Maslow’s theory of needs explains in a six-tier pyramid the needs of human beings. It’s usually represented as a five-level pyramid, but Maslow added another one later on in his life.
These needs can be divided into two types, deficiency needs (d-needs) and “being growth needs” (b-needs). The former is classified into physiological (food and clothing), safety (job and home stability) and relationships (love and friendship); while the b-needs can be divided into self-actualization and values.
The motivation to achieve the deficiency needs lowers as they are satiated, while the motivation to achieve being growth needs increases as they are satiated. In the first ones, you satiated them and that’s it, while the b-needs the more you achieve, the more you need.
The individual must more or less (not 100%) meet the “lower” needs before going to meet the “higher”. The person seeks to self-actualize higher and higher. Until some d-needs are not met, the person gives them the priority.
Let’s go over each of the tiers of the pyramid. Going from the bottom up, from the most basic needs to the more elaborate and optional.
Physiological needs: biological requirements for human survival (air, food, drink, shelter, clothing, warmth, sleep and, for some people, sex.)
These needs are the most basic of the pyramid, as they are essential for our body to work. If our body doesn’t work correctly accomplishing the other needs is a lot harder.
Keeping our nutrition and fitness up to date is key to living long and well. Our body needs gear, oil and a whole lot of things. If one of the teeth of one gear is broken, the gear may keep working putting more pressure, with a higher risk of breaking. Once a gear stops working, that line stops with it.
Now, let’s translate that to our bodies. B12 vitamin is not something we miss the next day after failing to ingest it as our body has a reservoir. It´s something we see as time passes, we start feeling tired, depressed, cry over nothing, lose hair, brittle nails, etc. This may stay the shortest topic on this post, but. please, go check out other posts as it´s my passion.
We should give our body what it needs, so we can look for the next needs in our pyramid.
Safety needs:
Once the body is “satiated” to a point where our most basic needs stop being the top priority, we start looking to achieve the next level in the pyramid. This tier could be called the predictability tier and is essentially having control of our own lives.
We can divide the safety tier into two main needs, financial and emotional safety.
Let’s dive first into financial safety as it’s the one most of us would put in the lower part of the safety tier. Being financially safe means having our physiological needs covered in the regular and having enough reserves to last enough to achieve financial safety again. As reserves, I mean food, but also clothing, sleep and shelter in a stable way.
This translates into having enough money or assets to be able to acquire food, clothing and a place to sleep. The first two are pretty easy to acquire if you have the money, but the shelter and the deeper sleep that comes with a good place are usually a lot harder to come by than going to a supermarket. The perfect way to have the need for shelter met in a stable way (safety level) is to own our place as it makes it a lot harder to find yourself on the street. Luckily, there are some ways to hack the system even for young people, doesn’t mean it’s easy to get there.
Being completely financially stable means being financially free, a term that has taken off and is here to stay. We will be going on about financial freedom in other posts as it’s something I would like to achieve myself and help others do it too.
Let´s go to the next part of our safety tier, the emotional safety needs. Inside this one, we can include the protection of laws and order, that at the same time, is something that is easier to get with higher financial safety.
Inside the emotional safety needs, we also find social stability because it gives the security that we have someone to rely on. Does having control over most aspects of our lives ease the need for love and belongingness? Does having our lives sorted out to make it easier to find and belong to a tribe?
This one is closely related to the next tier, love and belongingness.
Love and belongingness need
After the needs of the body – physiological and safety needs – have been met, we get to a higher level, and we start on the psychological ones. The first level of our psychological needs is made out of our craving for love and the feeling of belonging.
Before explaining how they work, let’s explain the most important. Friendship is by definition the emotion or conduct of being friends, a relationship between friends. Out of the dictionary, we define friendship as the ability to communicate with another person without words, of being content together without talking, being able to talk for hours without sensing the time fly, etc.
To accept someone means not feeling the need to change them, not thinking about how they could improve from our point of view. Every single one of us is unique and shouldn’t change our ways just because it doesn’t conform to all the social norms. Gloomily, as humans, we need to be accepted by others. We are pack animals and we need to be accepted to be part of the pack, almost no one wants to be a stray wolf.
Trust, by definition, means a firm belief in the strength or character of someone or something. You trust a bridge will not break and then use it, even if it’s not something you consciously think about. Trust in someone is believing they will have your best interests at heart, have your back through thick and thin.
Love is, by definition, a deep affection or a great interest and pleasure for someone, in our case). Love is something humankind is obsessed with, we fight, makeup, get scared about, sad, etc; to put simply is war.
I like to think about these needs, love and belonging as a well. The more love you get and the more you feel you belong, the fuller your well. If you receive water (good and stable relationships) you will have more water to give to other people. It’s said that people who are given no love or have no pack turn bitter more easily, it might be true.
