320: The Six Human Needs

Chris Sandel: Hey! If you want access to the transcripts and the show notes and the links talked about as part of this episode, you can head over to www.seven-health.com/320.

Hey, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Real Health Radio. I’m your host, Chris Sandel. I’m a nutritionist and a coach and an eating disorder expert, and I help people to fully recover.

Before we get on with today’s show, I just want to announce or mention that I’m currently taking on new clients. If you are living with an eating disorder and you want to fully recover, then I would love to help. I know there can be ambivalence about this; I know full recovery can feel like something that’s just so far off in the distance, but even if there is that ambivalence, I still believe that I can help, and it doesn’t matter how long the eating disorder has been going on – whether this is something that’s been going on for a year or many decades, we can still work together.

So if you want to recover and you want to reach that place of full recovery, then please send an email to info@seven-health.com. Put the word ‘coaching’ in the subject line, and I can send over the details to you.

So let’s get on with today’s show. This episode, I’m going to be talking about the Six Human Needs. This is something that I actually went through – I think it was in December time – as part of a group coaching call. When people work with me, I do one-on-ones; there are group coaching calls, there’s group meal support calls, there’s a whole programme I’ve created called The Fundamentals of Full Recovery that has all these modules in it. So there’s lots of these parts or lots of things that are one-off when we work together.

As part of the group coaching calls, some of them are focused very much on let me just do one-on-ones with people while other people are watching, so everyone gets to benefit from that, but often I’ll go through a particular exercise or a particular topic and we’ll just all chat about this and discuss it. What I went through in December was this thing called the Six Human Needs.

00:02:10

The Six Human Needs

I first heard about this – it’s got to be over a decade ago, and I first heard about it through Tony Robbins. I can’t remember if it was in his one of his books or from watching something online. I know that he got it from I think a person called Cloé Madanes, so I’ve got her book. The book is called Relationship Breakthrough: How to Create Outstanding Relationships in Every Area of Your Life. A lot of what her work is built upon is that we all have these six human needs and that we’ll all try and find ways of meeting them, or at least meeting four of them.

As part of the group call, I shared what I’m going to cover today, and people really found it helpful. So I thought this would be a good way of demonstrating some of the stuff that we do as part of that group and some of the things I focus on when working with clients. Because I think often, people think about recovery in this very narrow band, thinking about the things that we think about with an eating disorder, where it’s very much about food or it’s very much about movement or those kind of things.

And that is a lot of what I focus on, because if you’re not changing the energy balance, for example, then you’re not getting very far. So yes, we want to have those very fundamental pieces in place, but I think there is a lot more to recovery than just that. So this is something, as I said, I discovered probably a decade ago. It was something I used to use a lot with clients, and then probably over the last couple of years has fallen out of my routine. I have at this stage I don’t know how many different worksheets and things that people can do – well over 100, I would say. So like everything, some things come in and some things drop out, and I go through phases of focusing on things more in this way or that way.

So it was a good reminder in December time when I pulled this thing out again and went through it of just how helpful it is. So what I want to do as part of this call – not part of this call, part of this podcast episode; I’m used to being on group calls. But as part of this episode, I’m going to go through the Six Human Needs, and then I have some prompts at the end that I think would be useful for you to do some journalling on and some reflecting on just so you can get an understanding of how this is lining up for you and how this fits into your life bigger picture, but also how it connects with the eating disorder.

In terms of the Six Human Needs, the first four of these needs are needs that we will all meet, and we’ll find ways to meet them. We can meet them in ways that feel very positive and are very constructive for our life; we find ways that are neutral; and there are ways where it is very destructive, or there is a lot of collateral damage that is caused, but we’re still choosing to meet the needs in that way.

00:05:04

The need for certainty

The first need is that we all have a need for certainty. Certainty and this need for it, it’s not just a nice-to-have. This is a real survival mechanism. We need to feel that we have this base level of certainty. We all are striving for this in our lives. And we can get this in different ways. Obviously, we want to have a roof over our head, we want to have enough money coming in, we want to have the ability to be able to feed ourselves. These are the very basic ways of doing this. But we tend to have more of a need than just these absolute basic things. We like to find certainty in other ways.

