Intersections of perceived stress, burnout, dispositional hope, intellectual humility, locus of control, and lifestyle factors in undergraduate medical education

The effective management of stress and burnout is a key priority in promoting medical student wellbeing. Psychosocial factors like hope, stress, burnout, locus of control, and intellectual humility as well as lifestyle factors like exercise, sleep, idle time, downtime, and caffeinated beverage intake may be important in protecting against the negative consequences of stress and burnout. The purpose of this cross-sectional study was to explore the relationships between lifestyle factors and five different psychosocial wellbeing indicators. We sent a voluntary, online survey to first- through fourth-year allopathic and osteopathic medical students ( n = 205). We used validated psychometric scales and investigator-created lifestyle questions to measure the variables of interest. Hierarchical linear regressions were used to examine the effects of the different variables’ associations with hope. We found that both exercise and sleep are potentially buffering the negative impact of high burnout on dispositional hope. We also found that having a high level of independence of intellect and ego may mitigate the negative effects of a more external locus of control on dispositional hope and may be protective of hope in people with higher stress. Future research can increase our understanding in this area by following medical students across time to control for any temporal effects on these variables and to determine if baseline characteristics can accurately predict future outcomes like burnout.