Those who belong to a pack or group take more easily the group’s habits, good or bad. Let’s see an example of this, between 1978 and 1981, some investigators working for Simon Fraser University carried out “Rat Park” an experiment that proved the relationship between drugs and society. In Rat Park, the rats that were part of a mischief when offered drugged water chose clean water; while rats in isolation were more likely to choose the drugged water. You can read more specifics and more results in the Rat Park post.
We can find a whole lot of stories and facts to talk about like people raised by wolves, etc. But if rats, as intelligent as they are need their mischief, humans need society a lot more.
Esteem needs
On to the fourth level of Maslow’s pyramid of needs, where we find esteem needs, more specifically self-esteem and the desire to be respected by others.
Let’s start by what’s self-esteem. Self-esteem is what we use to describe a person’s perceived worth. It’s extremely subjective, it changes drastically inter and intrapersonally.
Self-esteem is a combination of different factors and needs. One of these needs overlaps with those on the third level, such as the sense of belonging. Another one overlaps with the safety needs inside the 2nd tier.
The principal factors that affect self-esteem are self-confidence, identity and the feeling of competence.
Starting with the last one, the feeling of competence is not the same as being competent. A competent person in something is one who is able to do it successfully and efficiently. Being competent takes a combination of things such as skills, training, experience and knowledge. Usually, people are competent in different things as most people don’t have the time and drive to learn all the things. Feeling competent is not the same as being it, that’s something we should always take into account in our careers and in our personal lives too. We can be competent in a specific skill and somehow feel incompetent. Something for another post.
The next one is self-confidence, “a feeling of trust in one’s abilities, qualities and judgement” tied to the feeling of competence and in control.
And lastly, identity. Who are you? That question is one we should make to ourselves often in a “deep” way. Not in a “I’m [insert your name]”. What makes you tick? What makes you shine? What makes you feel like a child with a new toy? What makes you forget the world? What’s most important to you? What do you spend most of your time doing?
Those five together create someone’s self-esteem or destroy it.
Self-actualization needs
Fifth tier needs, self-actualization needs, mean the self-fulfilment of someone’s potential through personal growth. In one sentence, the self-actualisation needs of a person are the drive to become the best version possible of ourselves. Its what drives us to become better and better every day, that’s why it’s a being or growth need, the more you grow the more you want to grow.
This need can be observed in Renaissance men and women, after the dark ages they were starving for knowledge. But not a specific branch of it, they want to learn everything they could about anything they could get their hands on. “Astronomy, bring it on; human body and medicine, bring it on; fauna biology, here we go; arts, please.” And this list doesn’t include everything. For me, the biggest example of this is Leonardo Da Vinci, he was curious about a lot of things and resulted to be really good at them, something marvellous.
BUT, self-actualization should not be only about knowledge as we would be simple robots. Here comes the sixth tier, yes, there is a sixth one.
Values
Later in his life, Maslow described a sixth level, the Intrinsic Values tier. Inside this tier, Maslow included truth, perfection, goodness, perfection, excellence, justice, fairness, and you can imagine the others. When the person gets here they are looking for the ultimate completion of their person. their character.
Remember, someone doesn’t have to achieve 100% of a tier to pass to the next one like in most games. They just need to satiate enough of the tier to be on the lookout for the next step. Even if a person is hungry or homeless, they will try to be nice (in my experience). They are even more likely to help you out because they KNOW how it feels. Of course, there are cases where they will lose or bend their beliefs to push through.
Maybe this tier shouldn’t be the one the top, “last” to be reached. Maybe it should be next to the pyramid, where you can climb both at the same time. Comment what you think about this, please.
Maslow´s theory, unlike other theories, takes the human being as a whole in a holistic way, with its body, emotions, soul and all that jazz. It’s used in the classroom, if a student is tired and/or hungry (physical and emotionally), s/he won’t be able to focus as his/her mind will be subconsciously looking for what s/he is missing.
Maslow’s theory of needs is important because it explains how a person’s problems in one moment in their life can affect them from then on. People who went hungry when young are more prone to have a problematic relationship with food for the rest of their life. It can be buying too much/too little, eating too much/too little. These are eating disorders such as anorexia, bulimia, binge eating, pica, rumination disorder, restrictive, etc.
Just as this happens with food, it happens with affection and the rest of the tiers. Maslow’s theory ends up being a possible explanation for the source of many mental health problems.
Of course, Maslow’s pyramid is not perfect and has weaknesses, such as being a utopia, an ideal reality that results impossible. The other biggest weakness of this theory is its individualism. The pyramid could somehow represent society in theory, but in practice, every person grows or not at different rates, and we shouldn’t compare ourselves.
Each person has their own problems and will get to their solutions, which will not be the same as those another person would apply.
This is my first official post because I plan on using this theory, and others I might find useful, to look for my global health and bring you with me on that journey, please join me. It would mean so much to be able to share my problems and joys and maybe create a supportive community that may or may not have similar problems to me.
If you´re still here, thank you so much for reading, please, make sure to check out some of the posts linked to this one as I’m pretty sure you will enjoy them too.
HEART, MIND & GUT 
Leave a comment