And people can do this in a variety of ways. It could be that someone follows the exact same routine every day, and by having those routines, that gives them this sense of certainty. For someone, it could be around their faith. Having this faith in God, going to church, this is how they get their sense of certainty. It could be through stable relationships or a friendship group and having those people in one’s life, being able to talk, interact with those people, hang out with them – that interaction gives someone this sense of certainty.

People can get it from their work, from their career. You can take this to the extreme and it be workaholism and someone gets their sense of certainty by working every moment that that day gives them. You can get it through alcohol. You can get it through drugs. You can know that “Every time I take this stuff, I feel certain that it’s going to have this impact on me and that’s how I get certainty.”

It could be that I have this identity of myself as “I will always find a way”, so no matter what’s going on, if I have this identity of “I will always find a way”, then I can feel fairly certain in that. I feel certain in my capabilities, in my ability to figure things out.

If we think about this through the eating disorder lens, this is how people often feel this need for certainty. They feel it by focusing on a particular weight, and whether they’re at that weight or they’re trying to get to that weight, that’s how they get their sense of certainty. They can get it by restricting and having rules around the foods that they eat or the timings that they’re eating or these different things connected to that. They can get their certainty by eating only ‘healthy’ foods.

For a lot of people, when they reflect on the eating disorder, lots of the behaviours, lots of the rules, lots of the thought processes are all about “How do I get this sense of certainty?” As I said, we will all meet these first four needs in a variety of ways; it’s not typically that people have just one way of meeting them. There are a variety of ways. Some do these to a higher degree or to a lesser degree, and some of them are positive, neutral, or negative.

00:08:08

The need for variety

The next need that we all have is a need for variety, or uncertainty. This can feel like the opposite of certainty, so “I need uncertainty and certainty, or I need certainty and variety.” But they’re actually pretty related to one another.

The thing is, if someone has absolute certainty, they get to a point of being bored. We all want excitement, we all want surprise. I mean, there’s a lot of surprises we say that we don’t actually want because it’s not the right type of thing, but we all crave this mixture of certainty and variety.

There’s a lot of overlap in the things that can provide certainty can also provide uncertainty, because really, when we think about uncertainty or variety, it’s something that changes our state. For example, “I can dependably know that if I do my routines, that has an impact on my state, so that gives me this change in state, which is a positive thing.” “I know that I can depend on sitting down and doing prayer and using my faith; that will change my state and it will change my outlook.” “I can do things with my food, I can do things with my exercise, and I know that will dependably change my state.”

There could be other things outside of just the things that provide certainty. It could be watching TV or a series. It could be watching the same thing that you’ve watched before. It could be going travelling. It could be going to new restaurants. It could be shopping. It could be skydiving. There’s all of these different ways of meeting this need for uncertainty.

For all of us, we all have a level of certainty versus variety that we need. For some people, they crave the smallest amount of certainty and then they’re fine to then have a very varied life and they don’t need routines and they’re happy to go to extremes and that’s just how they’re wired. And there are other people where their level of variety and what it takes for them to meet that need is a lot less, and their desire and need to have certainty is much higher. We all fall differently on that spectrum, but we all do have a need for both of these.

00:10:24

The need for significance

The next need is the need for significance. We all want to feel that we are special or unique. Again, we can look at this through the real positive ways of doing this or we can look at this through the negative ways of doing it. Someone can feel special and unique because of talents that they have, being able to do certain things and feel very accomplished in being able to do those things. But someone can also feel unique in the “I have it worse than anyone else. This is a much bigger problem than anyone else is going through or most people are going through.” So I can get my uniqueness in something being so bad that that’s how I think about my significance.

