If you listen to Marty Seligman’s early talks, when positive psychology starts to become a more well defined field, his view of wellbeing is going beyond ‘the basics’ of everyday life. He’s even used numbers to say, ok if the aim of therapy is to bring a depressed person from −5 to −3 or 0, the goal of positive psychology is to take you from +3 to +5. Some wellbeing theories inherit this general thinking, and many of the basic physiological needs like having food or shelter or being safe are things seen for a requirement to be at a normal baseline. With the exception of social relations and some of the emotions work, you’re more likely to see most physiological needs in the clinical literature and some with folks who work on resilience.
I’m wondering why so few of the theories involve physiological needs
If you listen to Marty Seligman’s early talks, when positive psychology starts to become a more well defined field, his view of wellbeing is going beyond ‘the basics’ of everyday life. He’s even used numbers to say, ok if the aim of therapy is to bring a depressed person from −5 to −3 or 0, the goal of positive psychology is to take you from +3 to +5. Some wellbeing theories inherit this general thinking, and many of the basic physiological needs like having food or shelter or being safe are things seen for a requirement to be at a normal baseline. With the exception of social relations and some of the emotions work, you’re more likely to see most physiological needs in the clinical literature and some with folks who work on resilience.
Haha one reason might be that there’s probably bias towards psychological needs when you get a bunch of psychologists to come up with the theories 😅🤷
(Might look very different if there were 6 prominent theories of well-being coming out of a humanistic field of biology!)