There is a common belief that eating healthy, exercising regularly and avoiding unhealthy behaviours such as smoking, can reduce the risk of developing certain diseases. However, it is important to understand that there are other lifestyle factors that can also play a role in an individual’s health. These include things like stress management, sleep quality and social connection, all of which can contribute to an overall feeling of wellbeing.
There are many different theories and models on what a lifestyle is, with each approach having its own advantages and disadvantages. In this article, we will be considering the main definitions of lifestyle within both the psychological and sociological fields, analysing them from an internal dimension, an external dimension and a temporal dimension. This will allow us to identify the main components that characterise a healthy lifestyle.
Psychological approaches to a definition of lifestyle focus on the interpretation of the concept as an organisation of personality and a system of values that emerges during adulthood. This includes models such as Alfred Adler’s individual psychology, Milton Rokeach’s life course perspective and Arnold Mitchell’s Values in Action (VAL) research. In these models, the concept of lifestyle is seen as a set of behavioural orientations and values that determine the way an individual orientates their actions.
On the other hand, sociological models of lifestyle have been influenced by various theoretical traditions including Bourdieu’s theory of the ‘habits of class’ and Weber’s model of a social structure characterised by status groups. In these theories, a person’s lifestyle is determined by the way in which they organise their daily practices and the behavioural styles they develop as a result of the different consumption habits they follow.
In this context, the definition of a healthy lifestyle is an essential construct for health promotion, as it refers to the set of behavioural practices that a person adopts, in order to achieve a level of wellness in which they feel comfortable and happy. Currently, there is an urgent need for a critical reworking of the concept of lifestyle in health psychology in order to build more effective and broad-based models for health promotion interventions. This is why this paper aims to analyse the main definitions of lifestyle in both the psychological and sociological fields, in order to propose a new definition for this concept in health psychology. The definition of a healthy lifestyle proposed here emphasises the importance of a holistic vision of health, including the bio-psycho-social dimensions and dimensions of time, which are incorporated in a broader framework of salutogenic and ecosystemic approaches to wellbeing.