For some people, they get uniqueness from building themselves up and doing lots of good in this world, and for other people, it’s “How do I tear other people down? That’s how I feel more of my significance.” You can get your sense of significance through violence. One of the things that Tony Robbins will often say as part of these talks is you put a gun in someone’s hand, you feel fairly significant. Especially if someone then gets into gangs or gets into violence, you feel pretty significant, and people are reacting to you in a very specific way when you’re in that situation. So there can be this significance. You can feel certainty, you can feel variety all in that moment.

There are obviously other ways of feeling significant. You can dress uniquely, so you can be very much into clothes and style and that’s how you feel significance. You can have lots of tattoos. You can do it through your career and where you’ve moved up the corporate ladder. It could be the letters that you have after your name, the number of PhDs that you have. It can be the amount of money you have in your bank account. It can be through religion and faith and all of the things that you’re doing in that area, and it just shows how pure you are or how devoted you are, so that is how you get your significance.

It can be “I’m really compassionate, and my compassion and being compassionate with others and serving others and giving to people is how I get my sense of significance.” It can be from being a parent or from looking after your parents as they get older. We all have different ways of meeting this need for significance.

00:12:43

The need for love + connection

The next piece is then the need for love and connection. We are social creatures. We are meant to be in connection with other people, and it is really important for us to have this. So when we’re thinking about love and connection, it’s the importance of relationships. This could be with a wife or a husband or a partnership or a marriage or whatever it is, but it can also be through friendships. It could be through work colleagues. It could be through those different kinds of connections.

But we can also get connection through being in nature. Once again, through prayer or God or religion. We can feel connected through beautiful art or creativity. It can be from petting a dog or from an animal.

It could also be from creating really big problems, and this is then how I get attention from people. This is something that kids will often do, but it’s also something that adults will do. I’ve had many clients say to me that their eating disorder was started in part because this is the way that they are able to have love shown to them, attention shown to them, and this was really the only way that they’d learnt of how to have people show interest in them.

With each of these four first human needs, we will all find ways to meet them. This could be ways of actually doing things, but it can also be lying to ourselves and telling ourselves different things or framing things in a certain way so that we meet these needs. And when I say ‘lying to ourselves’, I’m not saying that we’re all just these manipulative creatures, but we will all find ways of meeting these four needs.

The final two needs are what Tony Robbins and Cloé Madanes talk about as being these higher order needs. Actually, for many people, they’re not meeting these needs on a regular basis, and from their perspective, these are the needs that are really the things that will add to the quality of our life and the fulfilment of our life. It’s not that the first four can’t do these, but as I’ll go through in a moment, they can be a little bit limiting because of our ability to become comfortable with those things.

00:15:08

The need for growth

The first of these extra needs, the fifth need, is growth. We really want to feel like in life, we’re growing. And if we’re not feeling like we’re growing, often we feel like we’re dying inside or often we will start to have different problems show up in our lives because we really do have this need for growth.

And growth can be taking on new challenges; it can be going back into further education. It might be starting a new career in your thirties or forties or fifties. It could be really focusing on, “How do I become a better parent?” and looking at ways that can happen and putting the time and energy into going through programmes connected to that or other ways of being able to learn that. It could be learning to be better able to regulating your emotions and doing this in a really healthy way. It could be about just being able to identify one’s emotions.

This growth can happen in lots of different ways, and if we’re thinking about this from a recovery standpoint, recovery can very much meet someone’s need for growth. And it can lead to a lot of uncertainty; it can lead to a lot of challenge in terms of “This is not how I’ve been doing things, it feels so strange to be doing things in a different way”, but recovery can definitely be ticking the box for growth.

00:16:35

The need for contribution

The final need is contribution. This is the desire for us to contribute in meaningful ways outside of ourselves. So it’s not about me, it’s about we. We can do this in big or small ways. I think often when people hear of contribution, there’s this feeling of “I have to be the next Mother Teresa or some figure that is doing this monumental thing on some large scale”, and it definitely doesn’t have to be that way. It can be changing something in your local community. It could be changing something just within your immediate family. It could be doing some online group where you’re supporting people.

