Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and the Psychology of Languishing: The Space Between Doing and Being

Languishing describes a psychological state where you are not in crisis, but not thriving either. You're functioning. You’re showing up. But life feels dull, flat, or far away.

Psychologist Corey Keyes coined the term to describe this “in-between” state: the absence of crisis, but also the absence of aliveness. It is a widespread, under-acknowledged experience and one with deep psychological roots.

To understand why we languish, we can turn to two essential frameworks:

1. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs

2. The psychological polarity of doing vs. being

Together, they offer a map of how we lose connection to vitality and how we might reclaim it.

1. Maslow’s Hierarchy: From Deficiency to Growth

Psychologist Abraham Maslow famously proposed that human motivation is structured in layers, beginning with basic survival needs and moving toward more expansive, growth-oriented pursuits.

He divided these into two broad categories:

Deficiency Needs (D-needs): The Survival System

These are the needs we experience as urgent, uncomfortable absences; they arise from lack.

• Physiological needs: food, water, oxygen, rest

• Safety needs: security, order, stability

• Belongingness and love: inclusion, intimacy, community

• Esteem: respect from others and self-worth

How they work:

• These needs are reactive: they grab attention when unmet and motivate behavior to resolve the tension.

• When a D-need is satisfied, the motivation subsides. It’s like hunger: once you eat, you stop thinking about it (until next time).

• D-needs are often driven by fear, avoidance, and protection.

What happens if unmet:

• Maslow believed that when these needs are chronically unmet, they result in neurotic or defensive behavior.

• For example, lack of love may lead to people-pleasing or withdrawal; unmet esteem may produce arrogance or low self-worth.
  
  

Maslow: “Deficiency motivations are urgent. They press until satisfied, then fade.”

Being Needs (B-needs): The Growth System

These are motivations to grow, explore, and fulfill one's nature, not to fix a lack, but to expand into wholeness.

Examples include:

• Truth

• Beauty

• Justice

• Creativity

• Self-actualization

• Meaning

• Unity

• Transcendence

Maslow believed these were inherent in all humans, but often suppressed because we’re stuck in survival mode.

How they work:

• These needs are proactive: they don’t arise from discomfort but from a pull toward expansion.

• They never get “used up.” The more you experience them, the more you want to keep engaging with them.

• B-needs are associated with joy, awe, curiosity, and love.

Their function:

• They are self-reinforcing: engaging with beauty, truth, or justice generates intrinsic motivation.

• B-needs nourish the whole person: emotionally, cognitively, spiritually.

Maslow: “Being needs are not the result of deprivation; they come from abundance and potential.”

Maslow’s Critique of Modern Society

Maslow believed that modern cultures tend to:

• Overemphasize D-needs: security, materialism, external validation

• Neglect B-needs: creativity, play, self-discovery, transcendence
  
  

He warned that this creates “pseudo-satisfaction”, people chasing wealth or approval to feel whole, but never touching their deeper longings.

“What is necessary to change a person is to change his awareness of himself,” Maslow

He argued that self-actualization and transcendence require freeing oneself from the compulsive grip of unmet D-needs and entering a different mode of being-"Being-Cognition".

We enter Being-Cognition when our core needs are met enough to relax compulsive striving, and we begin to perceive reality directly, not through what it can give us, but for what it is. It is a shift from instrumental to intrinsic.

From Striving to Seeing: Maslow’s Vision of True Flourishing

Most of modern life is organized around deficiency. When our fundamental needs go unmet, we live in a state of tension. We strive, compensate, hustle, optimize. Even positive practices like gratitude or meditation often become tools to reduce stress or boost productivity, but are still governed by lack.

Maslow warned that this instrumental orientation, where experiences are valued only for their outcomes, traps us in a chronic state of “not enough.” This is D-Cognition, seeing the world not as it is, but as it relates to what we’re missing or want to control.

“Gratitude, awe, or love, when sought for what they can do for us, are no longer pure. B-Cognition perceives these as ends in themselves,” Maslow.

The Shift: From Doing to Seeing

Maslow argued that true flourishing begins when D-needs are sufficiently met, not perfectly, but enough to quiet the compulsive striving. Then, something opens.

