Sometimes You're Hungry, Sometimes You want to Be in Love
How to Enjoy Your Life // Abraham Maslow
Intro
Ignite a Shift by Stephen McGarvey is one of those books that changed my brain, you know? It really shifted the way I saw my own mind. And I can’t remember if it was in that book or Talent is Overrated (which I listened to the audiobook of and liked but didn’t love) that I learned the term “meta-cognition.”
Meta-cognition is defined by Webster’s Dictionary as “: awareness or analysis of one's own learning or thinking processes”
And the book claimed that the most successful people do this. They take a step back and think about their own thought process.
I think many of us can sometimes be in the camp of over-intellectualizing, as I spoke with
about recently, and need to narrow our scope and just think about beautiful things like the sky or flowers or pistachios.But meta-cognition can also be really helpful for understanding your own blind spots. Your biases. Your triggers, so on so forth.
Hungry Hailo
For example, it took me a long time to meet and understand her, but when I started analyzing my own thoughts and reactions, I uncovered “hungry hailo.”
I am sorry for saying hailo in the third person, I know I don’t like it either but it does help to create that separation. My first hunger cue is irritability. It took me a long time to learn that about myself because of my relationship with food, something I’m exploring and trying to fix over on
.And now I know that most of the time, when I’m irritated, paranoid, or impatient, I take a step back and ask myself “why.”
“Why” is a great question, especially when directed toward oneself and ones own behavior, since that’s all you really have power over, you know?
And almost always, when I feel that annoyance, my “why” is that I am simply hungry.
And now, I can share this fact with friends, family, etc. I will literally tell them “I’m going non-verbal hungry” and they know that I’ll buy some fruit and nuts once given the chance and then I’ll start talking again.
And then, once I’ve had a snack, if I’m still upset I will literally pull up Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs and look at it. I’ve been doing this for months. So, in the name of going deeper, and using a psychological lens for the summer (more on summer theme next week), I thought I’d look into Mr. Maslow.
What I found was really beautiful:
