Lifestyle refers to the choices and practices people make in their everyday lives, such as eating habits, leisure activities, and cultural patterns. These choices are formed in specific geographical, economic, political, and cultural contexts. They have an impact on human health because they contribute to physical and psychological well-being.
The term ‘lifestyle’ is used in many fields, but it is most often associated with health, especially when it comes to the way we choose and organise our life. The concept of lifestyle is also a key theme in various research areas, including sociology, economics, psychology, and medicine. This article aims to present the main definitions and results of studies on this topic, and also to analyse some of the different theories of lifestyle. It explores these in three dimensions: internal, external, and temporal.
Theories that emphasise the internal dimension consider lifestyle as a set of values, opinions and interests that a person acquires throughout their life and that are linked to a particular way of living. These can include views on politics, religion, or intimate relationships and also the appropriation of cultural conventions. These concepts are closer to the original meaning of the word ‘style’ in the artistic field and highlight a personal imprint on one’s behaviour and attitudes [1, 2].
Other theories consider lifestyle as a social construct that defines a specific group or class based on their choices and practices, with a link to the individual’s identity as belonging to this category [3, 4]. These models, which are close to the sociological currents of Weber and Bourdieu, are related to a model of lifestyle as a process of socialisation involving a dynamic interaction between static and dynamic factors at a cultural level [5, 6].
Finally, the third trend refers to a synchronic and diachronic analysis of the various components of lifestyle, with the aim of identifying the patterns that are shared by people. This approach, reminiscent of Daniel Yankelovich and William Wells, involves the identification of a set of attitudes, interests, and opinions that are common to a population, and that influence how lifestyles evolve in a given social context.
This narrative review allows a better understanding of the main elements that characterise the lifestyle concept in relation to health and identifies some future areas of research and intervention. This will help to promote a vision of healthy lifestyles not as a collection of health behaviours, but rather as a set of values, beliefs and behavioural modalities that define a person’s health practice model. This will enable the development of more effective interventions to promote a healthier lifestyle. The main challenge will be to develop a theoretical-explanatory model that takes into account the complexity of the components of the lifestyle concept in relation to health. These include, in particular, the role of values and the antecedents to those values, and the complex interaction between them. The construction of this model will require a multidisciplinary effort.