So finding ways that you are contributing above and beyond yourself and where this feels very meaningful to you – and this could be some kind of volunteer work, working at a soup kitchen, or using the skills that you’ve learnt through your work that can then be applied in some other way. For example, Doctors Without Borders, so doctors going and working overseas in regions where they’re needed and taking the skills that they already have and doing this in a different setting and feeling this contribution by doing that.

So those are the Six Human Needs that we all have. As I said, we’ll find ways to meet the first four; the extra, the other two, are real bonuses, but they’re often where things really add to the quality of one’s life.

00:18:09

Why growth + contribution are so important

Everything that we’re doing is connected to meeting these different needs. So if you reflect on every decision you make, every choice that you make, all of the different hobbies that you have or the behaviours that you do, we can pretty much bring it back to these different needs.

One of the things that Tony Robbins says is that if you find something that meets three of these needs at once – so one thing that you do meets three of these needs at once – this will be something that you keep coming back to because it has this real power of doing something really important with this one action.

For example, if I’m thinking about this from an eating disorder standpoint, most people, when they start to think about this, recognise that the eating disorder is meeting their needs, one, in a pretty high way, but two, it’s meeting multiple needs. For example, “It’s meeting my need for certainty; by being able to do these different behaviours, it’s meeting this need for certainty. It is also meeting my need for variety because it is something I’m able to lean on to be able to change my state. So when anything comes up, whether that be an unhelpful thought or a sensation or an uncomfortable emotion, I’m able to use the eating disorder to quickly change that and avoid that feeling, so it then meets my need for variety because I can change things very quickly. It can also meet my need for significance because this is how I feel special or unique in this world.”

So just using that as an example, this one thing, the eating disorder, is then meeting these three needs. And for a lot of people, that’s where they then get stuck because often it is the best way that they’ve found to meet those needs.

What most people do if we think about the first four needs is that it doesn’t actually take that much to meet those four needs. Often, once we hit these, we enter into our comfort zone. We find ways in our everyday life to meet our need for certainty and for variety and for significance and love and connection, and we will typically settle at those places. Often, this is where people can really stagnate and stay at this place.

This is why the growth and the contribution thing helps to move that needle. It helps us to keep moving forward, and it can often then help us to reach these other needs in a much more deep or meaningful way. So rather than settling for some level of connection, it allows us to experience connection or love on a much more meaningful level because this contribution opens that up, or because that growth and our ability to have difficult conversations or be with difficult emotions allows us to then have deeper connections, for example.

So really starting to look at, “How am I meeting these different needs? Am I meeting my needs for growth and contribution?”

00:21:14

How our passions/hobbies tend to meet these needs

What I would often say as well is if you look at the things that you spend the most time on or are most passionate about outside of the eating disorder, you’ll see that these things meet your needs. This is something that I talked about when I did this in the group; we looked at a lot of the people in the group, and I used some of their backstory in terms of things they’re interested in or things they’ve done with their careers or whatever it may be, and we were able to take this one thing that they spend a lot of time on and we were able to see how it’s meeting these various needs.

If I use myself, for example, I’ve commented on the podcast numerous times that I have a real love of golf. Golf is my absolute number one hobby. I spend probably more time than most doing this. I love watching videos on golf, listening to golf podcasts, playing golf, practising, all of these different things.

If I put this through the filter of the human needs, when I think about golf, it provides me with certainty. I know what’s going to happen when I show up in terms of golf is something that I know the rules, I know what’s going to happen when I show up to a course in terms of it will provide me with this same level of joy; I will get to be in nice surroundings, I’ll get to be in nature. There’s some very dependable aspects of golf.

But there’s also a ton of variety, because when I say I know what’s going to happen when I show up, I also don’t know what’s going to happen when I show up. Some days I’ll play really well, some days I won’t play so well. So there is this uncertainty and variety and excitement that then comes about because of that, because I don’t know how it’s going to go and I’m wanting to get better, and is this going to be a day that that happens or is it not going to be a day that that happens?