We begin to see life through Being-Cognition (B-Cog):

• Perceiving reality directly, without distortion by fear or unmet need

• Sensing beauty, truth, and unity as inherently valuable

• Feeling awe, reverence, gratitude, not as tools, but as revelations

This mode of consciousness isn’t about achieving or fixing. It’s about dwelling. Witnessing. Letting life be what it is.

“Life is no longer a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced,” Maslow.

The Nature of B-Cognition

B-Cognition is intrinsically aligned with what we might now call:

• Flow (Csikszentmihalyi)

• Mindfulness

• Peak experiences

• Intrinsic motivation

• Non-dual awareness

It is a way of being where doing flows from fullness, not lack.

You’re not practicing gratitude to feel better. You feel gratitude because you truly see the gift of being alive.
You’re not meditating to manage stress. You meditate to rest in the richness of the moment.
You’re not helping others to earn value. You help because compassion is part of you.

Maslow’s Reframed Hierarchy

Maslow’s late work dissolves the popular notion of a rigid “pyramid.” He envisioned:

• A spiral, not a ladder: B-needs can emerge even amidst D-need struggle

• A dynamic ecosystem: we revisit D-needs in crisis, and rise into B-needs when conditions allow

• A cultural imperative: society should support swift, dignified satisfaction of D-needs, so people can ascend to their fullest capacities
  
  

Self-Actualization and Transcendence

Maslow eventually placed transcendence above or rather, within self-actualization. It is not simply about becoming the best version of oneself, but about devoting oneself to something greater:

• The flourishing of others

• The care of Earth

• Truth, justice, beauty, love
  

In this state, identity becomes porous. Motivation shifts from personal gain to planetary and cosmic belonging.

The Critique of Modern Wellness

Maslow would likely see much of today’s wellness culture as D-cognition in disguise.

Key Differences Between D-Needs and B-Needs

Wellness becomes just another form of striving when it’s goal-bound. Maslow invites us to begin not with doing, but with seeing.

Meeting D-Needs with Dignity

To escape the trap of instrumental wellness, we must create conditions that allow D-needs to be met without shame, struggle, or delay. Maslow emphasized that we don’t overcome D-needs by ignoring them or bypassing them with spiritual practices. Instead:

• Meet physical needs through rest, safety, nourishment, and sustainable rhythms

• Meet emotional and psychological needs through trauma-informed care, relationships of safety, and compassionate witnessing

• Meet esteem needs through real contribution, earned confidence, and meaningful feedback

• Meet belonging needs through authentic community, shared values, and inclusion
  
  

When these needs are met consistently and with dignity, the nervous system relaxes, and B-Cognition naturally arises. We stop using B-needs (like beauty, truth, or spirituality) to patch survival gaps, and begin to experience them as true ends in themselves.

"A healthy society would help people satisfy D-needs quickly and respectfully, so they can grow into B-needs and flourish," Maslow

What Changes in Being-Cognition?

When we stop grasping and start witnessing, life begins to breathe again.

• We feel intimacy with ordinary things.

• Relationships become encounters, not exchanges.

• Emotions arise and pass without war.

• Work becomes expression, not proof of worth.

• Growth is not an escape from imperfection, but its unfolding.

  
  As Maslow wrote:

“What a man can be, he must be.”

But he added:

“…and what he must be may not be only for himself. It may be for life itself, for others, for truth, or for the planet.”

This is the vision of true human flourishing, not as achievement, but as presence.

2. Maps of Presence: A Universal Developmental Polarity

The distinction between D-cognition (deficiency cognition) and B-cognition (being cognition), as described by Abraham Maslow, is far more than a theoretical split within motivational psychology. It reflects a fundamental polarity that runs through nearly every major model of human development, consciousness, and well-being.

Across disciplines, from neurobiology and somatic regulation to mindfulness psychology, existential psychotherapy, and transpersonal or spiritual frameworks, we see this same essential shift: from striving to presence, from lack to wholeness, from managing life to meaningfully inhabiting it. Whether framed as dysregulation vs. regulation, doing vs. being mode, ego development vs. soul calling, or force vs. power, the deeper architecture is consistent.

