For example, a lifestyle can mean how you spend your free time. It can also refer to your views on politics, religion, health, intimacy and more.
A healthy lifestyle requires a balance of all aspects of your life. Often it starts with small choices, like drinking water instead of soda or spending an hour without your phone or tablet. These little changes can have enormous impacts on your overall well-being.
The concept of ‘lifestyle’ has been used and defined in many different ways, especially in scientific research. Various fields have developed their own definitions and theories that are far apart from each other. It is important to shed light on these differences to understand the context and meaning of this concept.
This paper reexamines the main definitions of ‘lifestyle’ in the psychological and sociological fields. A framework that combines these different perspectives is proposed to define the construct and propose future research directions.
Theories that emphasise the internal dimension consider lifestyle as an expression of personality, a style of living that is shaped by an individual over the course of his/her life and that guides his/her behaviour. This approach to the concept of lifestyle is rooted in psychological analyses, starting with Alfred Adler who defined a ‘lifestyle’ as a style of thinking and perceiving that develops through the first years of one’s life and defines his/her way of acting and interacting with the environment [12].
Other theories focus on social positioning and analyse the level of autonomy of an individual within a sociocultural-economic system. The aim is to identify the behavioural characteristics that are required for an individual to be in a certain position in society. These models are mainly sociological and have been developed by authors such as Weber and Bourdieu.
These models are not very useful in the field of health psychology because they do not take into account the complex interplay between a person’s position in society and his/her actions, which are influenced by environmental factors, including social norms, economic and cultural conditions and personal characteristics.
The final category of theories considers a more generalised approach to the idea of a lifestyle, which is more related to sociological analysis. These models are based on the concept of ‘action profile’ and try to identify the behavioural characteristics that characterise a lifestyle in a given context.
This approach has its merits in identifying the main dimensions of the lifestyle concept and making it easier to compare and contrast them. However, it does not provide a theoretical model that could serve as an explanatory model for future interventions to promote lifestyles that contribute to a healthier population. Therefore, the current understanding of the lifestyle construct needs to be reworked to create a more effective theory and a broader explanatory model. This could allow for the development of a new paradigm that will combine individual, social and life span dimensions of wellbeing in health promotion. This would be a step forward to the salutogenic and ecosystem approaches in which the bio-psycho-social model of health is understood as a continuous interaction and repositioning between an individual and his/her environment.