Outside of physical needs like food and sleep, do needs even exist? Or are needs just a demanding way of labelling wants, feelings, or short-term urges?

In terms of food, we need over 30 vitamins and minerals on a weekly or even daily basis. However, did you know that most people throughout history have failed at this, with the various side effects of this (whether it’s mood, happiness, health, or wellbeing problems later on)?

So maybe a “real need” is actually a should- i.e. a need is something good for you, that you should be doing.

And a false need is a want, feeling or urge.

Therefore, real needs are healthy or real shoulds (not false shoulds, or shoulds that aren’t actually for the higher good of you and others).

If we go deeper, what are feelings?

We feel them quite strongly sometimes.

We even feel them as needs sometimes.

Feelings are most likely your DNA, cells, and a lifetime of billions of brain connections mixing between themselves (and often randomly, and not logically), and then trying to give you information about something that they think is of importance to you.

But not in logical language but in their own language, your brain’s own feeling/visual/sensory/verbal/logical way of speaking to you, which your consciousness may or may not be good at talking to.

What do you think?

But this could mean that your cells or DNA might be giving you reactions coming from thousands of years ago, which might cause you a lot of problems if you act on them.

And your lifetime of billions of brain connections might literally be giving you false information based on what they’ve been trained to believe and do and how that is all getting mixed internally and then fed back to you.

So maybe your feelings are your biological machinery talking to you, in their own language, and they could be right or they could be wrong.

What if you’re someone like me, who experiences a high amount of difficult or painful feelings frequently? How do you improve these? I remember visiting several psychologists and the popularity of the consciousness/thoughts based CBT method, which was ineffective for me in all cases because the problem was with the unconscious wiring, not with the thoughts themselves.

This is something I have grappled with for a long time, and while I see “traditional” alternative therapies as having differing effectiveness, the ways that you move this to health is hard to explain…

Is it energy healing? Is it facial expressions? Is it the way words are arranged? Is it creative ways to get the brain patterns to reorganise into what is more useful and less harmful? When I was younger I wanted to see specifics, but now, what matters is just getting to the results, even if it involves quite a lot of the mystery of the universe so as to get there faster (but safely- safety is really important).

These are some of the big questions in life, aren’t they…

Increasing feeling good and decreasing feeling bad.

Increasing what you value and is important and decreasing what you don’t value and isn’t important.

Increasing success at the right shoulds and decreasing doing the shouldn’ts.

The idea is, if you are taking care of the shoulds, the shoulds will make many of the good and bad feelings fall into place more healthily.

A person who eats well, gets enough sleep, gets enough exercise, gets enough sun, gets enough rest and relaxation, will feel much better than a person who doesn’t. A person who takes care of their long-term goals will have a lot less to worry about. A person who feels like something is unsafe and does something to make it safer will have a lot less to worry about.

But beyond doing the shoulds, maybe feelings are the mystery of life. People talk about the idea of having an animal spirit- the symbol of your unconscious, but animals represent the cellular and DNA part of us- they definitely don’t represent the complexity level of a lifetime of billions of brain cells mixing. Maybe it makes more sense to see your history as an alien from another galaxy trying to talk to you in it’s own language, and in some ways it is smarter than you, and in other ways it less smarter than you. Your animal spirit can represent your ancient self, but your alien spirit can represent an entire lifetime of billions of brain cells randomly mixing and speaking to you in their own language, which you may have developed skills in understanding, or you might not have. So, two types of feelings.

In fact, why limit it to two?

What I have observed is that people seem to have different “parts” of them, that are skills that come out in different circumstances. You might have 4 animal selves and 3 alien selves, or whatever mix you like. And don’t forget your consciousness- what you think, what you choose, what you control, what you do. Different skills for different circumstances.