Feel Good Tip #1: Know Your Needs

If you want to feel good regardless of what others think or say, follow this simple tip: Know Your Needs.

It sounds obvious, but not many of us actually know our needs and how to meet them without necessarily relying on others.

It’s when we rely too heavily on another to meet our needs for love, value, and self-worth that we lose touch with our power to take care of and feel good about ourselves.

Knowing your needs covers everything from the basics of food, water, and shelter to the social needs for relationship, connection, and love all the way to our needs for meaning, creativity, spirituality, and fulfillment.

Start with the basics. Do you know what you need for food, water, exercise, sleep? If you do, how well do you meet those needs on a daily basis?

If you find yourself feeling irritable or out of sorts, use the handy acronym HALT to diagnose whether you might have an unmet need:

Are you:

Hungry

Angry

Lonely

Tired

HALT is one way to stop, step back, and assess your needs in the moment.

If you have a deeper angst, you might ask yourself if you are feeling good about your work, contribution, or service in the world. Is there creative work you want to be doing?

When it comes to love and relationships, be careful to avoid codependency, which is taking responsibility for someone else’s thoughts and feelings, or allowing your own feelings and behavior to be too strongly influenced by others. Knowing your own needs and how to meet them helps you separate from other people. You are responsible for your thoughts and feelings. They are responsible for theirs.

This doesn’t mean you don’t care about them. It just means you can detach from them, allowing them to meet their own needs and doing the same for yourself.

This also doesn’t mean you aren’t there for people. If they need something that you can provide, you can be there for them. But it’s not a requirement. If you can’t come by when they call, they can reach out to another friend. Or wait until you are available.

Likewise, if you need emotional support, you develop options for meeting the need. You might have several friends to reach out to, but you don’t hang your hat on just one person in particular. Insisting on only one way to meet a need leads you back down the road of codependency.

So know your needs. Write them down. Brainstorm many options for meeting those needs. Give yourself permission to take care of yourself. If one method doesn’t work, find another avenue. The more flexible you are, the more options you have, the better you’ll be able to meet your needs, and the more often you’ll find your way to feeling good.

Photo by Aziz Acharki on Unsplash