I definitely get significance through it. I’m constantly working on how to lower my handicap, become better at this game. And while I don’t have this be my whole identity, there is some level of significance I get from getting better at this, and it’s something that I want to work at.

In terms of the connection piece, one, it’s a great sport for me to be able to connect with other people. There is so much time between hitting a shot that you get to have proper conversations with people. A round of golf will take anywhere from three and a half to four hours, depending on how many people I’m playing with, so over that time, you get to have conversations with people. You get to connect. It’s one of the ways since moving up to Scotland a couple of years ago that I’ve made friends.

So there’s definitely the connection piece of being with humans, but there’s the connection piece of being in nature. So many of the golf courses are really breathtaking in terms of the scenery, especially around here, being either on the cliffs if I’m playing links golf, or near where I am, there’s lots of hills and beautiful scenery. So there’s this connection with nature, so that adds to this connection piece.

In terms of the growth, as I said, I’m constantly practising. I’m wanting to get better at this thing, and this is my creative hobby. I know some people are into playing guitar or playing piano or painting or whatever it is, but this is what golf is for me. So there’s a lot of growth that happens as part of this.

Contribution, I’m not sure how it necessarily meets that need, but at least the five of them, it’s meeting it and it’s meeting it in a pretty significant way. And it’s not my only way of meeting these different needs, but it’s meeting five of them, and that’s part of the reason why I keep coming back to this thing, because I’ve found something that I truly enjoy doing, and from my perspective is meeting these needs in a very constructive way. That’s why I keep going back to this thing.

I would suggest, if you’re a little stumped, like, “I’m not sure about these different needs or how things are being met”, think about the things that you’ve spent a lot of time on – which could be things that you’re currently doing or it could be things that you did as a teenager or in your twenties or at some point in a past life, before the eating disorder occurred. How did you use to spend your time? Look at it through the lens of the human needs and how it was meeting each of these different needs.

00:25:37

Journalling prompts

What I want to do is set you a little bit of homework at the end of this episode. I want you to take some time and answer these questions – and I would also add, I want you to spend some time after this just reflecting on this more generally, thinking about the different human needs and thinking about how this fits in to you and your life. So I’m going to ask some questions, but I would also say after that, just doing some journalling more freely connected to everything that I’ve covered as part of this episode.

The first question is: How do you attempt to meet each of these needs?

What are the things that you are doing so that you are meeting each of these needs? As I said, there are going to be multiple things that you’re doing. It’s typically not just one thing. There’s typically lots of different things that you’re doing, and some of them can be positive, neutral, or negative. But how are you attempting to meet each of these needs?

At the same time: How do you know when this need has been met?

For example, how do I know when I’ve met my need for certainty? Because I can be doing all these things, or I can be doing something specific with the intention of getting my need for certainty met, but really, does that feel like it’s then meeting that need? And how do I know when that need has been met?

These questions feel like they’re the same, but I think they’re a little bit different and coming at it from a different angle. So how do you attempt to meet each of these needs, and how do you know when this need is met?

The next question is: If you were to put these in order, what is your order?

You can do this in two ways. You can do this where you look at your current life – so let me look at my current life and the way that I’m currently living and the behaviours that I’m currently keeping up, and if someone was to look at that life and objectively look at how I spend my time, all of these things, what order would these be in?

The other way you can do it is, now that we’ve gone through this information, now that you’re starting to reflect on this, what would you want the order to be in an ideal world? What would you want this order to be?

For example, if you’ve got certainty as your number one need, which is pretty much the case with nearly everyone I work with because there’s just this huge overlap with people who’ve got an eating disorder and certainty being really important – so there could be the recognition that “At the moment, certainty is my number one need, and I can rank all the needs in order based on my current situation, but also look at, if I was to create how I would like things to be, what order would I put them in?”

