Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

Why is self-wellness really so important? What is the goal? Well, there’s this guy named Maslow who made a pyramid ranking the needs of people. At the bottom, are the basic needs of food, shelter, and water. Each step of the pyramid leads one to self-actualization – the ability to be insightful into one’s own actions and understand their own beliefs and coming to terms with their actions and choices in the past. 

 

Sounds amazing doesn’t it? Only a few people that you know are probably in that step. Again, this is because each step has to be met before one can achieve the next one. If we don’t feel safe, we aren’t going to care about our relationships with other or our own self-esteem. We will only be wondering where the next meal is coming from. 

As a therapist, sometimes when crises come up in relation to future safety such as possibly losing a house or financial stress, deeper reaches into feelings and thoughts beyond those related directly to the stress are not able to be addressed. Sometimes it does make for a stall in therapy but those needs are important as well to be addressed and addressed first in order for more progress to be reached. 

Furthermore, if you meet someone and find that they are unable to regulate their emotions or interact with others well, sometimes they may be more concerned about their physical or safety needs than anything more related to the mind and spirit.

Mind, Body, & Spirit

In the last post, I talked about what spirit is. But what about how it connects to Mind & Body? Simple. 

If you aren’t in agreement with another person’s spirit (belief system), this affects your relationship with them – whether you become angry or frustrated with them or they become hurt from your judgment on them. This is called an emotional reaction which is your mental health that in turn affects physical health.

If you don’t like your own belief system – maybe because of what you learned growing up led to a belief system in which looking back you disagree with your decisions – you may feel guilt (emotional reaction/mind) which can lead either to changes or to shame. Shame leads to more harmful and sometimes risk taking reactions to self and others leading in the end to even more guilt creating a vicious cycle.

You could also have a decreased self-esteem from regrets of past decisions and because of the guilt. This lack of self-esteem can lead to under or over eating that affects physical health.

With the full explanation, one can see how it's important to be healthy in all areas of one's person. It's never going to be a 100% perfect kind of day. However, developing ways of keeping that health in each area helps to get you back in balance more quickly.

Spirit

So what happened to spirit from the first to the last post you ask? Well, I’m glad you did. Now, spirit can be defined in multiple ways. Spirit or spirituality is often connected directly to one’s religion and their belief system whether that is God, Allah, Buddha, Gandhi, Confucius, The One True Power, or any other higher power that a person chooses to believe in. However, when you break it down w/o necessarily having religion in it, it’s the connection of a person to their belief system.

A belief system is a person’s own moral, views, and decisions on how they want to live their life. Yes, sometimes religion tells us that but sometimes people don’t believe everything that their religion tells them (like some Christians acknowledging homosexual relationships as fulfillment of love while others believe it to be a sin). Many of our morals and views on living our life have come from the environment that we were raised within – our family. We learn right vs wrong at a very early age because our parents most likely punished us when we tried to strip off our clothing and run around in our diapers. We learned that it is not socially acceptable in our society (unless you live in a nudist community) to walk around naked so we learned to be ashamed of this behavior and wear our clothes in order to gain acceptance from others around us. 

But I want to go back to the fact that this is each person’s own belief system and we all have different ones. Most are not right or wrong – just different. 

For example, most people have a tendency to want to help others – some people think it’s most appropriate to extend that help to only those they know and care for, others donate to charities and think that’s the best or only way to help others, some don’t donate but might be willing to help a stranger who appears to be having difficulties. Each person is living within their own moral code.

Mind and Body

Our physical body and our mental health are directly connected to each other. When we are in physical pain such as being sick or having a broken body part, we do not feel like ‘ourselves.’ Everyone in a lesbian or heterosexual relationship experiences this during that ‘time of the month’ that the female has cramps. Don’t deny it – if your significant other is being a little bit more naggy you immediately ask her if it’s that time. And why you ask? Because her physical pain (not to mention hormones) makes her cranky – which is the mental health/emotional part of the body-mind connection. Nobody likes being in pain. We’re suffering and want others to participate in and/or acknowledge our suffering – it’s human nature. 

Furthermore, there has been much research that shows that people who suffer from mental health diagnoses such as depression or anxiety, develop physical symptoms that are sometimes mistaken for actual medical ailments. As a mild example, someone experiencing anxiety has physical symptoms such as sweating, breathing heavily, and a ‘fluttering’ heart. Those who struggle with anger or stress management, develop high blood pressure as a result – which in turn leads to heart disease. 

In the reverse, exercise has been shown to decrease depression and increase self-esteem. There are some research studies that say that diet can impact focus for those diagnoses with ADHD as well as improve self-esteem.

Without one being stable, the other part of us is at risk of being attacked so to say. If we maintain a healthy physicality, our emotional stability will increase. If we increase our emotional stability, our physicality will be at less risk for disease.

Mind

Mind refers to one’s mental health. Mental health is sometimes interchanged with a person’s emotions but emotions are really just a part of mental health. It also includes the way that you think and those thoughts lead to reactions. 

 

When it comes to thinking, some people have a more negative, realistic, or optimistic perspective. This influences your thinking because it puts a spin on those thoughts. Thoughts create feelings or reactions. If the thought was a negative one, your feeling is more likely to be negative. If you can try to reframe the thought to be more positive, you will have more positive emotions and reactions.

For example, you might see a co-worker walk by and have a dirty look on their face. You might think it is toward you and you would then most likely react coolly toward her the next time you see her or try to avoid her. However, if you change the thought to thinking she is having a bad day at work or got bad news in her personal life, you wouldn’t change your reaction to her except to maybe be slightly cautious when approaching her and even try to smile more in her direction to brighten her moment. 

Another example is thinking that your significant other should be able to read your mind and know what you want. This is an unhelpful thought because it isn’t true – no one can read your mind. More about this in communication (since that’s what is missing!).

Your thoughts can be influenced based on your experiences both past and present. Sometimes past experiences can be clouding your judgment on current situations. This is where a therapist is sometimes beneficial because it’s difficult to sort through the differences and not allow past experiences to hinder our current thoughts, feelings, and communications. 

Sometimes people do have mental health diagnoses which can be referred to as added mental obstacles that hinder their thoughts, feelings, connections, and other aspects of daily living. Some of these diagnoses can be treated with medicine, therapy, or a combination of the two. Left untreated, there can become a variety of complications with their self image and relationships with others.