A lifestyle is the combination of personal interests, values and behavioural orientations that constitute an individual’s way of living. It is generally considered to be an essential component of a person’s identity and may influence the development of mental health problems as well as the onset or exacerbation of physical illnesses. Lifestyle is a subject of intense interest for researchers in many fields, including medicine, epidemiology and health psychology. However, there is considerable variation in the definitions used in the literature, and the term has been interpreted in a variety of ways.
In the field of health, the focus tends to be on the presence or absence and the frequency of certain risk behaviours (such as smoking, alcohol consumption, diet and physical activity), with a view to reducing them in order to improve health. This approach reflects the classic sociomedical paradigm of the patient as an active protagonist of their own recovery, responsible for the pursuit and management of their lifestyle choices.
However, there are also studies that define a lifestyle more broadly as the whole set of behavioural characteristics that a person adopts, in addition to the consumption habits they engage in. These are considered to influence both the health status and the perception of the person’s life and world, as well as their ability to change their own behaviour in the face of a disease recurrence.
Theories that emphasise the internal dimension of a lifestyle are linked to the psychological field and, in particular, to the work of Alfred Adler. They take the idea that an individual develops a framework of guiding principles, established during childhood, to define a style of personality. This is why these theories are often called the ‘evolutionary theory of personality’.
Another tendency that relates to the social structure is to consider a lifestyle as an element of the culture of a particular group. Thorstein Veblen, with his ’emulation concept’, and Max Weber, who intended lifestyles as distinctive elements of specific status groups, are examples of this type of analysis.
The latter have also analysed how a person’s behaviour is determined by the forces at work in a given society. This led to the development of the so-called profiles-and-trends approach, in which the relationship between attitudes and behavioural characteristics is considered from both a synchronic and diachronic point of view, taking into account the influence that social trends can have on forming and changing the individual’s lifestyles.
These three interpretative keys allow us to distinguish different approaches and to examine how these differ in the light of their ambitions for the study of lifestyle. The main limitations of these interpretations, however, lie in the fact that they do not address the question of how lifestyles form and evolve. This remains a gap in the research that should be filled. It is important to understand these aspects if the aim is to advance the conceptualisation and application of the lifestyle concept in clinical and healthcare settings.