I then want you to rate how successful you’ve been at meeting these needs.

When I use the word ‘success’ here, I mean how successful are you at meeting these needs in that it is adding to the quality of your life? For example, you can meet the need for certainty in many ways, but some of them feel like, “Wow, that’s really adding to the quality of my life” and others feel like “That’s not helpful in really adding to the quality of my life.”

So the difference between “To get my need met for certainty, I drink a bottle of wine each night” versus “The way I get my need for certainty is I have this really lovely, deep relationship with my partner, and I feel absolutely so certain in the trust that I have in that relationship and that’s how I meet my need” – both of those could be meeting your needs, but in terms of how it feels in terms of adding to the quality of your life, it can feel very different.

So, “Reflecting on the ways that I’m meeting my needs: how successful do I feel this is in creating the kind of life that I would like to be having?”

And then the final question that I have is: What would happen if you switch one of your most important needs for something else?

For example, if your first need, as I said, is certainty, what would happen if you said, “You know what, I’m going to make my first need love and connection” or “I’m going to make my first need significance”?

I would also add here, “What would happen if I switch my most important needs and I found ways to meet that without the eating disorder?” Because I think what would also be helpful is starting to reflect on, “How do I meet these needs if I remove the eating disorder? If I have the eating disorder removed from my life, or at least just for a thought experiment, if I put that to the side, how am I meeting these needs?”

So often, what people find is that “Actually, the eating disorder is the thing that is fundamentally meeting all these needs, and when I remove that, I don’t have something to fill that void.” The problem with that is if I don’t have something to fill that void, then I’m just going to keep going back to my old behaviour. As I said earlier, we all find ways to meet these needs, and we all need to be able to meet these needs. So if I’m removing this need for certainty and that’s what the eating disorder is giving me, how am I able to meet that in some other way?

The reality is, in the beginning, you might not be able to meet it to the same degree or with the same level of “Yes, I feel so certain or dependable on this thing.” But at least you can be bringing in these new ways of being.

And there can be this period where it feels a little wobbly and unsure, but the more you’re able to do that, the more that you learn that “Oh okay, this thing does provide me with a level of certainty”, and you can start to recognise, “While the eating disorder was providing certainty for me, there was a lot of downside to the certainty that it was providing for me.” So really starting to explore, “How can I meet these needs without the eating disorder?”

00:31:44

You don’t have to figure it all out in advance

The thing I would also add with this is you don’t have to figure all this out in advance. I think this could be a trap of “Hey, I can’t work out how I’m going to do this, so I can’t get started with recovery.” I think what often happens is as you start to make changes, things start to open up. You start to think differently. You start to recognise things in a different way than when you’re in the midst of the eating disorder.

So what I would suggest is, do what you can at this stage to do this reflection work and then you can get started with recovery, or you continue with recovery if you’re already started. Don’t have this be the thing that puts you off doing recovery, because I think the more you move along in your recovery journey, the more that things will change, but also the more that you will start to perceive things differently.

So that is it for this episode. I hope that you found this useful. I do really recommend spending some time after this one doing some journalling and reflecting on this. There is going to be a transcript for this. Normally it can take a couple of days after this goes live, but you can keep checking back if this is something that would be easier to be able to read after you’ve listened to it this first time.

But yeah, I really hope that you use this in a really pragmatic way and that this isn’t just something that gets listened to and forgotten about, because I do think that when you start to think about things through this lens and really start to understand, “How am I meeting these different needs?”, this starts to really open things up for you.

That is it for this week’s episode. As I said at the top, I’m currently taking on new clients. If you want help in your recovery, I would love to be that support and to be able to provide coaching as part of it. And as I talked about earlier on this episode, there are lots of different aspects that are included as part of the way I work together. If you want to do that, you can send an email to info@seven-health.com and just put the word ‘coaching’ in the subject line.

That is it for this week’s call. I will catch you again next week with another new episode. Until then, take care, and I will see you soon!

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