A healthy lifestyle is a key aspect of overall well-being. It includes daily habits that support health, such as exercising and eating a nutritious diet. It also involves avoiding unhealthy practices such as smoking and excessive alcohol intake. However, many people struggle to develop and maintain a healthy lifestyle, which may be because they don’t have the right tools or support. A new generation of wellness technologies has emerged to help people adopt healthier behaviours and achieve a balanced life. But what exactly is a ‘lifestyle’? This narrative review aims to explore the main theories and definitions of this construct, from both the psychological and sociological fields. The aim of this paper is to reconsider the concept of lifestyle in terms of its internal, external, and temporal dimensions, thus making it possible to build more effective theoretical and explanatory models that serve as a framework for health promotion interventions.
Theories that emphasise the internal dimension conceive of lifestyle as a style of personality, drawing on the origin of the word “style” in the artistic field to highlight human uniqueness and creativity. This approach was first introduced by Alfred Adler, who understood a person’s lifestyle as the framework of guiding values and principles that evolve in early childhood to form a set of judgements that informs their actions throughout their lives (modus vivendi).
Later, the notion was adapted by Milton Rokeach as a personal style. This approach was followed by Arnold Mitchell and Lynn R. Kahle, who analysed a person’s personality and motivational characteristics using a structured questionnaire, in order to identify their behavioural patterns.
The next type of model, which is mainly sociological in nature, analyses lifestyle as a social phenomenon that emerges from the interaction between the external factors of society (social and cultural conventions and the individual’s inclinations, expectations, and interpretations) and the internal forces of the individual’s self-positioning process (tastes, preferences, and behavioural choices). In this context, it is important to distinguish between a “necessary” lifestyle, which is determined by the sociocultural context, and a “choice” lifestyle, which is an expression of an autonomous subject that enables them to distance themselves from predefined and a priori rules.
In the more recent work of Georg Simmel and Pierre Bourdieu, lifestyle is considered as a system of cultural production (the “field”) in which a range of behavioural choices are made to define and position an individual within that field. Nevertheless, this view suffers from the fact that it is not clear how these choices are made and how they interact with each other, or how they evolve over time. Moreover, it is not clear whether the different processes of orientating, positioning, identification, and recognition are operating “vertically” or “horizontally”. Thus, this model fails to provide a full explanation of lifestyle as a complex and multidimensional construct. On the other hand, it is possible to find other more recent sociological and psychological models that are more comprehensive in their analysis of this phenomenon.
