What Are Human Needs?

Needs are the conditions that must be met in order to sustain life and experience meaning. When our needs are met, we experience positive emotion; when our needs are unmet, we experience negative emotion.

While this may be theoretically simple to understand, I’ve found that most people are tragically unskilled when it comes to mapping a negative emotion to an unmet need. I say this because I have been--and sometimes still am--one of these people. When I feel a pang of something unpleasant, it isn’t immediately obvious to me what my unmet need is. What’s often more obvious are my interpretations about a particular situation or my judgments about another person. I mention that this lack of skill is tragic because as long as I am unable to map a negative emotion to an unmet need, I remain unlikely to get that need met. Instead, my thoughts about the situation have bogged me down in my opinion of right and wrong-doing, where I am often the one in the right, and others are in the wrong. These ideas keep me disconnected from my needs and alienated from other people and the world, pretty much guaranteeing that my needs will continue to be unmet, thereby producing more and more negative emotion.

How do you typically handle negative emotions? Do you stop and take a moment to map a negative emotion to an unmet need; or do you entertain thoughts of right and wrong-doing, nurturing judgments and interpretations of events? Unless you have a literacy of human needs, you probably practice the latter.

In order to meet your needs and experience more meaning in life, you will need to expand your language of needs. This article presents a layout of human needs in order to help you with your needs literacy, thereby maximizing your ability to understand where your negative emotion comes from, and to experience more positive emotion as a result.

What Are Human Needs?

There are many ways to label and categorize human needs. In my high school psychology class, I remember briefly learning about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Later, I was introduced to Marshall Rosenberg’s system of Non-Violent Communication, which is based on an awareness of human feelings and needs. Both of these models have proven quite helpful in expanding my literacy of human needs.

Below I have separate human needs into four categories: Survival, Interdependence, Autonomy, and Higher-Order. These needs are compatible with the systems above, but are organized somewhat differently in an attempt to consolidate the lessons into less buckets, with the hope that they become easier to remember.

Survival Needs

Most people are familiar with the basic human survival needs, which we can also classify as physiological needs. These include: 

• Air

• Food

• Water

• Shelter

• Security

• Rest

• Protection 

• Movement

• Procreation

• Healing

These are the most foundational of human needs, upon which our survival depends. When these needs are not met, no other needs matter. This is why we become hangry (irritable as a result of hunger), panicked when we see our bank account approaching zero, delirious when we haven’t had rest, psychologically stuck if we lack movement, frustrated when we lack sexual expression, or terrified when a life-threatening virus threatens us. 

Interdependence Needs

Interdependence needs are the needs we have that are related to other people. These needs include:

• Inclusion

• Appreciation

• Support

• Cooperation

• Reassurance

• Empathy

• Emotional safety

• Closeness

• Consideration 

• Community

• Love

• Respect

• Trust

• Understanding 

• Touch

• Celebration

• Compassion

• Affection

• Justice

These needs are an important aspect of our relationships with others, including with our family, friends, communities and working environments. When these needs are missing in our interactions with other people, we are likely to feel a vague sense of negative emotion, a deep knowing that something is off, even if we aren’t quite able to put it into words.

We know our interdependence needs are met when we feel a sense of harmony in our relationships; when we are satisfied with the communities we are a part of; when we feel safe and compelled to contribute to our groups; when we feel at ease in the presence of others.

While these needs relate to other people, it is important to note that we cannot demand that other people meet our needs. Instead, when we realize that we have negative emotion with regard to other people in our life, the best thing to do is follow this four-step process for identifying an unmet need and asking for its fulfillment:

1. Pause and ask yourself what unmet needs the negative emotion maps to

2. Ask yourself what it would look like to meet those needs (this is a guess)

3. Translate whatever comes up from #2 into a doable request, something that another person could actually do (this is a guess)

4. Communicate both the need and the request to the other person or group, without demanding that the request be fulfilled

   1. If the other person or group is in a position to fulfill your request, then you can evaluate whether your guess was actually correct. You’ll know your guess was correct because the negative emotion will be neutralized. On the other hand, if you still experience the negative emotion, you’ll know that your request was not an exact match for your unmet need.

   2. If the other person or group is not in a position to fulfill your request, it’s important to respect their freedom. Perhaps they are not able to fulfill your request now, but they might be in the future. Perhaps they will never be able to fulfill your request because they have contrasting values. Either way, it’s important that other people never feel you are trying to manipulate them into doing things. Instead, use your personal freedom (an Autonomy Need covered in the next section) to determine whether your relationships are in your best long term interest. You have the freedom to decide which relationships to nurture. 

Autonomy Needs

We all have needs related to our personal autonomy. While interdependence needs correspond to the needs we have in relation to other people, autonomy needs are the needs we have in relation to ourselves. These needs include:

• Honesty

• Creativity

• Balance

• Authenticity

• Freedom

• Choosing dreams/goals/values

• Choosing our plans for fulfilling our dreams/goals/values

• Celebration

• Inspiration

• Self-worth

• Meaning

• Fun

• Leisure

• Learning

• Competence

• Mourning

• Clarity

When our autonomy needs are met, we feel secure within ourselves; we enjoy our own company; we are driven to do and accomplish new things; we feel an internal sense of meaning that cannot be dislodged by outside events. In other words, when our needs for autonomy are met, we have great self-esteem.

While Survival Needs are the most basic of all human needs, Interdependence and Autonomy Needs share the same level of importance. Often, when our Autonomy Needs are not being met, neither are our Interdependence Needs, and vice versa. This is because our relationship with ourselves and our relationships with others are two sides of the same coin. 

Higher-Order Needs

When we become adept at meeting our Survival, Interdependence and Autonomy Needs, there is still one more level at play. These are our higher-order needs, the needs that become important if we want to experience a life of supreme meaning and fulfillment. These needs look like:

• Beauty

• Harmony

• Peace

• Order

• Purpose

A life of meaning is our birthright. But meaning doesn’t mean much if we don’t have food, if we don’t have harmonious relationships, if we don’t have personal direction and freedom to make our own decisions. My philosophy teacher frequently tells his students that it’s pointless to listen to his lectures if they are food-insecure or if they haven’t figured out what to do for a living. If we attempt to meet these higher order needs without fulfilling our most basic needs first, at best we will end up confused; at worst we will end up depressed, anxious and wondering why life feels like it's full of friction. 

Summary of Human Needs

 A literacy of human needs is necessary if we want to understand our positive and negative emotions, and develop productive coping mechanisms. Not only will it help you understand your own inner workings, it will help you understand the inner workings of other people. In this way, you will develop compassion and understanding for people you were previously frightened by or triggered by.

You will also learn to take responsibility for your feelings and for getting your needs met. Becoming aware of and connecting with your needs means you will be less passive aggressive, less manipulative, and you will stop wishing other people to read your mind about what you want. As a consequence, you will get your needs met more often and experience more positive emotion as a result.

 To simplify everything you just read, here is a way to visualize human needs as a pyramid, where the most basic needs are at the bottom, and the highest-order needs are at the top:

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