Everyone has their own emotional needs. Be it in professional areas or personal areas, emotional needs require to be fulfilled to live life peacefully and positively. And, literally, there is nothing wrong with fulfilling your emotional needs. It is not wrong in relaxing and chilling out for a few minutes to feel positive.
If you’re aware of your emotional needs and fulfilling them from time to time, you’re likely to establish a great sense of relaxation, peace, positivity, and happiness. However, if you’re not fulfilling your emotional needs and are not aware of your actual emotional needs, you might likely feel sad, stressed, overwhelmed, or grief. But, don’t worry; in this blog, I am going to help you how in identifying your core emotional needs to fulfill them.
So, let’s get started.
According to psychology, we have nine emotional needs:
- Security
- Volition
- Attention
- Emotional Connection
- Connection to Community
- Privacy
- A Sense of Self
- A Sense of Achievement
- Meaning
Let’s read about these nine emotional needs in detail in the next section.
Nine Emotional Needs According to Psychology
1. Security
It’s a fact that we all need a safe place to live, breathe in, communicate our feelings in, love in, and whatnot. We all need an environment wherein we can all live fearlessly and a safe place that allows us in developing our potential. When our security need is not met, we generally tend to feel unsafe or insecure. When we feel that our security-related emotional needs are met we start feeling equipped.
2. Volition
Volition means to live autonomously according to our own needs and it can also mean living according to our own direction. if volition is unmet in our emotional needs, we might start having a frank or open conversation with our elders, leaders, or boss. We begin to be open wherein we should know our limits, control, or have clear boundaries. When this emotional need is met, we tend to have respect, love, and trust for everyone above our age, below our age, or of the same age.
3. Attention
Receiving attention from our loved ones, people who know us, our friends, or family members is important because we feel valuable because of it. Giving and receiving attention is like having a sense of peace and own self. If attention or emotional need is unmet, we don’t prefer communicating with our friends, family members, or loved ones. When this emotional need is met, we love spending quality time with our loved ones and family members.
4. Emotional Connection
In order to maintain emotional connections, we need to have connections with other people. If you’re someone with emotionally fulfilled connections, you tend to have love, friendship, and intimacy. If your emotional connection needs are unmet, you need to make them a priority because they are essential to living a positive life. You need to spend time with your friends, family members, and loved ones to feel emotionally connected.
5. Connection to Community
We are all social creatures and to live a healthy life, we need to keep programming our brains. In order to program it properly, we require to feel connected so that we can live a positive and healthy life. If we don’t feel connected to the community, we avoid socializing and this emotional need is always unmet. Therefore, in order to fulfill this need, we must keep socializing with others as well.
6. Privacy
We all are human beings and we all need space and time for ourselves in order to reflect on our experiences and think about ourselves. If your privacy or personal space need is unmet, you tend to feel lost and your self-identity gets evaporated. In order to fulfill this emotional need, try to have some me-time, try to spend some time with yourself, and more importantly focus on yourself. It’s not selfish to focus on yourself.
7. A Sense of Self
It’s not only important to communicate your feelings or socialize to stay connected, but you should also have a sense of yourself. We all need to have a sense of our worth because we all are a part of a group or community. When we don’t have a sense of self, we don’t recognize our worth and we don’t know how strong or powerful we are!
8. A Sense of Achievement
We all need the self-confidence to move ahead in our careers but importantly we should all have a sense of ourselves, our worth, and our accomplishments. If you don’t have a sense of achievement, you must start making a list of all your accomplishments so that you can gain insight into your worth.
9. Meaning
Whatever we do in life, we require meaning for everything so that we can set our accomplishments. When this emotional need is unmet, we lose connection with ourselves. Therefore, whenever you do something, find meaning so that you can resonate according to your ideologies.
I hope this blog helps you with understanding your core emotional needs and how to fulfill them.
Thanks for reading!
