If I told you that you have fundamental physical needs like food, water, shelter and clean air, this would not be a surprise to you. We all know this intuitively and spend a good deal of our day and money obtaining these (e.g. rent and food is over 50% of my monthly budget).
But when I talk about the fact that we also have fundamental psychological needs, this is not always as intuitively appreciated. Yet, these psychological needs (and whether they are being satisfied) play a significant role in whether our subjective experience of life is positive or negative.
What is a psychological need?
A physical need is fairly easy to understand. If you don’t have food and water, you will get sick and die. Both the need (food) and the outcome (die) are very tangible and easy to understand.
Psychological needs are more nebulous. Psychological needs are qualities of our experience that if absent lead to poor wellbeing (and in extreme cases, death). If we don’t have people that love and care for us, we run the risk of becoming socially isolated and we know social isolation is associated with a range of negative effects. If we don’t have a sense of meaning and purpose, we can become depressed and aimless and lose the motivation to move forward.
Whilst the dangers of not having our psychological needs met are typically less than that of our physical needs, the failure to have our psychological needs met is commonly associated with mental ill health which itself can be incredibly damaging. Hence understanding our psychological needs and taking conscious action to address them can be a powerful antidote to mental ill health.
So what are these fundamental psychological needs?
Sheldon et al. (2001) took on this question, pitting 10 candidate psychological needs against each other to determine which ones are most strongly related to the most satisfying events in our life.
The 10 psychological needs they explored were taken from various psychological theories and models from the last 80 years:
Autonomy – the sense that we’ve had some control and choice in relation to our actions and activities
Competence – feeling effective in your chosen activities
Relatedness – feeling a sense of closeness with others
Physical thriving – the feeling that you have good physical health
Security – a sense of order, predictability and safety in your life
Self-esteem – a sense of personal worth
Self-actualisation – a sense of meaning and purpose and the feeling that you are moving towards a more ideal version of yourself or your life
Pleasure-stimulation – the experience of pleasure (as opposed to pain)
Money-luxury – having wealth and material goods
Popularity-influence – being recognised, respected, and having influence over our peers
In a series of studies, Sheldon et al. got participants to consider the psychological needs above and rate:
- how important each of the needs were to them (endorsement)
- how integral the meeting of these needs was in the most ‘satisfying’ events in their life
- how strongly associated each of these needs was with positive and negative mood states
A clear pattern emerged that held even when testing in different cultures (US vs South Korean), time frames (how long ago the ‘satisfying event’ was) and when comparing ‘satisfying’ and ‘unsatisfying’ events.
The most important psychological needs in terms of endorsement, and relationships with satisfying events and positive moods were:
Autonomy – the sense that we’ve had some control and choice in relation to our actions and activities
Competence – feeling effective in your chosen activities
Relatedness – feeling a sense of closeness with others
Self-esteem – a sense of personal worth
The second most important group were:
Physical thriving – the feeling that you have good physical health
Security – a sense of order, predictability and safety in your life
Self-actualisation – a sense of meaning and purpose and the feeling that you are moving towards a more ideal version of yourself or your life
Pleasure-stimulation – the experience of pleasure (as opposed to pain)
The least important psychological needs (in fact, these were sometimes associated with poorer outcomes) were:
Money-luxury – having wealth and material goods
Popularity-influence – being recognised, respected, and having influence over our peers
When participants had their psychological needs fulfilled, it was associated with an increase in positive mood. However when their needs were not fulfilled, it led to an increase in negative moods.
So what does this all mean?
The personal acknowledgement that psychological needs exist and that some of them might not be fully satisfied in your own life, gives you a starting point for thinking about what changes to make in your life. Specifically, rectifying an absence of need fulfillment can decrease negative mood states, and increase positive mood states.
Let’s consider the top 4 psychological needs. Note that these are not in order of importance, as there is individual and cultural variation in which needs are the most important. The four needs discussed below though emerge frequently, across cultures.
Autonomy
Complete choice about everything in your life would likely be a bit paralysing. I can barely pick a cereal from the cereal aisle without a meltdown!
However the opposite situation in which your life is totally dictated by the needs and decisions of others would be misery making.
The challenge is to find a space in the middle, in which your responsibilities to others are matched by aspects of your life in which you feel in control.
Psychologists in the workplace have known this for a while. Whilst we can’t give workers in an organisation complete autonomy (there are specific jobs that need to be done, goals to achieve), we can give workers some choice in how those jobs and goals are fulfilled, as well as some freedom to carve out other projects of their own. When that is done, workers generally report higher wellbeing.
So perhaps you feel your choice of degree was not your own (e.g. family pressures), but there is room within a degree to stamp your own personality on it. Take the time to delve into the areas of your degree that most interest you. Explore where your degree intersects with other fields that are more interesting to you. Consider that with the qualifications you will have because of your degree, a range of choices are opened up to you, that you would not have without the degree.
