We all have needs, needs that we want met and fulfilled. Often, many people gravitate externally for their needs, such as feeling needed by someone else, like a child who needs a mother and not internally, as in, what do they really need and want to be fulfilled and happy with themselves. These external needs only fulfil a basic requirement and doesn’t go deeper into what we really need as individuals to thrive and to be happy.

In 1943, Abraham Maslow proposed his theory on human needs called the Hierarchy of Human Needs. In this hierarchy of needs, there are 5 main needs and they are:

1. Physiological needs which are our basic needs such as food and water were suggested to be right at the bottom because a person can only focus on higher needs when their basic requirements are satiated.
2. Need for security or safety such as a home, adequate finances and safe environment.
3. Need for belonging and love such as with a community, family or spouse.
4. Need for self-esteem or feeling good about yourself.
5. Need to self-actualize or the need to achieve your potential, to be the best you can be. This need was suggested to be right at the peak because Maslow believed that you can only get here once your other needs were met.

It is often mistaken that Maslow had suggested that these needs were met progressively; as your more basic needs are met, you move on to the next. However, our lives are not led in a linear fashion and Maslow agrees that we tend to strive to meet our needs concurrently although not all needs are met at the same time.

Our needs are amplified at different times of our lives. Imagine if you were in your early twenties, what would you typically need at this age? Social life? A sense of belonging with your friends?

At this time, providing you live in safe environment with a decent roof over your head, you may not worry so much about security. Yet, if you had to worry about finances from an early age, security may very well be at the top of your needs. We want to love and want to be loved but many people chase money and neglect the people they love or is unable to lower their guard long enough for someone to enter their lives.

The issue with meeting needs is that many of us do not really investigate what fulfilling that need means for us. For example, meeting a physiological need may be about quenching your thirst or feeding your hunger but we can go one step further and look at nourishing your body instead of simply gobbling some calories down. Or how about feeling secure, what does that mean for you?

Most of our lives are precariously balanced on what we earn versus what we spend and for many, it can all be taken away at any given moment. You may value one need over another at different times in your lives but we all have similar needs over that we want to meet over a lifetime and here I will delve deeper into what each need might look like for you.

Physiological Needs

When we are hungry we eat and when we are thirsty we eat. If only life is that simple. Most of us eat foods that we can get or prepare conveniently. Many do not think about what really nourishes them. We have so much more food available to us at any given time, yet malnutrition is still a reality in high income cities.

This form of malnutrition is known as hidden hunger and it is estimated that 85% of people in the US do not consume enough of the daily vitamins and minerals essential for optimal health. Also, there are many people who have addictions to food and rely on them to provide emotionally and in the long run, something has got to give.

Our health is a major component of meeting our basic physiological need, yet many of us report that we feel little or no energy. Many are ill from lifestyle diseases and according to the World Health Organization, physical inactivity is responsible for 3.2 million deaths annually.

Think about what you eat and drink on a daily basis, are they really satisfying your need or just barely keeping you alive? How well do you sleep? How much do you move your body per week?

Need for Security

Majority of our lives are propped up by our income, we spend most of our income on our home, our shelter from the weariness of working and living, and for people living in war-torn countries, safety is worth paying dearly for.

We feel secure when we have more than enough in our bank account, when we have a home that belongs to us, when we live in a country that is peaceful with reliable infrastructure and governance. For most of our lives, we set goals based on the money we wish to make, the house we want to live in and the environment we want to live in, when this goal is unmet, it makes it very hard for us to be motivated to fulfil other needs.

Imagine this, according to the World Bank, 8.6% of the world’s population or 736 million people on Earth live on less than US$1.90 per day. When you do not have even the most basic sense of security in finance and living conditions, it would be difficult to think about all your other needs.

What does security mean for you? Does it mean x amount of dollars? How will you know when you have fulfilled this need?

Need for Love and Belonging

It is no secret that we all want to find love. This would explain why dating apps and websites are so popular, as are shows like The Bachelor. Mostly, we long for the connection with another, we want to find our soulmate, someone who gets us and loves us for who we are.

