Chapter 7
Prioritising our own needs
I’m serialising my book “The Observing I: A guide to living a more authentic life” on Substack, with a new chapter being released every Wednesday. I’m a big believer that philosophy should be available to the masses, not locked behind paywalls or hidden away in dusty archives. So I’m making my book available here.
This is Chapter 7.
I’m going to say something now that may challenge your perspective.
Prioritising your own needs is not being selfish.
At this point, you might be thinking “It sounds selfish. What about the needs of my children? What about my partner’s needs? What about all that work I need to get finished over the weekend?”
Society teaches us that to be “good”, we should be thinking about others. To not think about others is to be selfish, and being selfish is “bad”. It’s got some heavy connotations, that word. When we think about selfishness, our minds are drawn towards notions such as self-involved, self-serving, unkind, and unfair.
The definition of selfishness, according to Merriam-Webster, is "concerned excessively or exclusively with oneself; seeking or concentrating on one’s own advantage, pleasure, or well-being without regard for others."
There’s something really important to note when we look at that definition and think about prioritising our own needs. We’re not concentrating on our own advantage or pleasure. We’re not doing it without regard for others. Fundamentally, our reasoning is quite the opposite.
Let me be very clear. When I say “prioritising our own needs”, I don’t mean laying on the sofa binge watching a TV show on some on-demand streaming platform whilst our partner spends the day cleaning the house. I’d definitely call that selfish. In fact, I’d probably go a little further and describe it using a number of words that are 4 letters long and generally frowned upon.
What I’m talking about here is ensuring that we take time to look after ourselves and our own well-being. If we’re dedicating all of the hours under the sun to work, for example, and don’t do anything to meet our own needs, what do you think is going to happen to us in the long run?
I’m going to take a wild guess and say that you’ve answered something along the lines of “we’re going to be left feeling stressed. Burnt out. Depressed.” This, in turn, is going to adversely impact our ability to meet our responsibilities, potentially affecting our sense of worth, and taking us into a death spiral as we push ourselves harder to compensate whilst making less and less progress over time.
Emotional death spirals are, as the name suggests, a negative cycle of emotions that leaves you plummeting towards the ground at high speed. They’re generally triggered by something and, from my experience, when you’re burnt out, tired, and have nothing left in the tank, it’s a hair trigger.
Work failures, fights with loved ones, an unexpected bill that you’re going to struggle to afford. That’s all it can take. That’s how fragile we can be left when we expend zero energy on tending to ourselves.
This idea of prioritising our own needs is more like those safety talks we get before going on a flight. There’s some sound advice in there that I think is very relevant. Not putting your head between your legs - I never understood how that’s going to help if you plunge into the ocean at 400 miles an hour. I mean the bit where they tell you to sort your own oxygen mask out first before you try and help other people with theirs.
If you can’t breathe, then you’re not going to be able to help anyone else around you. You can try to, and you might succeed for a while. Eventually, though, you’re going to pass out in your seat and be no good to anybody. This is exactly what happens to us if we continue to ignore our own needs and put others before ourselves. It won’t happen as quickly as oxygen starvation, but the result will eventually be the same - we’re left unable to help anyone, including ourselves
The problem is that it’s really easy to put our own needs on the back burner. If we’re a parent, for example, of course we’re going to put the needs of our children above our own. There’s helping with the seemingly endless torrent of homework, the bedtime stories, putting just the right amount of rice on the dinner plate so as not to cause floods of tears, and the constant questions about how caterpillars’ poop and what’s holding up the sky.
At work, we’re trying to meet the expectations of the business so that we’re seen as a good employee and our sense of job security isn’t put at risk. Maybe we’re after that promotion, so we’re putting in extra hours to make a good impression. We might have a long commute that eats into our day, and by the time we get home we’re good for nothing but turning into a liquid pool of exhaustion on the sofa.
We need to be aware of what prioritising our needs actually looks like. Don’t get sucked into the notion of self-care that you see plastered across advertising and social media. Fizzy bath bombs, comfy socks, and a geometrically perfect arrangement of fruit on top of a bowl of low-fat Greek yoghurt is not it.
How about this as an example - you’ve been invited out with a group of friends on a Friday night after work. You agreed to it last weekend, but it’s been a crazy week. You’re feeling exhausted and want to do nothing more than read a book and get an early night. You’re saying to yourself that you should go, however, because you’ve said that you would, and if you don’t then you’ll be letting your friends down.
