Developing healthy habits and adopting a good lifestyle is not easy, but it is essential to thrive as you move through life’s journey. By making the effort to eat well, be physically active and make positive lifestyle choices, you will reap the benefits not only for your current health but also for your future health and wellbeing.
Whether you are an experienced executive or just beginning your career, you can improve your lifestyle to help you thrive. By implementing a few simple changes, you can feel more energetic throughout the day and make the most of your time at work.
In the field of psychology, the concept of “lifestyle” has been used and analysed in two main directions:
The first line of research, starting with Alfred Adler, defined a personality trait by considering all of the individual’s behaviour traits, opinions, attitudes, and emotions that converge to form a unique psychic imprint. The word style, as used in these models, recalls the origin of the term in the artistic field to highlight the human imprint, which is considered a fundamental characteristic of the person.
This approach was further developed by Milton Rokeach and Arnold Mitchell who, in the 1960s, linked lifestyles with value systems and reached the hypothesis that people develop a few hierarchically ordered values, which influence their behavioural models, attitudes, and interests. These values are differentiated into terminal, when they refer to a person’s existence, and instrumental values, that relate to behavioural models, ways of acting, and being.
A more recent line of research, of sociological origin, defines a lifestyle by considering the individual’s social position and the social practices that define it, as expressed in the concepts of Georg Simmel and Pierre Bourdieu. This view is based on the fact that lifestyles are determined by internal causes (beliefs, expectations, and preferences) and external causes (social structures that define power relations).
This approach has mainly been applied to consumer behaviour and, more recently, to research on health practice models. The risk with this type of approach is that it does not take into account the antecedent factors to the practices and thus is limited to a purely descriptive analysis, which is not necessarily useful in terms of defining health promotion interventions. Therefore, it is important to try to build a theoretical-explanatory model for lifestyles in order to use this concept as an effective tool for designing and evaluating health promotion interventions.
