[reposted from my substack]

Once a man painted a picture of a fearsome beast. The creature began haunting his thoughts and dreams, causing him great distress. The beast became so real in his mind that his fears threatened to consume him. The above is a parable I heard at a mindfulness retreat conveying the idea that much of our suffering is based on subjective beliefs that are not grounded in reality. How much of our unhappiness is based on what we imagine rather than what is?

We experience emotional pain in response to unmet wants and needs. The esteemed psychologist Abraham Maslow had set out a hierarchy of needs, which are safety, security, connection, and esteem. While he did not intend for these needs to be in a pyramid, overall he did hypothesize that the lower needs were ones more fundamental to our survival and will take priority over higher needs when they are missing. However, Maslow's theory does not elaborate on the details of what it means to have our needs fulfilled. There can be a lot of subjective interpretation when it comes to judging whether or not our needs are being met.

There are situations where pretty much all of us would agree that fundamental needs for baseline levels of safety, security, connection or esteem are not met, e.g., being held at gunpoint, serious illness, or loss of loved ones. Most of us also would agree that a baseline level of functioning in our physical and neurophysical systems is needed for emotional wellbeing. For example, some serious mental health conditions (e.g., severe depression, anxiety, addiction, mental illness etc.) result in states of neurochemical imbalance that inevitably would cause unhappiness in all who suffer these conditions. We all require environments that offer some levels of physical and social safety and an operational range of neurochemical balance in order to feel ok.

When we move beyond extreme cases of life hardship, subjective interpretations start to creep in. Our subjective perceptions of what qualifies as "enough safety or connection" will differ and depend on our personalities, past experiences, culture, and expectations. For example, one person could feel safe just having a roof over their head while someone else may require months or years of emergency savings to feel safe. Seeing a friend once every few weeks might be enough for one person while an extreme extrovert may ...

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