The little guilt monster crawls out from the cupboard under the stairs and starts prodding at you until you muster up the energy to get ready and put on your happy face.
Saying no to going out, however, is not being selfish. Saying no to going out is listening to yourself, trusting your own judgement, and not allowing yourself to be manipulated by the expectations of others. There is nothing wrong with giving that guilt monster a slap and throwing them into the back of the cupboard before messaging your friends to tell them that you’re exhausted and won’t be attending.
If they’re your friends, then they’ll understand. If they don’t and they get upset by it, that’s not on you - that’s on them. You are not responsible for managing their feelings. You are responsible for managing your own.
What’s going to happen if you do go out? It’s been a long week, so you might have a couple of drinks. Perhaps one too many. You’ll perk up as the dopamine kicks in and get into the swing of it when you’re there, and you’ll no doubt enjoy yourself.
Yet when you wake up on Saturday morning, you’ll scrunch yourself up into the ball under the covers, a bit hungover, more exhausted than you were yesterday, and probably not in the best state of mind. Then you’ll spend Saturday recovering, instead of tending to those things that you wanted to do for yourself that day because you don’t have the energy and aren’t really feeling it.
You might feel bad that you haven’t spent time on what you wanted to do that day. Then it’s Monday morning and you’re back at work, and the cycle begins again. It’s a situation that we must be mindful of. If not, we experience a slow erosion of our well-being.
I’m drawn to the old adage of the boiling frog:
If we put a frog into boiling water, then they’ll immediately jump out. If we put the frog into tepid water and then slowly bring it to the boil, then the frog won’t recognise the danger that it’s in and be cooked alive.
It’s a horrific metaphor, and I don’t advocate boiling anything alive, but that’s exactly what you’re doing to yourself if you don’t prioritise your own needs and continuously live to satisfy the needs and expectations of others.
Like the frog in tepid water being brought to the boil, we aren’t aware of the danger that we’re putting ourselves in when we choose to live like this. Over time, trying to meet the expectations of our family, our friends, our bosses, and even our culture, we’re sitting in water that’s growing ever warmer. Not recognising the damage that we’re doing to ourselves, and where this persistent damage will eventually leave.
To distil all of that down, what I’m saying here is that prioritising our own needs is actually the opposite of selfishness. It’s helping us to be mentally resilient because we’re looking after ourselves, and that resilience enables us to better help others and better approach challenges in the long term.
It’s ok to say to our boss that we won’t be working in the evening to get something finished that landed on our desk at lunchtime and needs to (unreasonably) be ready the next morning. If you’re finding this keeps happening at work, that’s not an issue with your productivity, that’s a lack of planning and forward thinking.
It’s ok to let people down if you’re feeling overwhelmed or stressed or just need some time to yourself. If they care about you, they’ll understand. If they don’t, then what does it really matter what they think anyway?
It’s ok to not meet the expectations of others. Part of living authentically is recognising the expectations that come from us over the expectations that come from the external. If we live our lives constantly trying to please other people, then where do we fit in? How happy and content can we feel if we’re never expressing who we are, or what we want?
There is nothing that should have more value to us than our own well-being. That’s not some sycophantic affirmation of self-involvement. It’s not pandering to idealism or “easier said than done”. It’s about us balancing the expectations of others against our own needs. It’s about taking responsibility for our own well-being. It’s about trusting ourselves and having the courage to say no.
If you’re finding yourself in a place where your stress levels are perpetually rising, your state of mind is suffering, and you’re doing nothing about it, then either do something about it, or get ready for an implosion. None of us are an unstoppable force, and none of us have a limitless resolve.
Prioritising our own needs and looking after our well-being requires effort, like all things in life. We cannot simply ignore our stressors and hope that the problem goes away. When has that approach ever worked out well for anyone?
Our minds can either be a place of turbulence, or a place of refuge. When we focus our efforts on meeting our own needs, we’re creating and supporting that mental refuge within ourselves.
Instead of our thoughts being flooded with guilt, or regret, or anxiety, because we’re all wrapped up in trying to do what we think we “should” be doing, we’re working to recognise where those “shoulds” are coming from, and whether they’re actually helpful to us or not.
