What Are the Differences Between Wants & Needs?

There was a 10-year period in my life where I was addicted to smoking cigarettes. I smoked in the morning before brushing my teeth, eating breakfast or even taking a sip of water. I smoked right before bed, after I had changed into my PJs, washed my face and prepared for the next day. I smoked at predictable intervals all day long: after meals, while driving, during any 10-minute break between activities. 

If you could rewind time, stop me on the sidewalk and ask me, “Brentan, do you smoke cigarettes because you want to, or because you need to?” I would have answered, without hesitation, “Because I need to”. 

At that point in my life, I needed cigarettes, and that wasn’t an exaggeration. Cigarettes were a lifeline for me. Besides being chemically dependent on them, I relied on them to chunk up my day into discrete moments where I could chill out, be quiet, and process my emotions. I relied on them to make me feel balanced in a world that rendered as ultra chaotic on my nerves.

The Confusion Between Wants & Needs

This is what adulthood looks like when we grow up being disconnected from our needs. As children, we become confused about our needs, which primarily happens for two reasons:

1. Bad things happened that shouldn’t have, and we shut down our emotional processing and connection to our needs as a result

   (Mom and dad got a divorce when we were young, a parent left or died, there was phsyical/emotional/sexual abuse, there was infidelity, mom or dad screamed a lot, etc)

2. Good things didn’t happen that should have, and because we didn’t know how to ask for what we needed, we learned to disconnect from our needs

   (We didn’t receive enough affection as infants because mom was stressed out all the time, we weren’t encouraged to explore our interests as a young kid because there was scarcity of time or resources, etc)

In other words, the trauma we endure when we are children, left unhealed, will cause us to be disconnected from our needs as adults. We become confused about our needs, our wants, and the difference between those two things; instead dependent on coping mechanisms that help us deal with our pain.

The Difference Between Wants & Needs

It’s important to be connected to our needs because true needs are always in our best long term interest. Our needs for air, food, water, shelter, community, companionship, autonomy, respect, etc. are all in our best long term interest to fulfill. By fulfilling our needs, our life becomes better tomorrow. 

Wants, on the other hand, don’t necessarily correlate with long term well-being. In fact, many wants, when fulfilled, actually contribute to our long term detriment. Receiving a trust fund, getting drunk tonight, losing 15 pounds, etc. may very well be in our long term best interest, but not necessarily. There’s a version of the story where receiving a trust fund deteriorates your relationships because you don’t have sufficient external pressure to grow as a human being, and you become fragile and unrelatable. There’s a scenario where losing 15 pounds might contribute to an overly physical sense of self-worth, and continued internal dissatisfaction because you feel like you always need more improvement.  

Put another way: needs refer to the conditions that must be met in order for us to live a balanced life; whereas wants are strategies we use to fulfill our needs. This is why needs inherently map to long term well-being, while wants don’t have such a correlation. Wants can either contribute to our long-term wellbeing, or they contribute to our long-term detriment. In order for our wants to be good for us in the long-term, we must understand which needs they map back to.

Ideally, we should be connected to our needs first, and our wants second. When we become disconnected from our needs due to past trauma, we rely too heavily on our wants to guide our decision making. The disconnection from our needs increases the likelihood that we will attach to wants that lead to our long-term detriment. 

In some cases, we become dependent on our wants, creating cycles of addiction where our wants feel like needs because we don’t know another way of neutralizing the pain. For instance, I felt like I really did need cigarettes, but that was only because I relied on them as a coping mechanism to deal with pain that I otherwise didn’t know how to deal with. If I had been connected with my true needs--the needs that allow me to prosper physically, emotionally and mentally--I would have viewed cigarettes as a long-term detriment to my well-being.

Wants Vs. Needs

Let’s look at a few wants vs. needs scenarios in order to understand the distinction in various situations.

Scenario #1 - Addicted to Cigarettes 

I wake up in the morning, roll out of bed, saunter onto the balcony and light up my first of many cigarettes of the day. Internally, this action registers as a need for me. Besides the chemical addiction, it helps me regulate my mood, and gives me ten-minutes to prepare for my day by being quiet. 

In truth, the cigarette is fulfilling a deeper need that I’m not consciously aware of. I’m not aware of it because I’ve pushed down my emotions and have disconnected from my body due to childhood trauma that has not yet been understood. So I don’t actually know what my deeper need is, and instead I’m stuck on the surface believing that cigarettes are a true need of mine.

