Early morning thoughts about needs.
Since submitting my PhD thesis, I've been giving my body time to get various of its equilibria back. Muscles unclenching, tracts tracting, and sleep patterns starting to pattern again.
Around 4a.m., prompted by a Big Think article posted over on the Book of the Face, I found myself having thoughts about pyramidal models. Posted to the Twitters at the time, but I'll keep it here for posterity.
How about, instead of treating Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs as a mountain that people have to climb from level to level, you treat it more like a healthy food pyramid?
Satisfy all of the needs in balanced proportion with each other, to maintain your healthy balance as a person.
Worth considering also: when some of your needs aren't being met, and you have no ready means of meeting them, then you look for more of other needs to fill the gap - to make you feel full, even if it's not the best option for your health.
A poverty across any needs can have a lasting effect on someone's psychological wellbeing. On their morale, their self-efficacy, their ability to live a better life.
It is at its most stark and obvious among those who lack in those "eat most" needs like food, health and security, but those are not the only deficits that can have a crippling effect on people.
Those large basic needs should certainly get triaged first in emergencies, but if the support is only limited to keeping people alive at a subsistence level, you could still end up with the psychological equivalent of malnutrition if the "eat less" needs are not fulfilled at all.
Long term, people need sufficient energy to grow, pathways to grow along, and a good balance of all of those psychological trace elements to keep them healthy, and keep them going.
Thinking that starving someone will encourage their growth is perverse.
Around 4a.m., prompted by a Big Think article posted over on the Book of the Face, I found myself having thoughts about pyramidal models. Posted to the Twitters at the time, but I'll keep it here for posterity.
How about, instead of treating Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs as a mountain that people have to climb from level to level, you treat it more like a healthy food pyramid?
Satisfy all of the needs in balanced proportion with each other, to maintain your healthy balance as a person.
Worth considering also: when some of your needs aren't being met, and you have no ready means of meeting them, then you look for more of other needs to fill the gap - to make you feel full, even if it's not the best option for your health.
A poverty across any needs can have a lasting effect on someone's psychological wellbeing. On their morale, their self-efficacy, their ability to live a better life.
It is at its most stark and obvious among those who lack in those "eat most" needs like food, health and security, but those are not the only deficits that can have a crippling effect on people.
Those large basic needs should certainly get triaged first in emergencies, but if the support is only limited to keeping people alive at a subsistence level, you could still end up with the psychological equivalent of malnutrition if the "eat less" needs are not fulfilled at all.
Long term, people need sufficient energy to grow, pathways to grow along, and a good balance of all of those psychological trace elements to keep them healthy, and keep them going.
Thinking that starving someone will encourage their growth is perverse.