Mental Health and Lifestyle Habits
A health-tech company wanted to better understand how lifestyle habits, particularly sleep, exercise, and screen time, relate to mental-health outcomes. The aim was to use the analysis to inform thoughtful features for a well-being app.
The objective was to explore the dataset, answer focused business questions, identify meaningful patterns, and translate the findings into practical recommendations without claiming that the data proves cause and effect.
- Records
- 3,000
- Columns
- 12
- Duplicates
- 0
- Missing values found
- 595
My approach
- Reviewed and cleaned the dataset to prepare it for analysis.
- Used Excel and SQL to organize and explore the information.
- Compared mental-health measures across lifestyle groups and age groups.
- Summarized the results using charts and dashboard-style visuals.
- Considered what the findings could, and could not, support before forming recommendations.
Questions I explored
- How did reported sleep duration relate to stress levels in the dataset?
- How did mental-health and happiness scores compare across exercise levels?
- Which age groups had the largest share of respondents reporting high stress?
- How did mental-health scores vary across screen-time groups?
What the data showed
- Sleep and stress. Average sleep was almost the same at every stress level: 6.45 hours for low stress, 6.48 for moderate and 6.49 for high.
- Exercise. Average happiness score rose with exercise, from 5.29 (low) to 5.36 (moderate) and 5.55 (high). The gap is modest.
- Age. The share of respondents with high stress was highest in the 55 to 64 group (35.8%), followed by 18 to 24 (33.8%). The lowest was 45 to 54 (31.5%).
- Screen time. Average happiness score moved between 5.27 and 5.54 from 2 to 8 hours of screen time, with no consistent direction.
- Overall. Average sleep was 6.48 hours. Low was the most frequent stress level (1,008 respondents) and the most frequent exercise level (1,033).
Recommendations
- Don’t market sleep as a stress fix. Sleep and stress barely relate in this data, so avoid promising that better sleep alone will lower stress. Pair tracking with other tools instead.
- Build an exercise encouragement feature. Add reminders, achievable activity goals and gentle progress tracking.
- Target support at the 55 to 64 and 18 to 24 age groups. These two groups report the highest share of high stress. Offer age-aware check-ins and coping resources aimed at them.
- Don’t centre features on cutting screen time. No consistent link was found between screen time and wellbeing, so reducing screen time shouldn’t be sold as a wellbeing solution.
Key learning
The analysis reinforced the importance of interpreting relationships carefully. Some comparisons showed only small differences, so the recommendations should remain proportionate to the evidence. Lifestyle patterns alone do not establish that one habit caused a particular mental-health outcome. The findings are a starting point for exploring supportive, user-centred features, to be validated with stronger analysis and user research.