Lifestyle Research Reveals New Anti-Aging Benefits of Lifestyle Therapy
Lifestyle is basically the attitudes, thoughts, behaviors, and preferences of an individual, family, or group. The word was first introduced by Austrian psychiatrist Alfred Adler in his 29th book, The Case of Miss R. with the implied meaning of “the basic nature of human beings as determined early in life”. Lifestyle is also called individualism, in which the individual’s needs and wants are the only prerogatives. It is a broad concept and encompasses a large number of ideas and attitudes about living.
It is important to study the concepts of Lifestyle in order for us to fully understand ourselves and the world. A major contribution to the field of anthropology is made by Alfred Adler. According to him, his work on Lifestyle helped to shed light on the way people relate to each other. He divided people into three groups: the highly emotional, the highly intellectual, and the moderately emotional. His work on Lifestyle helped to explain why some people get what they want, what they need, and what makes them successful while others live a less than ideal existence. In his theory of Lifestyle, Adler upholds the importance of culture, tradition, language, food, and other aspects, but he also stressed that all these aspects are influenced by genetic predisposition, experience, and personality.
In our day and times, individual psychology has become important to understand human behavior. In fact, Lifestyle has been used as a means to measure individual psychology for many decades now. The most significant Lifestyle related research made by Hogue and Weil is their research on the determinants of lifespan. They found out that genetic and experiential variables are far greater influences in determining the length of life than social aspects. Thus, they came up with the concept of Lifestyle and used it to study how different variables affect the lives of ageing individuals.
In an interesting study published by Oxford University Press, Michael Wolf and Professor Emeritus Professor Robin Warren, examined the effects of a popular American television program, the Oprah Winfrey show, on the lives of rural poor people in the Columbia, South Carolina area. Wolf and Warren found that the life expectancy of the subjects who watched the Oprah Winfrey show significantly increased, from an average of sixty-two years old to an average of seventy-one years old. This increase was mainly attributable to a considerable rise in the number of healthier lifestyle choices the participants made. However, the researchers pointed out that the improvement in life expectancy was mostly due to an increase in the total amount of discretionary income that the participants were able to obtain.
In this study, the researchers specifically looked at the effects of Winfrey’s show on the lifestyle of these poor, aging citizens. In order to explore the question of whether or not this television show had an effect on the lives of these citizens, they used a controlled design in which they had randomly selected twenty-six randomly selected individuals from a local gym, a public housing agency, and twenty-four households that already had a single adult member who was older than sixty-five. These households also had one adult member who was younger than sixty-five. The participants were invited to take part in a number of conversations on a diverse range of topics, with each participant given a book to read during her “turn” in the conversation. The participants then discussed the book with the researchers afterward, providing them with detailed feedback about their own experience.
Within a few months, the researchers found that the number of health risks decreased, as did the number of safety risks. In addition, the researchers found that the participants who participated in the Oprah Winfrey show lived longer, as they exhibited more healthy behaviors, such as exercising, eating right, and avoiding substances or alcohol that are hazardous to the individual’s health. In a related study, another pair of researchers led by Dr. David A. Graham, now a professor at the University of Michigan, reported in the Journal of the American Medical Associations that a person’s social media use, but not the content of that social media site, can impact their mental health. In this study, they examined the impact of four popular social media websites on the quality of life of stroke patients, finding that these sites contained relatively few unhealthy contents, but the users of these sites exhibited significantly greater frequency of depression and other emotional disorders.