Understanding the Concept of Lifestyle
A healthy lifestyle is essential to reduce the risk of diseases such as heart disease and type 2 diabetes. It includes a balanced diet, exercise, adequate sleep and avoidance of tobacco and alcohol. A healthier lifestyle can also lower the risk of depression and other mental illnesses. Despite the many health benefits, adopting a healthy lifestyle can be challenging and requires consistent effort. Achieving a healthy lifestyle requires a change in your current habits and routine. This will take time, but with dedication and a supportive community, you can make positive changes.Historically, there has been a tendency to understand and define lifestyle as a set of healthy behaviours. However, this approach has failed to consider the underlying antecedents that drive these behaviours. It is therefore important to explore a broader framework for understanding lifestyle. This would allow for a more holistic approach to research and health promotion interventions.One of the first approaches to understanding lifestyle was led by Alfred Adler, who defined it as a style of personality. In his analysis, he described how an individual’s system of guiding values and principles that develop in the first years of life form their behaviour and decisions throughout their lives. This concept is still reflected in the work of psychologists such as Milton Rokeach and Arnold Mitchell.More recent trends in the literature focus on the internal dimension of lifestyle. These approaches tend to emphasise the meaning and motivation behind specific activities. These are often based on personal beliefs, attitudes and preferences, and can have a direct impact on behaviour. The underlying assumption of this perspective is that lifestyles are constructed through the interaction between external factors (the social structure that defines power relations, called the “field”) and internal factors (beliefs, emotions, expectations, and interests, which are part of the individual’s habitus).Although these theories have contributed to understanding the concept of lifestyle, they fail to recognise the complex interplay between different dimensions of life that are interrelated. As a result, they lack a comprehensive explanatory model for the construction of lifestyles. This is a major limitation of these models in terms of the effectiveness of health promotion interventions. In addition, they tend to focus only on the behavioural component of lifestyle and neglect its psychological, identity, and life span components.