experiences are less often claimed as most important by struggling youth, then sports, travel, celebrations, friendships, and achievements may not be just pleasant extras. They may be exactly the kind of thing that deserves more attention in conversations about keeping young people well.
Disclaimer: This article is based on a published peer-reviewed study and is intended for informational purposes only. It does not constitute medical or psychological advice. The findings are observational and do not establish cause and effect. Readers with concerns about their mental health or that of a young person in their care should consult a qualified healthcare professional.
Paper Notes
Limitations
The authors identify several limitations. The study was conducted in Zurich, Switzerland, with a predominantly urban and ethnically diverse sample, which may limit how broadly the findings apply to young people in other countries or cultural settings. Participants were asked to describe only their most important event since the last survey, which means the results may have been shaped by the timing of data collection, typically between early spring and summer, potentially causing seasonal events to be over-represented. The researchers also acknowledge that cognitive processes guiding which memories people choose to report are not fully understood. Anxiety, depression, and mood can influence which events a person recalls as most significant, meaning the associations found may partly reflect memory and perception biases rather than actual differences in life experience. As with many long-running studies, some participants dropped out over time, with slightly higher dropout rates among males, youth from lower-income families, and those with a migration background. The study is also cross-sectional in its analysis of mental health symptoms and life events at each time point, meaning it cannot establish which came first.
Funding and Disclosures
The specific work was funded through the UZH Population Research Center’s Seed Grants program, supported by the UZH Transform funding line. The larger z-proso study was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), the Jacobs Foundation, the UZH Jacobs Center for Productive Youth Development, and other contributors. No conflicts of interest were declared.
Publication Details
Paper Title: Personally meaningful life events from adolescence to young adulthood: a longitudinal natural language processing analysis | Authors: David Bürgin, Christina Haag, Lynn Alison Büeler, Laura Bechtiger, Clarissa Janousch, Elena Feldmann, Denis Ribeaud, Manuel Eisner, Viktor von Wyl, and Lilly Shanahan | Affiliations: Jacobs Center for Productive Youth Development, University of Zurich; Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Research Department, University Psychiatric Hospitals, University of Basel; Institute for Implementation Science in Health Care, University of Zurich; Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Prevention Institute, University of Zurich; MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, University of Cambridge; Experimental and Clinical Pharmacopsychology, Department of Adult Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, University Hospital of Psychiatry Zurich, University of Zurich; Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge; Department of Psychology, University of Zurich | Journal: Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry | DOI: 10.1111/jcpp.70169 | Publication Year: 2026
