LifeStyle is the first of the five key components of LEARN. LEARN is an acronym that stands for the five essential components of our lifestyle behavior-change programs: Lifestyle, Exercise, Attitudes, Relationships, and Nutrition. These components are important because lifestyle change encompasses much more than changing just one specific area of your life-it embraces everything about you. Lifestyle is, after all, everything about the way we live. It embraces everything from our most private thoughts to our overt behaviors. Lifestyle is the interaction of our thoughts, feelings, behaviors, attitudes, goals, and personal values. It is reflected in how we feel about ourselves and in our relationships and environment.

The unique thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that most directly affect us are part of the greater fabric of lifestyle. We can no more focus on changing one isolated behavior than we can isolate a single thread in a tightly woven blanket, change that thread, and say we have a new blanket. Just as the blanket is composed of tightly interwoven threads, so is the fabric of life and lifestyle. The complex interwoven fabric of life comprises all that we are-to change one behavior, we must address all of the threads.

For example, your job may be causing you a great deal of stress. Simply changing your job may or may not reduce your stress. You may need to address relationship issues, build your time management skills, learn some assertiveness techniques, increase your physical activity, or learn how to change your thoughts. By not addressing all lifestyle issues, you could find yourself in a vicious cycle of changing the wrong things and still feeling overstressed

A lifestyle approach strives for long-term solutions to a chronic problem-not a short-term fix. Lasting lifestyle change is not a quick fix, but involves establishing new habits and working hard to make them part of your daily life. The lifestyle approach emphasizes gradual, sustainable, and permanent changes in lifestyle, exercise, attitude, relationships, and nutrition.