Feeling at Ease
"The only person who can give you a sense of security and- Robert Kyosaki
the life you envision is yourself."
SAFETY
The current structure of our brains is the sum of centuries of evolution. Within that evolution, the limbic part of the brain is the oldest. It regulates emotions and the 'flight or fight' response. It is there – in the amygdala, also one of the oldest parts of our brains – where uncertainty and fear are deeply rooted .
When we feel physically unsafe, we create a stress response that is harmful to our body and our psyche. Clear examples of this are stress syndromes after war situations, physical assault or other traumatic experiences where the harmful psychological impact is clearly visible .
Post-traumatic stress syndromes cause an intense adrenaline response that leaves lasting imprints in our brain circuits. They also cause a whole series of biochemical processes that disrupt our neuro-endocrine processes. In other words, the chemical composition in our brains becomes unbalanced.
BASIC COMFORT
Feeling comfortable presupposes a basic level of physical comfort.
Not having a roof over your head causes low self-esteem and abnormal behavior in young children. Children – like their parents – more often show anxious behavior and are also more susceptible to depression. It also makes people emotionally numb, which we call 'alexithymia' in scientific terms.
HEALTH
Good health, both physical and mental, is the third basic condition for being at ease. When good mental health is absent, that has a far-reaching impact on our physical health. A great deal of scientific research has demonstrated the correlation between the harmful effects of negative emotions and heart disease.
That said, the importance of good physical health is often overestimated when we think and talk about a high quality of life. This is especially so for people with disabilities. People with physical impairments consistently report a high quality of life.
Experiences of pain, on the other hand, disrupt our quality of life, which is why we try to avoid them.
FINANCIAL SECURITY
Money is the only self-imposed need that humanity has installed in its existence. It serves as the gateway through which we can meet a great many other needs.
A range of scientific studies has shown that a lack of money causes anxiety, which in turn affects our stress levels. Debt that raises stress levels over a longer period causes depression and leads to a reduction in cognitive capacity in people generally, and in young children and adolescents in particular.
A lack of financial security also has an impact on the suicide rate.
PRIVACY
Scientific research into privacy within psychology and biology is scarce; most of the research focuses on ethics and legislation.
The need for privacy appears to be linked to our sense of insecurity, whose roots can again be found in the limbic part of our brain. In evolutionary terms, that need has proved its worth in protecting us from others.
A crucial part of our need for privacy is bound up with the basic trust we have in our fellow human beings and in the institutions that supply us with information. Some evolutionary psychologists go further than this Darwinian reading and argue that privacy helps us adapt to our environment and build valuable relationships.
FREEDOM
The least that can be said is that our need for freedom is a complex matter.
Freedom is generally defined as being able to exercise control over your own actions. Psychologists, however, cannot agree on whether 'free will' is an illusion or not.
The principle of complete free will appears to be wrong, given the many cognitive biases.
Biology and neuroscience raise objections to the idea of freedom as well: biologically speaking, our genes impose a partly determined framework on us. This is best illustrated by a landmark study of the behaviour of identical twins, who display similar behaviour.
In neurology, brain scans have shown that our brains make decisions before we are actually aware of the decision to be made, so that we unconsciously create a kind of 'readiness potential'.
The evidence is strong but not conclusive: research into 'neurological noise' appears to contradict the mechanistic arguments for free will, even though that noise is not a conscious process.
Our need for freedom should therefore be reformulated as the 'conscious experience of freedom'. Read that way, science produces a far more varied picture of the need for freedom. There is a clear link between a lack of freedom and a low quality of life among prisoners. They undergo a form of trauma as a result of the coercion they experience in prison.
In any case, it very much appears that the social context responsible for the absence of freedom matters as much as freedom itself: people who can move only their eyes (locked-in syndrome) show no significant reduction in their well-being over time.