CDC youth health data show improvement in mood, diet, and sports participation
CDC’s latest Youth Risk Behavior Survey data suggest modest but real progress in several areas of adolescent health, with improvements in mental health, fruit and vegetable intake, water consumption, and sports participation among U.S. high school students from 2023 to 2025. The new Youth Health in Focus report also makes plain how much of the burden remains unchanged: inadequate sleep, low adherence to physical activity targets, heavy social media exposure, and unsafe driving behaviors continue to shape daily health risks for teenagers.
The strongest movement appeared in mental health indicators. Persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness fell from 40% to 33%, poor mental health dropped from 29% to 23%, and seriously considering suicide declined from 20% to 14%. Those shifts matter because adolescent mood disorders rarely remain confined to a single domain of life; emotional distress can disrupt sleep, school performance, social functioning, appetite, and willingness to engage in physical activity. When those pressures ease, even partially, the downstream effects can reach far beyond the classroom.
A second cluster of gains involved diet. Daily fruit consumption rose from 33% to 39%, daily vegetable consumption increased from 58% to 63%, and the share of students drinking plain water at least three times a day climbed from 54% to 58%. These changes may look incremental, but for adolescents they represent movement toward eating patterns that are less energy-dense and more consistent with cardiometabolic health. Better hydration and more regular intake of fruits and vegetables can also influence concentration, energy balance, and the stability of daily routines, especially during the school week.
Participation in sports rose as well, with more students reporting that they played on a sports team, increasing from 52% to 58%. Team sports can create a structured environment for movement, social connection, and accountability. In public health terms, they often serve as one of the few reliable settings in which regular physical activity is built into the week rather than left to chance.
“These are meaningful improvements, and they show that progress is possible when schools, families, and communities work together to support young people,” CDC Deputy Director and Chief Medical Officer Jennifer Shuford said. “At the same time, too many students are still struggling with daily health behaviors that can negatively affect their long-term health.”
Sleep deprivation, screen exposure, and driving risk remain stubbornly common
The report’s more sobering findings sit in the same survey wave. Daily physical activity, muscle-strengthening activity, and meeting recommended activity guidelines were unchanged, while fewer students attended physical education daily from 2023 to 2025. The lack of movement on those measures suggests that structural barriers to routine exercise remain deeply embedded in adolescent life. School schedules, transportation patterns, neighborhood safety, academic demands, and screen-based leisure all compete with physical activity, and none of those pressures disappear because one indicator improves.
Sleep remains a major concern. Only about 1 in 4 students, 24%, got at least 8 hours of sleep on an average school night in 2025, essentially unchanged from 23% in 2023. Insufficient sleep is not a benign inconvenience; it is linked to worse mental health, poorer concentration, and riskier behaviors such as not wearing a seat belt or texting while driving. In teenagers, sleep loss can also amplify emotional volatility and impair judgment at exactly the developmental stage when impulse control is still maturing.
The digital environment adds another layer of strain. About 1 in 3 students, 36%, reported social media use every hour or more in 2025, similar to 37% when measurement began in 2023. That frequency of use can fragment sleep, reduce time for exercise, crowd out face-to-face interactions, and expose students to a constant stream of social comparison. None of those effects are captured by a single survey item, but the pattern is familiar to clinicians and families: highly connected teens are often less rested, less physically active, and more distracted than they realize.
Unsafe driving behavior remains especially alarming. Nearly 1 in 2 students, 46%, who drove in the past month texted or emailed while driving in 2025, compared with 42% in 2023. The behavior carries immediate safety implications and illustrates how digital habits can move off the screen and into the roadway. A teen who glances at a message is not just multitasking; they are exposing themselves and others to a preventable crash risk in a setting where split-second attention matters.
National surveillance still drives school and community prevention strategy
For more than 35 years, CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey has supplied nationally representative data used by schools, families, public health officials, and community leaders to track adolescent risk and guide prevention efforts. The value of this surveillance system is practical: it identifies where gains are occurring, where progress has stalled, and which behaviors deserve immediate attention in school health programs.
This report draws on national YRBS data from 2023 to 2025 and includes 10-year trend information from 2015 to 2025 across five focus areas: dietary behaviors, physical activity, sleep, digital behaviors, and mental health and suicide risk. The time horizon matters because adolescent health rarely changes in a straight line. Some trends shift quickly after a period of policy change or community investment, while others resist movement because they are tied to the architecture of daily life, including school schedules, food access, transportation, and digital norms.
The data also reinforce a central public health truth: progress in one domain does not erase risk in another. Fewer students reporting sadness, hopelessness, or suicidal thinking is encouraging, but those same adolescents may still be sleeping too little, sitting too long, and spending too much time on social media. The clinical and public health task is to treat these behaviors as connected rather than separate, because the biology of adolescence does not partition them neatly. Sleep shapes mood, mood shapes movement, and screen use can affect both.
CDC says the full 2025 YRBS dataset, the Youth Health in Focus report, and supporting materials are available on its website. The report emphasizes select statistically significant differences, leaving the broader pattern clear: adolescent health improved in several important areas between 2023 and 2025, but the most persistent risks still sit close to the center of daily life.