In a recent survey, nearly half of Americans say they almost always feel left out, isolated and 54% of Americans feel that no one knows them completely. In the United Kingdom, a third of them feels just as lonely almost all of the time.

We want to connect with like-minded people who want the same things we do, our tribe. To see our need to find our community, look no further than Meetup.com, a platform that connects people of similar interests. According to Wikipedia, as of 2017, there are about 35 million Meetup users spread across 225 Meetup groups in 180 countries.

Belonging to a group is much more than just having something to do on a Friday evening. When we start school, we are naturally placed in an environment where making friends and forming groups take place without much prompting. Even then, we still seek people whom we can relate to and essentially, like.

As we get older, we outgrow our friends and they too, outgrow us. Our path in life changes and what interest us when we were twelve stops being of interest years later. As adults, we get put into a group environment called “The Office” and we may luck out and work with people we actually like and become friends with but most people have “work mates” and “real mates” and never the twain shall meet.

That is, if people have that many mates to begin with.

Who do really connect with? Who really gets you? Remember, to really connect with someone requires a two-way conversation, you need to be just as interested in them too.

Self-Esteem Needs

It is human to want to feel good about ourselves. Self-esteem is about being confident in who we are and being valued for what we do. Mostly, we want to feel like we matter. Self-esteem is cultivated from a young age, from our parents and our teachers praising us for a good job done.

Some girls are told from a young age that they are pretty, some boys are told that they are the man of the house or some kids are told they are clever. As we grow older, we still prize these components of ourselves because these are the things we hinge our self-esteem on. If we are recognised for the things we identify with, it boosts our self-esteem.

We all have different things that boosts our self-esteem. Perhaps its your intelligence? Your work? How you look? Your creativity? Your ability to sing? Many people also weigh their self-esteem on their status such as socially or perhaps even professionally. Social media is a major driver of low self-esteem in today’s society because we measure our self-esteem based on not just our own value but our comparison of our lives with others online.

When we compare our lives with others online, it is not an accurate measurement since no one posts about a lousy day so all we see is a fraction of that person’s life. This comparison leads to envy which then leads to low self-esteem.

To decide what would boost your own self-esteem, you need to think about what makes you feel good about yourself. Forget about social media, comparing your life to others is a one-way ticket to feeling lousy.

Need to Self-Actualise

Finally, the need for us to self-actualise is basically being the best we can be. This need is achieving our potential, figuring out what gives us purpose and doing it. Maslow believed that we each have the means to achieve our potential and his initial profiling of people whom he believed to have reached this peak level were people like Albert Einstein and Henry Thoreau. In the original form of this theory, he believed that when individuals had their needs met at each level, they reach the peak, self-actualisation but in his later years, he recognised that this was not the case.

Like Maslow, I believe that we possess the inner resource to reach our potential. There are basically two categories of people, people who do not try at all and people who keep trying and eventually succeed. To achieve self-actualisation means having a purpose and passion that is unique and meaningful to you as an individual and having the resilience to keep going till you achieve your peak potential. In this level of need, your focus is devoted, unwavering.

What happens though is that many do not do the work of finding out what would give them the sense of self-actualisation. They haven’t found out what their purpose is and thus never get there. Before you can commit, you must know what it is you are committing yourself too. Search your soul for what your purpose is and focus on making it come true.

What about you? Have you found your purpose? What would self-actualisation look like for you?

Conclusion:

The people Maslow based his theory on were successful people of his time, he saw them as self-motivated individuals and saw their respective professional successes as a sign of self-actualisation. On hindsight, we now know that successes in your professional field does not mean that you have all your other needs met.

We have heard of starving artists, successful individuals who suffer from ill health and loneliness. These are people who in their respective fields might have reached the peak of their potential but have failed to meet the other needs in their life.

Instead, I think that the healthier way of looking at your own hierarchy of needs is determining which order of priority they are for you. For some, security is high on the agenda, for others, self-actualisation. Or perhaps a combination of the two will serve a purpose for you. Overall, even though some needs may hold a higher place for you, a balance is required for you to feel fulfilled in the end. All these needs exist in all of us, just that we see them more clearly at certain parts of our lives and we strive harder to meet them. In the end, balance is all you need.