Like all of us, I too have those moments when I have to stop and reflect on the choices I’m making. It comes from a past life of people pleasing, something I’ve spent a long time beating out of my system.
In those moments, there is a question I ask myself, and I find it to be a powerful one.
Is this serving me in a positive way?
I used to be gripped by powerful "shoulds", and they’d often leave me expending energy and effort at the detriment of myself. Fuelled by that need to people please, because external approval was a means of improving my self worth (what a complicated bag of shit that was), I’d end up putting the needs of others above my own.
I’d go way above and beyond at work, putting in extra hours in the evenings and weekends for no extra pay. I’d help out friends who, it turned out, weren’t really friends, but acquaintances I knew by association in the local bar that were far from reciprocal when it came to giving back. All in the name of bolstering self-worth.
Did I feel worthy afterwards? No. It was a perpetually defeating ideology. I grew resentful of work. I grew resentful of those acquaintances. I had a short fuse and I’d get angry at the smallest things, because I had nothing left. I was running off fumes and satisfying none of my own needs.
I was taking responsibility for other people’s happiness at the expense of my own, feeling as though if I could make them happy, then that would somehow osmose onto me.
It was unsustainable, but, being a stubborn bastard, I persisted for a long time. Much longer than I should have. Eventually, my sheer need to not feel like a burnt out husk of a human being outweighed that desire to people please, and I found myself saying no.
All of that pent up resentment that was growing inside me, the frustration, the disappointment I felt in other human beings. It was a furnace that built in pressure until that simple word erupted from the flames.
No.
At first, it burst out of me with inappropriate force. Just saying it felt good. I’d stand on the beach and scream it into the sea, a symbol of my sudden and radical emancipation. With practice, I tempered it, and it left me with a powerful realisation. Well, actually, a few powerful realisations.
First, saying no allowed me to protect my time. It was shocking to me, on reflection, how much energy I was expending on activities that weren’t “of me”. It gave me the capacity to work on things that actually brought me joy, that gave me meaning. And that’s really important. Often, our work and the day to day stuff that we need to do doesn’t necessarily bring us meaning.
It’s our hobbies, our passions, our relationships with others - these are what are important, what enriches our existence. If we’re burying ourselves in other commitments, we can lose out on having the time and the energy to engage with what’s truly important.
Then there’s the assertion of boundaries. Saying no enabled me to adhere to my genuine values, to set those limits and not sell myself short chasing something that I could never catch.
It never worked, by the way. The people pleasing. It was a quick fix, and it didn’t change the perceptions that I had about myself. The stories that were running in the background.
Aligning our actions with our values enables us to act authentically. I think that was another thing that was eating at me back then, that I wasn’t being true to myself. I was a big bowl of cooked spaghetti, tangled up, lightly oiled, and obscured under a thick layer of ragu.
Sometimes, still, those narratives will creep in. It takes a lot of time to unpick those patterns of thinking. It’s a process, not a switch that you can suddenly turn off when you realise that your motivations aren’t serving you.
That’s where that question comes in. I like the idea of our actions serving us, rather than us serving our actions. The story it tells is one of control over subservience, a reminder that we’re the ones who are driving. I needed that at the time, and it’s stuck to this day. A simple but powerful tool that’s enabled me to stop and reflect before acting when I catch the faint whiff of old behaviours. Over time, my instinct has grown wise to them. They smell like a handful of wet dirt.
You might be at that point already, able to set your boundaries and stick to your values, and that’s great. If you’re not, and you’re battling against those unhelpful narratives, it can feel like an unwinnable conflict.
I can reassure you, from my own experience, that it is not. It’s challenging, and there are going to be times when you question yourself and what’s driving those motivations that are working against you. You won’t feel like it, but this is a good space. I’ve always believed that 90% of the struggle is knowing that you’ve got these shit narratives running in the first place. You can’t change what you’re not aware of.
Which brings me nicely on to yet another psychological tool that I want you to keep in mind, and it’s called the Johari Window.
Back in 1955, two American psychologists, Joseph Luft and Harry Ingham, came up with a framework for understanding the internal aspects of ourselves, and the relationships that we have with others.
As you can see in the illustration (no apologies for quality, I did it myself), it’s called a window because it’s split up into 4 distinct panes. The top line of the frame represents things you know about yourself, and the left line represents things others know about you.