Many years later, I will learn to unpack some of this childhood trauma, and I will see that cigarettes were a tool I used to fill my need for balance. I could have met that need through other means--through journaling, therapy, meditation, yoga, etc--but since I was disconnected from my need, I wasn’t able to see what might satisfy it that would also satisfy my long-term wellbeing, so instead I smoked half a pack of cigarettes a day for ten years.

Scenario #2 - Kiddo Wants Candy at the Grocery Store

You’re at the grocery store with your two-year-old. It’s close to Halloween, and they’ve updated their end-caps to push holiday candy and decorations. Your two-year-old immediately gets excited, and starts to plead with you to buy them some candy. While there’s nothing you hate more than telling your wide-eyed excited kiddo “no” to something they want, you also know that they’ve already had candy today, they threw their nap, and you’re planning to have birthday cake with dinner for a friend’s celebration. Candy right now is not a wise decision and is not in the best long term interest of anyone involved. 

Knowing that a more true need for your kiddo is healthy food and quality sleep, you opt to do the hard thing and tell them “no.” Depending on the day, your two-year-old is more or less willing to accept this decision. Let’s say on this particular day, they are cranky from throwing their nap, which results in a not-too-happy kiddo being denied candy. 

At this point, you try to redirect the kiddo’s attention to a toy you brought from home, hoping that they have an alternative need for play that you can meet while simultaneously denying them something they want. Kiddo doesn’t seem interested in play right now. You wonder if perhaps they can be sold on autonomy--the delight of walking around the grocery store by themselves instead of sitting in the cart. You ask and start to lift them from their armpits, watching closely to gauge their level of receptivity to the alternate treat of getting to walk around the store on their own. They feel relaxed in your arms, not fighting the attempt to lift them, which you take as a good sign. When you plop them on their feet on the ground, they stop crying and look up at you, and a sense of excitement is restored in their eyes. You look around for a clerk to help you locate a miniature shopping cart for the kiddo to use on their new walking-around-the-store adventure.

The candy is no longer the object of affection, and kiddo does not feel ashamed or guilty about crying and causing a scene in the grocery store because mom has stayed calm, connected and focused on creatively meeting kiddo’s needs. 

Scenario #3 - Resisting the Breakup of a Bad Relationship

You find yourself at the beginning of a painful breakup. Your partner has been unfaithful and has told you about it. They initiated the breakup, even though you mentioned that you were willing to work out the issues that led to the infidelity. As your partner turns to leave your apartment, potentially for the last time, you find yourself a crying mess. You beg for them to stay and talk to you. You beg for additional interventions. “Let’s see a couples’ therapist!” You say. It’s too late. They’ve already closed the door and are headed to their car. As they drive away, you trace their tail lights until you can no longer see a trace of them, and you know it’s over.

That evening, you find yourself tossing and turning in bed. More than the breakup, you find yourself ruminating over why you found yourself so desperately trying to save the relationship. After all, they weren’t your end-all-be-all. There were red flags and communication issues from the beginning. You never really felt like you could be yourself or fully relax around them. It’s clear that you wanted something that wasn’t actually good for you in the long-term. So why did you try so hard to save this?

You discover that wanting to be in a relationship, despite it’s less than perfect fit, was a coping mechanism that diluted the near-constant pain you’ve felt from childhood. You find that you were willing to tolerate circumstances and behavior that should not have been tolerated simply because it was less painful than being alone. In this contemplation, and with help from friends, family and therapists in the coming months, you come to understand that painful experiences in your past caused you to be disconnected from your needs for companionship, intimacy, and respect. Because you were unable to see those needs for what they were, they manifested themselves through the less-than-ideal want for a relationship at all costs, even if it was not the right fit.

Based on this newfound knowledge, you set about to reconnect with your needs, and to align your wants in a way that benefits your future self.

Reconnecting With Needs

All of us experienced adverse childhood situations that negatively impacted our ability to connect to our needs. Many of us are so disconnected from our needs that we allow our wants to pull us around willy-nilly. We feel helpless and victimized by the world because we don’t trust ourselves to behave appropriately in response to life’s challenges. We’ve seen ourselves make matters worse so often, that we forget we have the power to behave in our long-term best interest. 

The difference between wants and needs is nuanced. It is something to pick apart situation by situation. Knowledge and understanding is what will assist in reconnecting to our needs. And reconnecting with our needs will assist in generating wants that serve us today, tomorrow and for the rest of our lives. 

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