Last week, I started a short series on the 7 universal needs that are essential to your well-being, and talked specifically about three of these, health, leisure, and autonomy, which I group together as the fundamental lifestyle and well-being needs. To recap, when you pay attention to and care for your own needs, you are regulating your nervous system, which allows you to stay more calm and centered. This leaves you feeling more energetic and increases your capacity to make effective decisions and perform well. This is especially important when you’re in a difficult situation, you have too much work to do, or you need to make an important decision, all of which can drain your energy and induce anxiety. 

When you know that one of your needs isn’t being met, you can start by implementing small changes. For instance, if you want to take better care of your health by drinking more water, you can start carrying a refillable water bottle with you as a reminder. Or once a week you could leave work earlier than usual to go to your favorite yoga or fitness class, filling your needs for autonomy, health, and leisure all at once.

If you tried something new to more effectively meet your health, leisure, or autonomy needs, reflect on how it went. If it went well and you liked the result, keep doing it until it becomes a habit. If it wasn’t quite right for you, consider what else you could try. 

This week, I’m going to cover two more of the essential needs, purpose and connection. I think of these as the needs that relate to your heart and identity.

Purpose

Purpose is about living a life with meaning. There are many ways to have purpose in your life and doesn’t mean that your job must be your passion - you can have purpose in many other ways. Purpose is one of my high-priority needs and closely connected to my core values. Some of the ways I meet my need for purpose are through mentoring and coaching, contributing to causes that matter to me, parenting, and writing this blog.

However, I’ve learned that I need to watch out for overcommitting myself, because then those things will cease to meet my needs and instead become burdensome. Similarly, I have a list of things that I feel I should do in order to be a good person or to help others, but would not actually bring me a sense of satisfaction or enjoyment or contribute to my well-being. I’m learning to let those things go because they’re not for me. If I really wanted to do them, I would have already. On the other hand, when I recently heard of a volunteer opportunity that could turn into a large responsibility, I felt a little tug in my heart, knew that it was right up my alley, and decided to say yes. While it did become busy and hectic at times, I set firm boundaries to make sure I wouldn’t overload myself while serving a meaningful cause, a delicate balancing act.

What are you doing to have purpose in your life? What might be missing for you right now that you want to add into your life? Likewise, what are you doing that doesn’t effectively serve your needs? Consider whether you can let anything go so you have more capacity for the things that really matter to you.

Connection

Connection is about relationships, affection, and community. Connection in relationships can come in a variety of forms - romantic partners, family, friends, colleagues, even pets. Likewise, you can find community at work, school, through hobbies and other interests, religious groups, online, etc. I shared several ideas for building and deepening your connection with others in this earlier post. 

With all the essential needs, quality is more important than quantity, and it took me some time to understand that this is true for connection. I used to look at the amount of time I spent with my kids each day as a measure of our connection, when really, the nature of how we spend time together (for example, being present vs. distracted) is more important. I have a lot of people that I want to stay in touch with but don’t see very often because we’re busy or don’t live close to each other. I’m not good at just calling friends or family out of the blue, so I’ve adopted a version of social snacking and regularly send text messages to people that I’m thinking about to check in on how they’re doing and share what’s new with me. I mentioned going on daily walks with my husband - that also fosters connection, in addition to my health and leisure needs.

How are you getting connection? What is a new habit that you can establish to build connections in your existing relationships? Or is there a type of relationship that you are missing right now that you could take steps to build?

As you become more aware of your own needs for purpose, connection, health, leisure, and autonomy, you will find that some of them are higher-priority for you than others. With finite time, you may have to make tradeoffs in order to meet your highest-priority needs - just make sure you don’t sacrifice a higher-priority need for a lower-priority one. And remember that you are playing a long game when it comes to well-being, so consider both the short-term gain and your longer-term needs. Next week, I’ll wrap up this series with the last, but not least, of the universal needs, security and esteem.