It is the movement from D-cognition perception colored by absence, threat, and goal-seeking, to B-cognition, which arises in moments of awe, stillness, and intrinsic value.

This polarity is not merely a contrast in behavior or mood, but a threshold of consciousness, a point at which one's orientation to self, others, and life itself undergoes a profound reconfiguration. To recognize this universal arc is to see that Maslow’s hierarchy is not just a pyramid, but a gateway into a different way of being.

1. Regulation and Dysregulation: The Biological Foundations

While Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is often discussed in terms of motivation and psychology, its deeper implications are somatic and neurological. The movement from deficiency needs (D-needs) to being needs (B-needs) is not just a matter of “wanting more out of life”; it’s a transition that requires a regulated nervous system. Without physiological safety, psychological growth cannot take root.

The Nervous System as the Gatekeeper of Motivation

The autonomic nervous system governs our internal state, constantly scanning for cues of safety or danger (a process known as neuroception). When we perceive threat, physical, emotional, or social, the sympathetic branch is activated: fight, flight, vigilance, striving.

This state mirrors the urgency of D-needs: when survival or acceptance feels at risk, the body mobilizes all resources toward protection or restoration. “Doing mode” thrives here; problem-solving, hyper-focus, control, and performance dominate. This is often misinterpreted as productivity, when in fact it may be biological dysregulation masked by output.

In contrast, B-needs require ventral vagal activation, a state of calm alertness associated with the parasympathetic nervous system. Only in this regulated state do we feel safe enough to slow down, reflect, connect, or wonder.

Polyvagal Theory: From Defense to Connection

Stephen Porges’ Polyvagal Theory offers a compelling lens to understand this. According to this model, the nervous system operates in a hierarchical sequence:

• Sympathetic activation (mobilization) under threat

• Dorsal vagal shutdown (immobilization) under overwhelm

• Ventral vagal state (social engagement and openness) when safe

When someone is dysregulated, stuck in fight/flight or collapse, they are locked in survival behavior. No amount of intention, coaching, or willpower will unlock B-needs if the body is signaling danger.

In this state, doing is not a choice; it's a compulsion. Being is not accessible; it's unsafe.

Only when the ventral vagal system is online, through regulation, can the deeper needs of presence, purpose, and play come to life.

The Physiological Prerequisite for Higher Needs

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs outlines a natural progression from basic survival toward self-actualization and beyond. However, contemporary neuroscience and trauma-informed psychology have deepened our understanding of what actually allows this progression to unfold.

It’s not enough to have food, shelter, and social contact in principle. If a person’s nervous system remains in a state of threat, due to unresolved trauma, chronic stress, or cultural demands that keep the body in overdrive, the conditions required for self-actualization will not materialize. The body interprets the world as unsafe, regardless of external circumstances.

In this context, being needs do not simply emerge because survival needs are technically met. They arise when the nervous system shifts out of survival mode and into regulation, particularly into the ventral vagal state associated with openness, connection, and trust.

This means that the movement from deficiency to growth is not only motivational or psychological, but biological. Presence, creativity, and self-transcendence become possible only when the body feels safe enough to stop bracing against life.

In this light, developmental growth depends not just on external provision, but on internal regulation, on whether the nervous system can support the openness that being mode requires.

2. Mindfulness Psychology: Doing vs. Being Mode

Having explored how survival, the ongoing work of meeting D-needs, and nervous system dysregulation shape our lived experience, we now turn to a deeper layer of the developmental polarity. This next layer emerges not just from biology or circumstance, but from how we relate to time, self, and meaning.

This is the distinction between doing mode and being mode, a core concept in mindfulness-based cognitive psychology, particularly in the work of Mark Williams and colleagues. These are not simply behaviors or traits, but fundamental modes of consciousness that profoundly shape how we inhabit the world.

Where the previous sections outlined the conditions that constrain or enable growth (i.e., external safety and internal regulation), doing and being describe the psychological postures we adopt in response to those conditions. how we move through life, whether by striving or by presence.

