Scientists have identified seven inherent needs that exist in our brains. How much each need gets met, by ourselves and our partners, shapes how we feel day to day.
Jaak Panksepp described these as brain-based systems that coordinate behavior and emotion. In a marriage, partners differ on how much they need each area stimulated. Understanding both your needs and your partner’s helps you find complementary roles together.
What are these needs that stem from inherent personality traits, and how do they work? Each need originates in neural circuits that link electrochemical signals to behavioral drives.
How important are these needs? These circuits are tied directly to survival and core biological functions. Each of you has a personal comfort zone within each need, shaped by temperament and history. The symptoms you experience when a need is out of balance may include feeling anxious, sad, angry, or shame.
How This Plays Out in Relationships
The work: identify which needs are out of balance for each of you. How you manage each other’s needs affects both your short and long-term marital satisfaction. A chronically unmet need creates persistent negative emotion in the relationship. The distress in your relationship may be rooted in unmet basic needs. Learning about these needs, and helping each other meet them, can transform the relationship.
Research shows we’re all pre-wired with these needs, regardless of environment. Specifically, the needs that affect you and your partner are:
1. Commander-in-Chief: responsible for coordinating functions of dominance, control, and power, especially when perceiving a threat or that you are being treated unfairly. When optimized, you feel confident and capable of handling challenges. Overstimulated: anger, aggression, or controlling behavior. Understimulated: passivity or low confidence.
Building Practical Skills
2. Explorer: responsible for learning and the need for novelty and adventure in your life, you may feel most satisfied when traveling to a new destination, feeling a high sense of excitement and pleasure at discovering new things. Overstimulated: reckless pursuit of novelty despite consequences.
3. Sensualist: responsible for sexual gratification and reproduction, producing sexual functions, erotic dreams and fantasies, sexual attraction and excitement, along with flirting, kissing, and more. In balance, this feels energizing. Overstimulated, it can become compulsive or out of control.
4. Energy Czar: responsible for rest and care to maintain health. If you’re working too much without enough rest, the “energy czar” sends signals to your body to stop and rest. This need also connects to food, water, and other survival drives. When balanced, this system lets you feel physically comfortable and mentally clear.
Going Deeper
5. Jester: responsible for recreation, play, and diversions, this need includes entertainment, fantasies, jokes, and having fun. The jester helps you relax, and feel renewed, and is especially important in childhood. When in balance, your jester helps you feel both joy and content; when overstimulated, you may feel “wound up;” when under-stimulated, you may feel reserved, “dull,” lethargic, and sad.
6. Sentry: responsible for danger in your environment, the sentry is activated through anxiety and hypervigilance. When your sentry is well-balanced, you avoid danger, taking adequate precautions such as wearing a bike helmet or locking the door to your car; when overstimulated, the sentry floods your body with fear even when danger is not present, such as with phobias of flying or driving, or through anxiety disorders such as Obsessive Compulsive Disorder or Social Phobia; when under-stimulated, you may not be vigilant enough, such as thrill-seekers who seem to continually “cheat death,” until they don’t.
7. Nest-Builder: responsible for nurturing and bonding behaviors, typical of parent-child relationships and romantic love relationships, your nest-builder pushes you to make new friends, join groups, and hold your child when they is sad. When your nest-builder is well-balanced, you feel comfort and support in your life, and feel like you belong. This is your attachment circuit activated when you experience loss as well, including death, separations, or the loss of a friend. When your nest-builder is overstimulated, you struggle with maintaining your identity and subjugate your needs to others, hoping to get approval; even small separations can make you feel quiet anxious, and how you react to your fears can impact your relationship. When under-stimulated, your nest-builder may influence you to feel lonely and isolated, bring up anxiety and sadness. Over time, if your nest-builder is consistently under-stimulated, you most likely experience bouts of depression and higher anxiety.
In marriage therapy, I help couples to identify the range of needs each partner has, helping them understand why certain activities or events may feel so important to both partners in different ways. Each partner pinpoints which needs feel well-balanced, overstimulated, and under- stimulated. As a therapeutic team, we then help each partner improve their connection through becoming more thoughtful of what matters to both themselves, and to each other, and develop a plan to help both partners get their needs met in a balanced way. Partners can see and understand how effectively managing each partner’s needs helps lead to more satisfaction over the long-haul in a relationship.
Ready to Transform Your Relationship?
Travis Atkinson, LCSW, specializes in evidence-based couples therapy including the Gottman Method, EFT, and Schema Therapy, for couples in NYC and online. Take the first step today.