In the top left quadrant, we’ve got Open. This is everything that both you know about yourself, and that everyone else knows about you as well. Think of it as our public forum, covering our personality, our skills, our traits, and any experiences that we’ve openly shared with the world. You know, like that time you drunkenly posted on Facebook about when you pissed in the laundry basket as a kid.
Then we have Hidden. This is the part that other people see but that we’re completely blind to. Think of it as quirks of our personality that we’re not aware of, or how we come across to people without realising it.
Private is the box that we’re keeping closed. All of the things we hold back from the world, that we secretly don’t want anyone to know. Our vulnerabilities, past experiences that we’d rather not share with the world. Our shames and regrets and weaknesses.
Lastly, there’s the Unknown. This is essentially your subconscious mind, the part that’s hidden from both you and the rest of the world. Hidden fears, unknown talents, those secret motivations hurling us into oblivion - you’ll find all of them here. They’re the parts of us that neither us nor anyone else is actively aware of.
How do we use this idea to get a better understanding of those motivations and drivers that aren’t serving us?
Quelle surprise, here’s where we need to employ some self-awareness. We want to try and get an understanding of the things in the Hidden and the aspects of the Unknown that might be impacting our choices and behaviours in ways that we don’t necessarily want to.
Getting a handle on the hidden components is the simpler of the two, provided you’ve got a friend, mentor, or family member that you trust and can offer you a safe space. By starting to understand the aspects of our character and behaviours that we weren’t aware of, it can help to inform us of what’s going on beneath the surface.
I’ll use myself as an example. I didn’t realise until I went through this process that I would very often say yes to future plans for going out and socialising with friends, only to make up an excuse when it came time to actually go out.
This might seem really obvious, and it certainly does to me now, but I was entirely oblivious to this pattern of behaviour at the time. What was driving it? My need to people please, of course. I didn’t want to say no in case that offended them, but when it came to the crunch, my introversion took over and I’d end up staying at home instead.
An exasperated friend mentioned that to me once, and it was only through them bringing it to my attention that I could do something about it. That something about it being saying no much more often (I am at peace with being a solitary animal). The answer may not be to people’s liking, but at least we all knew where we stood and no one was going to be left disappointed.
Trying to understand the Unknowns, that’s a very different and much trickier issue to address. The question that I’m sure has come to your mind is how the hell can we understand something when we aren’t even aware that it exists in the first place?
There’s no quick answer to this. I don’t want to pretend like there’s some alchemical process or psychological wizardry that can lift the veil on the subconscious. Instead, I’m going to try and explain how I went about it, and hope that you’ll be able to get something out of my own experience.
I heard this saying once, and I came across it through my study of Buddhism but I can’t find the exact source. It quite simply, and rightly, says:
The observer cannot observe itself.
At least when we’re trying to find the Hidden parts of us, we’ve got an external frame of reference. Other people can act as mirrors that we can use to examine ourselves.
For me, the first step was recognising that there was this Unknown part that I had to look at. I had to get curious about the things that I didn’t know, and try to bring those unknowns up to the surface.
Then, I thought, there must be some kind of connection between the aspects in the Private window and those in the Unknown. Why was I hiding those parts of myself, and what could they tell me about myself if they were properly examined?
It turned out that it wasn’t just the world I was hiding these parts from. I was hiding them from myself. They were aspects of my behaviour that I didn’t want to face, that I had just placed in a box and chosen to ignore.
In order to better understand them, I went and got myself a good therapist. Slowly, we managed to tease them out and make some sense of the driving forces behind them. Having someone there to abstractly and objectively examine what I was saying was a game changer. They linked together things that I hadn’t even considered because, going back to that saying, the observer can’t observe itself.
Over time, we could see how some of the Unknowns, those deep drivers of my subconscious, were influencing my day to day behaviour. It was equally terrifying and liberating.
I want to reinforce the point here that none of this is a quick or easy process. I’m still bringing things out of that Unknown space. Still working on getting to know myself and the forces that drive me. The sculpture that’s never quite complete.
That’s why prioritising our needs is important. We need the space to improve, to explore our identities, to grow authentically. It’s not a selfish venture. In fact, it can enable us to support the people and causes that are important to us from a far more grounded and emotionally sound place.
The book is available to buy from Amazon as a paperback or an e-book, if you want to add it to your book shelf.