Lifestyle is a way of life that involves your daily habits and how you choose to experience life. It includes your choices in work, play and sleep, along with how you eat, energize yourself and engage with people. A healthy lifestyle also helps you manage your stress and improves your mood. It includes getting regular exercise and limiting caffeine, and eating a diet low in glycemic index foods, which help keep blood sugar levels stable. It is also important to get enough sleep, and limit alcohol and smoking.
A healthy lifestyle can be hard to achieve because it requires a change in your everyday routines. This is especially true if you are used to eating unhealthy foods and not exercising. This is why it is important to make changes gradually, so you can stick with them. For example, start by adding one or two new healthy habits at a time, such as replacing red meat with chicken or switching from soda to water. Once you have mastered those new habits, add more, until you have built up a consistent lifestyle.
Throughout history, there has been a broad range of definitions and interpretations of the term ‘lifestyle’. The majority of these have been concerned with the internal dimension, which focuses on the personality traits and characteristics of the subject.
For instance, Alfred Adler considered a lifestyle as the ‘formula’ of an individual personality, which he defined as a system of judgement that informs actions and decisions throughout life. This approach was followed by Milton Rokeach, Arnold Mitchell and Lynn R. Kahle, who developed models of the lifestyles as scales of values. These models identified different population sectors for which specific lifestyles were most appropriate.
The other currents of interpretation of the lifestyle concept focus on the external dimension, which relates to the subject’s social position and its expression in their behaviours and activities. This concept is rooted in sociological theories, such as Georg Simmel’s formal analysis of the processes of individualisation, identification and differentiation, and the effects generated by lifestyles operating both vertically and horizontally. It has been renewed by Pierre Bourdieu, who conceived of the lifestyle as a form of capital and the practice of appropriation of lifestyles as a form of consumption and social stratification.
The behavioural component of a lifestyle is often cited as a health determinant in research, and it is important that this factor is addressed when designing interventions to promote a healthy lifestyle. However, it is also crucial that a multidisciplinary approach is attempted to understand this construct and its role in health promotion. This would enable more effective theoretical and explanatory models to be developed, which could form the basis of health-promoting interventions. In the meantime, this article aims to present some perspectives and research on the multidimensional nature of the concept of lifestyle.