A healthy lifestyle is not only good for your physical health, but it’s also great for your mental health. Emotionally, it helps you maintain a strong sense of self and creates positive feelings towards your friends and family, as well as allowing you to cope with life’s stressors. You can practice a variety of habits to improve your emotional wellness, including exercise, socialising with loved ones, journaling or talking to a trusted friend, or even practicing mindfulness. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to creating a healthy lifestyle; instead, it’s important to find what works for you.
The concept of ‘lifestyle’ has been studied from various perspectives and fields, such as psychology, sociology and anthropology. Among the different interpretations, there are three main categories of explicit definitions: internal dimension, external dimension and temporal dimension.
In the psychological field, the first perspective considered lifestyle as a set of personal values and behavioural orientations that characterise an individual, with a particular psychic imprint. This unique personality imprint is a result of a compromise between an individual’s needs and society’s demands. The definition remained ambiguous as the process that led to the constitution of this characteristic was not explored and questions about how the value system interacted and influenced behaviour were left unanswered.
A second perspective, rooted in the theories of Alfred Adler and Daniel Yankelovich, considers lifestyle as the behavioural patterns and interests of an individual, analysed from both synchronic and diachronic points of view. This definition, which also includes the influence of social trends, is a significant advance on the previous one.
Finally, the third interpretation of lifestyle, found mainly in sociological and anthropological perspectives, focuses on the idea that the behaviour of an individual is determined by a combination of factors, both tangible and intangible, such as social conventions and their own inclinations, preferences, beliefs and interpretations. These concepts also include the ‘field’, which represents the area of interaction between social structure and the individual.
The earliest studies of lifestyle were carried out by Thorstein Veblen and Max Weber. Their main objective was to show that the lifestyle of individuals is an expression of their position in a social stratum they identify as superior or inferior to them. For this reason, these lifestyles are visible in their consumption and behavioural patterns and can be distinguished from other social strata by a degree of prestige that they possess or aspire to.
These definitions of ‘lifestyle’ have a limited scope, as they do not allow us to understand how these habits are created and how they evolve. They also lack a clear understanding of their social context, and do not provide any insight into the ways in which they interact with other aspects of an individual’s life. In addition, it remains unclear whether and how these concepts are applicable outside the field of psychology and sociology. Therefore, a new vision of this concept is needed. It must take into account the social and cultural dynamics that underlie it, as well as its relation with other fields of knowledge such as health.