Com101 – Burbol’s Hierarchy of Happiness

(Above: the result of merging Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, Rosenberg’s Nonvilolent Communication needs, and Burbol’s discoveries of needs required for happiness and healthy communication.)

Every item in the following breakdown is a valid human need.  These are the needs behind every warning light on our internal emotional dashboard.  As you read the following text, know that you personally deserve to have every need on this list met.  You are allowed to thrive.  You are allowed to have a life that includes every item on this list so long as you do so in health ways.  The entirety of this series is based on how to get our core needs met in healthy ways, but it starts with recognizing that sometimes our core needs are not being me.  As you read the needs below, some needs will feel good, and some might give you a little twinge.  Take note of the ones that give you that twinge.  Those are unmet needs that is trying to alert you.  Those are needs that require some form of action or healing.

Here is a breakdown of Burbol’s Hierarchy of Happiness.

What do you find yourself craving from these lists?  What feels like a twinge in your life right now?  Those are unmet needs.  You will never be happy until you learn to address those needs in healthy ways.

A few changes to call out:

• I renamed it to Burbol’s hierarchy of “happiness.” I’m breaking away from Maslow’s model which is a motivational theory while my model is a theory of needs as they relate to emotions, achieving happiness, and healthy communication.  My primary concern is making a tool to aid with the goal of this series: getting our core needs met in healthy ways using self-mastery and healthy communication.
• Esteem now includes “self-healing.” This includes trauma, childhood assumptions, coping mechanisms, and survival mechanisms that we’ve carried forward from childhood when our dependency on our caregivers fell short and our needs were put at risk.  This is a need that often unconsciously stands in the way of us being able to satisfy many of our other needs.  Those other needs could be from any of the six categories.
• Belonging & love was renamed Interdependence.  I want to note that “privacy,” “consent,” and “boundaries” are among the additions.  These needs are crucial when it comes to healthy communication.
• The category Cognitive needs has been added. I use the word cognitive as an adjective relating to the definition of cognition: “the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses”[1].  (Author’s note: after doing more research on “cognitive needs” and Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, it’s come to my attention that a version of “cognition” has been added to a diagram of Maslow’s model on Wikipedia.org.  “Cognitive” appears between esteem and self-actualization and an article titled, “need for cognition”[2] has been sited.  I just want to clarify, our definitions of “cognition” are different, and our resulting category placement is different.  Their definition includes “a need to understand and make reasonable the experiential world” and I’m talking about a need to use our abilities simply for the sake of feeling the experience.  This leads to a need for regular stimulation of our human senses and abilities so we can experience the full spectrum of life and living.  Regardless, I’m breaking away from Maslow’s model.)

When any of our core needs are not being met, we will find that we are unhappy.  From there we get to choose what we do next.  We can choose unhealthy things like pretending we don’t need these things, ignoring our unmet needs, or seek alternate forms of comfort like food, distractions, and other coping mechanisms.  We can choose an unhealthy resolve to sacrifice some of our needs in favor of other or pressing needs, or another person’s needs.  We can also choose unhealthy ways of giving away our power with assumptions and blame.  We can choose unhealthy forms of communication; we can yell, sulk, or act out. 

We can also choose to stand in our power and take ultimate responsibility for getting our core needs met in healthy ways.  We can choose to call a checkin & timeout.  We can choose to heal our situations, misunderstanding, and past traumas.  We can choose how and when we communicate.

We get to choose how we respond and that is where much of our power is found.  Our choices become our perspective, thoughts, actions, behaviors, habits, patterns, and personality.  We get to choose what we do when our needs are not being met and those choices, toxic or healthy, will create our reality.  What have you been choosing?  What will you do differently?

Dear reader, let me pause here for a moment and say a few things very dear to my heart.  Every need on the lists above are basic human need that you are deserving of and allowed to pursue in healthy ways.  I’m not saying you are owed any of these things by the world or anyone in it, nor am I saying you must ask permission or somehow earn the right to have your core needs met.  I’m saying, these are basic human needs that fall under “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”  Don’t sacrifice them, give them away, or give away your power to choose.

You are allowed to be happy.  You are allowed to thrive.  You owe it to yourself to thrive.

If you have an internal voice, an actual person, or a human organization in your life that says otherwise, then someone is or was trying to control you.  You are allowed to pursue each and every one of these needs without permission or approval from anyone, provided you are considering how your actions impact the world around you and the rights and needs of others.  Furthermore, be suspicious of anyone suggesting you delay the fulfillment of any of your needs to some nebulous future moment.

It often will take time, energy, coordination, and practice to get all of one’s core needs met in healthy, non-toxic, ways.  You are solely responsible for that.  No one owes you anything.  You are allowed to be happy, but you are the one who is responsible for making it happen in healthy ways.  There is no guarantee that all our needs will come together for us from one day to another, but we are all the captains of our own ships, and we all have the right to aim for the horizon.  Again, you owe it to yourself to thrive.

Just as you are responsible for getting your core needs met in healthy ways, others are responsible for getting their own core needs met in healthy ways too.  That means you are not responsible for anyone’s core needs but your own.  I’m talking directly to the people pleasers out there, “you are not responsible for getting anyone’s core needs met but your own.”  You can and you should put your core needs first while encouraging others to do that same with their own core needs.  You should not put your needs second to another or sacrifice your needs.  Those who would put your needs in jeopardy are not your friends.  You deserve people who want you to thrive, who encourage you to thrive, and who celebrate you every step of the way.

When we all agree to take responsibility for putting our own needs first using healthy means, we all win.   We can trust others won’t be expecting us to guess their need.  We can trust they won’t be blaming us or asking us to sacrifice our core needs in favor of theirs.  Yes, all of us will need help from time to time, but no one can pour from an empty cup.  Let’s all ensure we are filling our own cup and not just everyone else’s cup.  When we all fill our own cup first, it will overflow, and we can share that excess with ease.  When all of us agree to take this approach, there will be an abundance of overflow to go around.

In the next article, I’m going to focus on how we can unconsciously hide from that word “happiness,” by inventing ways for it to be okay to not get all our needs met.

[1] “Cognition”. Lexico. Oxford University Press and Dictionary.com. Archived from the original on July 15, 2020. Retrieved 6 May 2020.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Need_for_cognition – “Need for cognition” – Retrieved 7 Dec 2022.