Basically, actively seek out those spaces in your life, where you can exert some control and make mindful choices about how to progress in those areas.
Competence
Students who select a degree/course, and then find it difficult, are having their psychological need of competence challenged. Put simply, we want to feel we are good at the main things we do in life.
Developing competence in an area is a combination of brute talent/ability, capacity for hard work and persistence, and the implementation of good learning strategies.
At least 3 of these are within your capacity to control.
You can:
- Up your work-rate, so you are allocating more time to your study and learning;
- Accept the idea that talent and ability aren’t always great predictors of being good at something and that persistance and ‘grit‘ are often better predictors of success;
- Employ different, evidence-based learning strategies to accelerate your learning;
Not only do these strategies help you develop competence in a given area, they actually teach you that ‘building competence’ is within your reach. You will discover that you are actually quite good at learning new things, which is a form of competence in itself.
Relatedness
We know that loneliness and social isolation are challenges that some students face. Some reports say that loneliness may be the next big public health crisis.
The psychological need to belong and feel cared for and valued by others is considered by some to be of equal importance to our physical needs. That is, without a ‘tribe’ we would quickly become ill and die. One of the reasons humans have survived and thrived so effectively is because of our ability to exist and function in groups.
There is no question that there are individual differences in how much or what types of social interactions we all need/want. I find I like having time to myself, but feel comfortable knowing there are friends and family nearby that I can call on. Other people enjoy being in direct contact with others far more frequently than me.
Regardless of the level of contact with other people you enjoy, take a moment to reflect on those social groups where you feel like you belong – groups in which you are appreciated, cared for, and have a purpose and role. This might be your family, a groups of friends, a group of work colleagues, a club or society, or an online community.
If you reflect on this topic, but struggle to identify where you belong, it might be worth making this psychological need a priority in your life. Perhaps it is as simple as devoting a little more time to your friends, or reconnecting with family and friends from the past. If this isn’t possible, it might mean reaching out to make new acquaintances by joining new groups. Keep in mind that developing close friendships takes time but you can start the process quite simply, by putting yourself in new and interesting contexts.
Self-esteem
Self-esteem, as a term, has lost some of its appeal and use in recent years. That is because the self-esteem movement, which basically tried to convince everyone they were awesome, failed miserably. Turns out you can’t just tell people they are awesome, and hope that it sticks.
But the term and concept still has legs, it is just that self-worth is developed with a little more hard work than simply being told you are amazing.
You can see how pursuing the first three psychological needs (autonomy, competence and relatedness) would contribute to a growing sense of self-worth. If you felt you had some control over your life, were getting better at the things you enjoyed, and felt accepted and cared for by others, this would translate into a more robust sense of self-worth.
And in essence, these are the basic ingredients of a sense of self-worth: taking charge of your own life to get better at doing stuff and doing this in a context in which you get to connect with people you care about and who care for you. These don’t have to be grand gestures either (e.g. saving the world). Start simple by working harder at your studies, whilst also trying to connect with other students within your degree. Or maybe take up a new hobby and connect with others as you develop your skills in that hobby.
Mental fitness and psychological needs
You might be aware, if you read this blog regularly, that I use the term mental fitness a lot, and am also building a mental fitness course for 2019.
As part of that course, I will talk in more depth about psychological needs, as understanding them is central to increasing your mental fitness.
In fact, I increasingly view mental fitness as how good you are at developing the knowledge and skills required to implement regular habits that satisfy your psychological needs.
If you don’t know or understand your psychological needs, how can you know what it is you are working towards?
Final words
Once you have a language to describe certain experiences, it increases your ability to exert some control over those experiences.
For example, the more adept you are at describing your emotional state, typically the more capable you are of taking action to modify your emotional state.
The language of psychological needs can help us focus us on the what needs to be in place, for us to lead the most satisfying and rewarding life.
This can help reduce the phenomenon that the discussion of ‘needs’ often gets hijacked by wants and desires, that are far more susceptible to powerful marketing.
In fact, it is a really interesting exercise when contemplating spending a significant amount of money, to ask yourself ‘what psychological needs will this good/service fulfill?’. I’ve been doing this recently with the urge to purchase a new mobile phone. As much as I feel I ‘need’ the phone, I am unable to really identify a psychological need that would be fulfilled by the purchase that aren’t already adequately fulfilled by my existing phone and other devices. At best the purchase would simply provide some short term pleasure, but with no increased capacity to be more autonomous, competent, connected or increase my self-worth.
I’m not suggesting you subject every purchase and life decision to an analysis of the underlying psychological needs that might (or might not) be satisfied, but it is a simple mental tool you can use to select between choices, or provide a counter-point to strong desires and wants.