Understanding Your Needs
Take a minute to reflect on your basic needs. I don’t mean your smartphone or Wi-Fi, I’m talking about your body’s physiological needs. At our core, we need food and water for our bodies to function properly. We also need shelter from the elements and a place to sleep for our basic needs to be met. As children, we are dependent on our parents to meet these needs. Sex can also function as a physiological need because it is necessary to produce future generations.
If money is tight or any of these resources are scarce, we become afraid for our survival and our primal instincts kick in. Has there ever been a time in your life where you were unsure how rent was going to be paid for or when your next meal would be? No matter how long ago that experience was, it could still be impacting you. Even if all your basic needs are currently met, you may be triggered by an external factor and your body may be responding as if they are not.
When your most basic needs are met, your awareness shifts to the next level: safety needs. Although you may have a place to sleep, do you feel comfortable being at home? Is your body able to relax and process your day? Maybe being at home feels safe, but you are in a high-risk neighborhood. Tensing up at every noise or experiencing racing thoughts about what could happen. The fear and uncertainty you’ve experienced may stay with you, even after the stressors are gone. Having job security and earning a living wage is also necessary for safety and security.
It may surprise you that the third level of needs is love and/or belonging. This need for love and belonging exists at birth and although all babies need this nurturing, not all receive it. Our relationship with our caregivers results in our attachment style (secure, anxious, avoidant, disorganized). This attachment style becomes triggered as you get older and enter intimate relationships. One of the reasons people who have experienced traumas, especially those with PTSD symptoms, struggle in relationships is because they are stuck in attempting to attain their safety needs, making it challenging to sustain a higher level of connection and intimacy.
However, this love and belonging doesn’t just apply to a partner. You may be longing for acceptance from your family-of-origin. This creates deep wounds that may be triggered time and time again. This also includes feeling isolated or excluded from peers at work or having a difficult time meeting or sustaining adult friendships. All types of relationships can satisfy, or mitigate, our internal desire for love and belonging.
The next level up is self-esteem. If you take some time to reflect on the deep impact of unmet needs of love and belonging, it is clear that our esteem needs can be dependent on the previous needs being met. Insecurity, shame, and self-doubt are detrimental to success. So much growth and progress is hindered by unmet esteem needs. Even if you earn a certain status or position, you may not feel that you deserve it or minimize your efforts in achieving it. Talking with a counselor is a great way to begin processing the incongruence.
Self-actualization is at the top of the pyramid and is only attained by a few. It involves realizing your full potential and putting it towards a purpose greater than yourself. Because of this, it often involves spirituality. Recognizing your purpose in life and striving continuously to achieve it leads to fulfillment of this need. Fulfillment here means diligently pursuing your purpose; it is not something you ever truly fulfill. Sadly, progress is often hindered by lower level needs not being met.
Each need you have may not fall neatly into one category. As in most things in life, our needs are complex and often interconnected. We often oscillate between levels, rarely linearly progressing. Although the hierarchy is relevant for understanding the process, one level doesn’t have to be 100% satisfied for you to focus on higher level needs. Similarly, you may believe your hierarchy is different than the one Maslow proposed. What’s important to keep in mind is that your needs are real and finding a way to meet them is essential for survival and success.
Information described above is based on Abraham Maslow’s original hierarchy of needs and was created in the early 1940s. He later revised his model to include cognitive, aesthetic, and transcendent needs which were not included.
“Sometimes we are so focused on what we want, we miss the things we need.”