A lifestyle is a way of living that reflects an individual’s values and attitudes. It can include habits such as diet, exercise, and smoking. Choosing a healthy lifestyle can reduce the risk of developing serious health conditions and improve quality of life.
A healthy lifestyle is one that includes regular physical activity, a balanced diet low in fat and sugar, and limited consumption of alcohol and tobacco. A healthy lifestyle may also involve stress management techniques and sleep hygiene.
There are a wide range of definitions of lifestyle in both the social sciences and the humanities. These include an internal interpretation that focuses on values, attitudes and orientations, as well as an external interpretation that focuses on behaviour. A common feature of these conceptualisations is that they tend to neglect the socio-cultural context of lifestyle.
The term lifestyle has been adopted by the health field with a view to understanding how people manage their wellbeing in order to achieve personal satisfaction and fulfilment. This is an important issue, given that non-communicable diseases account for over half of all deaths in high income countries and are associated with a variety of lifestyle factors such as smoking, unhealthy eating patterns, poor levels of physical activity, and excess body weight.
There is a growing recognition of the need to address these factors in health promotion strategies, particularly among the middle aged and older populations. This is partly due to the increasing incidence of chronic illnesses such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes that are largely preventable by adopting healthier lifestyles.
Lifestyles in the health field are not always clearly defined, in part because of the complex interplay between an individual’s biological and psycho-social dimensions of wellbeing and the dynamic and changing nature of life and work. A critical reflection of how the concept of lifestyle is used in the health psychology literature is therefore necessary in order to develop a more effective theoretical and explanatory framework.
This article discusses the main definitions and conceptualisations of the concept of lifestyle as it is used in the fields of health psychology and sociology, aiming at proposing a new definition that incorporates the different dimensions of the construct. The analysis is structured along three perspectives: internal, external and temporal.
Internal perspectives of the concept of lifestyle
The initial research on the subject was based on the analysis of social structure and the individuals’ relative positions within it. Thorstein Veblen, with his’schemes of consumption’ concept, opened this perspective by asserting that individuals adopt specific patterns of ‘conspicuous consumption’ in accordance with a desire for distinction from other social strata they identify as inferior and their desire to emulation of the ones they believe to be superior.
More recently, the perspective has broadened to include a focus on everyday activities, analysing – as in authors such as Joffre Dumazedier and Anthony Giddens – the use of time, especially loisirs (leisure activities), as the key element of lifestyles. In a similar vein, Georg Simmel, and more recently Pierre Bourdieu, have developed the notion of habitus in order to analyse the different types of lifestyles.
