The Basics: Physiological Needs in Maslow’s Hierarchy

26 May 2021

I have always wanted to know more about Abraham Maslow and, as he made an appearance in last week’s blog, it seems an opportune time to take a closer look at the stages of his hierarchy of needs.  We will start at the base and move upward in an attempt to understand what he was on about.

At the base of Maslow’s hierarchy are physiological needs, specifically air, food, drink, sleep, warmth, and exercise.  I tend to think of these as food and shelter, but the full list is much more provocative.  Think of being without air.  I had a 15-year-old cousin, Denise Dewar, die of cystic fibrosis because her lungs couldn’t function properly.  Today, hundreds of thousands of people infected with COVID-19 are praying for ICU beds and ventilators to allow them to breathe.  Yet I take breathing for granted.

And what about food?  Through six decades of life, I’ve never once seriously worried about where my next meal was coming from nor have I had to ask if I could afford a next meal.  That same good fortune applies to drink, sleep, and warmth.  Yet my grandfather C. was a WWII POW who escaped from three German camps and told us he often survived by eating grass while on the run.  I never saw Grandpa not clean his plate of every scrap of food he was offered. 

These recollections are not included to elicit sympathy for my dear relatives but to illustrate how little digging is required, even in a healthy, relatively prosperous life, to find loved ones who couldn’t always access to the physiological needs I take for granted. Do you, too, take them for granted?

And the German soldiers who imprisoned my grandfather—did you know that methamphetamine was issued to German soldiers as a means of providing them the energy to march nonstop for days at a time?  Or that Japanese Kamikaze pilots were instructed to use meth to keep them awake long enough to forfeit their lives while crashing their planes into military targets?  It would have been engrossing to ask those soldiers about sleep, another of Maslow’s physiological needs.

Maslow was raised by two Jewish immigrant parents who left Kiev to escape Czarist anti-Semitism.  He was born in 1908, the eldest of seven children, in Brooklyn.  He did not get on with his mother and reluctantly (and unsuccessfully) followed his father’s instructions to study law.  As a teen, Maslow believed masculinity was defined by physical prowess and tried to improve his appearance, and the impression he created, by weightlifting.  He failed at that endeavour given his natural tendency to hang out at libraries reading books all day (Nicholson, 2001 cited in Wikipedia, “Abraham Maslow”.)  Even in Brooklyn, gangs of boys threw rocks at the Jews as they chased them. Fortunately for psychology, Maslow couldn’t stand law and left university only to return to pursue the study of the psyche.

For readers who remember, last week’s blog was about the relationship between responsibility and well-being.  If we accept that responsibility is necessary for well-being, then we implicitly accept the premise that the attainment of Maslow’s physiological needs is a necessary first step toward well-being.  If true, we cannot be well without air, food, drink, sleep, warmth, and exercise.  Think about that.

Being self-responsible, at the most basic level, means doing the best you can to breathe good air through lungs for whose optimum function you strive.  Similarly, well-being implies that we seek the highest quality food, drink, and sleep that we can manage.  Even ambient temperature and humidity are environmental factors over which we often have control.  When was the last time you breathed early morning air coming off a large body of water on the edge of a forest?  Did you portage, canoe, or hike to that destination ensuring that your muscles and circulation system got the movement they require? 

None of this is included to induce guilt. It is included to 1) make Maslow accessible and 2) to demonstrate how much control even those of limited means have over their lives i.e., we have the power to choose exercise, good food, air, and clean water.  Be well.

Dan Chalykoff is working toward an M.Ed. in Counselling Psychology and accreditation in Professional Addiction Studies.  He writes these blogs to increase (and share) his own understandings of ideas.  Since 2017, he has facilitated two voluntary weekly group meetings of SMART Recovery.