Needs
👉 Our brains prioritize needs based on how urgent they are, and how important they are to our survival
We spent a lot of time last week talking about needs.
With all this talk of needs — what are our actual needs?
It’s easy to think that we all are unique and have our own unique set of needs — but at the core we are all human 🩵. Both the food critic and average Joe need to eat.
Psychologist Abraham Maslow provided a helpful framework, a “hierarchy of needs” to think about common human needs and how they are prioritized.
🪜The hierarchy implies that we only target a certain rung on the hierarchy when we feel confident in the rung below.
The bottom rung is safety — what we need to survive right now. All humans need air, water, food, shelter, sleep, and clothing. If a person can’t breathe or is starving, it’s biologically challenging to think about anything else until those needs are met. This makes sense — failure to meet these basic needs is literally life threatening, right now, so we’d be foolish to focus energy on anything else.
When safety needs are met, then security becomes the next concern. How can we not only meet our physical needs today, but longer term? These needs may include our health, financial security, and reproduction.
Only once we feel safe and secure will we focus on our relationships with others and self development.
🤔 Reflection of the Day: Do you feel like you’re stuck on any particular rung of the pyramid? If so, which one?