LifeMap: Maslow, 3 Brains and A Simple Formula For Happiness

Life is complex. As we leave adolescence and enter adulthood, we discover that no one prepared us for the seemingly endless challenges of everyday life. From earning and managing money to feeding ourselves to keeping in touch with friends and staying on top of our seemingly ever-expanding to-do list — let alone bigger challenges of managing wins and losses or trying to figure out your purpose.

With so many different aspects to life, it’s easy to be good at managing one area, only to neglect another — the retiring CEO who has made loads of money, but feels unfulfilled because he or she neglected their relationships; the social savant with great relationships but poor time management who never gets anything done; the confident, charming, popular financial master who eats terribly.

How do you avoid these traps? How do you make sure that while you focus on certain areas of life, you don’t ignore others? What we need is a comprehensive way to “understand life” — to “map” it out. A way to make sense of all the different parts of being human — a framework for tracking and organizing all aspects of living.

Is It Possible To “Understand All Of Life”?

What would it even mean? For our purposes, we simply mean understanding the various things we have to deal with as part of being human. We know we have toothaches and doctors appointments, budding romances and stressful deadlines, rent/mortgages to pay, emails to respond to and dreams to take action on — and on and on. Apparently infinite. If there was at least a simple way to categorize these all, it could help us make better sense of and be more effective with life.

Simple, Accessible, Deep

Ideally, any new understanding could easily be communicated to people of all ages and levels of education. At the same time, we want it to be both comprehensive and deep so that those of us focused on studying or growing in any specific are have the tools with which to do so.

LifeMap: A New Model of Life

By combining a few existing theories, we are able to create a framework that could be explained to a child, but at the same time tames the beast of life, creating a comprehensive yet accessible tool for understanding its various aspects.

A Map, Hidden In A Pyramid

Abraham Maslow was an American Psychologist in the mid nineteenth century whose 1954 paper Toward A Psychology Of Being introduced his famous Hierarchy of Needs. Briefly, it outlines five categories of needs — physical, security, love, self-esteem and self actualization (becoming what you feel you are meant to) — that, he proposes, have a necessary order, a hierarchy. We all need love, but if we can’t breathe, we don’t care much about it. We all want to live our dreams, but if we can’t pay rent, it’s a little hard to give pursuing them much energy.

A Comprehensive Psychology of Health

What was unique about Maslow’s work was that unlike most psychology it did not focus on illness, but on wellness and indeed excellence. Rather than study the mentally ill, he studied greats including Eleanor Rosevelt, Albert Einstein, Abraham Lincoln, Jane Adams, and others. His focus was not on identifying ailments or cures, but on asking what does the most whole, healthy happy human being look like and why.

The hierarchy is quite well known and often represented as a pyramid, as below.

Maslow 2.0 — The Expanded Hierarchy

Not as well known, Maslow published a 2nd edition of Towards A Psychology of Beingas a book with a new, deeper hierarchy. Instead of 5 levels, it has 8. Maslow breaks the 5th level into 4 discrete parts:

• Cognitive needs — the need to learn
• Aesthetic needs — the need for beauty
• Self Actualization Needs — the need to reach your chosen potential
• Self Transcendence Needs — the need to help others meet their needs

So, a more complete hierarchy would look like (forgive the non-pyramid presentation)

Tri Une Brain Theory

Around the same time that Maslow released his expanded hierarchy, American physician and neuroscientist Paul D. MacLean developed a theory of the evolutionary development of our brains, which he outlined in his 1990 book, The Triune Brain In Evolution. Simply, it says that we evolved three types of brains — reptilian, mammalian and higher brains.

As animals evolved, basic physiological functioning, survival instincts and the reproductive drive were all minimum necessary components and can be found in even the most primitive animals, namely reptiles.

As mammals emerged, warm-blooded, softer-skinned and giving birth to live young after long gestation periods, all factors which made them more vulnerable to predators, what enabled them to survive was living in groups. As social animals, inter-group instincts, both individual-to-individual connection and individual-to-group connection became essential for being able to rely on the protection of the group, thus evolved the mammalian brain.

Humans, being particularly slow and weak compared to many other animals, were forced to develop tool-making in order to compensate. This sparked the development of a robust cerebral cortex, which in turn facilitated language and abstract thought within what MacLean calls the higher brain.

So, simply, the reptilian brain, common to all animals, is responsible for preservation and propagation. Bodily function, reproduction, survival instincts.

The mammalian brain, exclusive to mammals, governs the “heart” or the realm of emotions, including self esteem and social bonding. [We know that dogs, for example aren’t “intelligent” in that they don’t have a highly developed logical capacity, but at the same time we know they are love machines — quite emotionally intelligent.]

Arguably unique to human beings, the higher brain or cerebral neocortex, governs logic, abstract thought, planning, spontaneity, language and creativity.

Maslow’s Real Gift

Maslow’s hierarchy is indeed a breakthrough and there is great insight afforded by the hierarchical nature — the idea that certain needs must be fulfilled first. But his realbreakthrough, perhaps made a little easier to see below, is that it outlines the dimensions of human experience. All experiences of life seem to fall within one of the need categories.

Triune-Maslow?

Interestingly, if we overlay Maslow’s hierarchy over Tri Une Brain Theory, we see that the first two levels of Maslow’s Hierarchy — Physiological and Safety and Security are the realm of the reptilian brain. The next two, Love and Belonging and Self-Esteem are emotional — the realm of the mammalian brain. And the highest levels — cognitive, aesthetic, actualization and transcendence — are the realm of the higher brain.

Maslow 3.0: The LifeMap

The value in connecting these two theories is that it both simplifies one and deepens the other:

Note: The specific needs shown above include my own contributions/opinions (posture, a balanced nervous system, the particular breakdown of the higher-level needs, for example) and should not be taken as accurately representing Maslow’s work, but one take on it.

Formatted in this way, Maslow’s hierarchy becomes an interactive teaching, diagnostic and even goal-setting tool.

A Happiness Formula?

Though simplistic sounding, LifeMap provides a simple 3-step formula for happiness:

Make the reptilian brain happy

Make the mammalian brain happy

Make the higher brain happy

How? Maslow gives us the roadmap — satisfy needs from the bottom, up.

With a tool like this, the person who chases money can see that they won’t be happy without also chasing purpose. The person who appears effective but sleeps poorly can see that they won’t come close to their potential (or feel as good as they might like). The person who has is healthy, happy and doing meaningful but repetitive work will understand that they won’t be fulfilled if they aren’t constantly learning. And on and on.

There are many more insights and possibilities that emerge from this model, but those will be explored another time.

Elliott