A lifestyle is a broad concept that encapsulates a person’s unique combination of habits, attitudes, and beliefs. It can also include the way a person’s life is organised and managed, including their priorities and interests. In the context of health, a lifestyle can include patterns of behaviour related to eating and drinking, activity level, mental wellbeing, and social connections. These trends have the potential to affect the overall health of a person, and as such, they are a significant area of research for health psychologists.
For example, in the field of healthy lifestyles, the focus is on encouraging people to adopt healthier habits, such as reducing alcohol and smoking, improving diet and exercise, and spending more time with friends and family. This is based on the assumption that healthy lifestyles can improve wellbeing and prevent chronic diseases such as heart disease, diabetes, and stroke. However, it is important to note that there are many factors influencing lifestyles, and not all of them are in the control of individuals.
It is therefore essential to take a critical approach to this topic and develop more effective models of healthy lifestyles that reflect the complexity of human behaviours and interactions. This will require a cross-disciplinary analysis of lifestyle from a variety of perspectives, including psychological and sociological ones.
One of the most widespread definitions of lifestyle is that offered by WHO, which defines it as “a pattern of living characterized by the choices and preferences that an individual makes about his or her activities, such as work, leisure, food, drink, and so on.”
Earlier studies on lifestyles had a more social-structural perspective. For example, Thorstein Veblen argued that people adopted specific ‘schemes of life’ and consumption patterns based on their desire to distinguish themselves from those social strata they considered inferior, and on their wish to emulate those who they deemed superior. Max Weber took a similar approach by interpreting lifestyles as distinctive elements of status groups, established in accordance with a dialectical process of recognition and appreciation of prestige.
Other perspectives on lifestyles viewed them as internal constructs of the personality. For example, Alfred Adler interpreted the term as an organisation of the personality that emerges during development and characterises the framework of guiding values and principles that an individual develops in the first years of his or her life and governs his or her actions throughout adulthood.
More recent studies have tended to view lifestyles as profiles of values and attitudes, analysing them from both synchronic and diachronic points of view (e.g., Milton Rokeach’s work, Arnold Mitchell’s VALS research, and Lynn R. Kahle’s LOV research). The latter has also developed into a profile-and-trends approach, where lifestyles are analysed as the result of a complex interplay between psychological and behavioural variables, with socio-cultural trends acting as both determinants of the existence and diffusion of various lifestyles within a population.