Doing Mode: The Mental Framework of Survival

Doing mode is the default mode when we are meeting deficiency needs. It helps us:

• Secure safety, belonging, and control

• Problem-solve and achieve

• Predict outcomes and manage future risk
  
  

It is task-driven and future-focused, rooted in goal-orientation and comparison. It thrives when there is something to fix or obtain. This is the mode of mind most engaged when we’re navigating the demands of survival, especially in modern life, where performing, optimizing, and producing are often equated with worth.

Doing mode is not inherently negative; it is essential for functioning in the world. But when doing becomes chronic, unconscious, or disconnected from deeper values, it begins to erode our capacity to feel connected, inspired, or whole.

Being Mode: The Ground of Wholeness and Depth

In contrast, being mode is not about solving or improving; it is about inhabiting the moment with awareness and openness. It allows us to:

• Tune into inner experience without judgment

• Engage with life as it is, not just as it could be

• Reconnect with curiosity, creativity, and relational depth
  
  

Being mode typically becomes available under specific internal conditions. It is not simply a mindset one chooses; it is a state of awareness that arises when both basic needs and biological safety are in place.

Only then can the psyche shift out of striving and protection and into presence. In this state, attention widens. We relate to experience as it is, not as something to fix. We can rest in the now rather than leaning into the next.

This opens the doorway to Maslow’s B-needs, needs not driven by lack, but by the intrinsic pull toward truth, beauty, love, and self-actualization. These are not needs we “solve,” but qualities we access through presence.

Why This Polarity Matters

The doing–being polarity adds psychological depth to Maslow’s hierarchy and biological realism to our understanding of human potential. When doing mode is overused, especially without transitions into being, we may meet our D-needs effectively, yet feel increasingly disconnected from inner life.

This is often where people begin to feel stuck:

• They’re accomplishing, but not expanding.

• Functioning, but not flourishing.

It’s not that anything is “wrong,” but that something essential is missing.

In this space, when doing no longer delivers, and being remains distant, a new kind of experience begins to emerge. It is not a crisis, but a threshold named languishing.

3. Hawkins’ Map of Consciousness: Force vs. Power

Spiritual psychologist David R. Hawkins offers another lens with his Map of Consciousness, a scale of human awareness from shame to enlightenment.

• Levels below 200 (fear, anger, pride) are governed by force, driven by survival, validation, and control; the realm of D-needs.

• Levels above 200 (courage, love, joy, peace) operate from power; intrinsic, grounded, and expansive, much like Maslow’s being-level motivations.
  
  

This model suggests that higher states of consciousness are not just emotional states, but motivational upgrades. The movement from egoic striving to deeper presence reflects Maslow’s shift from achieving to becoming.

4. Integral Theory: Ego to Essence

In Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory, human development is seen as a layered unfolding from pre-conventional (ego-driven) to post-conventional (transpersonal or integral) consciousness.

Maslow’s B-needs reflect this later-stage awareness, where a person’s focus moves beyond success or approval into wholeness, interconnectedness, and authenticity.

Doing mode aligns with horizontal development (skills, goals, accomplishments), while being mode is more about vertical development, growth in presence, capacity, and consciousness.

5. Existential and Transpersonal Psychology: From Absurdity to Meaning

Existential thinkers like Viktor Frankl, Rollo May, and Irvin Yalom emphasize that once survival is secured, humans face deeper questions:

Who am I?
What makes life meaningful?
How do I respond to the inevitability of death?

Maslow’s B-needs live in this domain. Meaning, purpose, and authenticity arise not from solving problems, but from embracing life as mystery. Being mode allows for presence with what is, not just what should be.

Languishing, in this view, is the liminal space between external achievement and internal significance.

6. Depth and Soul Psychology: Ego Roles vs. Soul Calling

In depth psychology and modern soulwork (e.g., Bill Plotkin’s “Soulcraft”), human life is seen as a journey from ego to essence. The early years are focused on forming a functional identity, D-needs territory. But in midlife and beyond, many people feel called to shed their roles and find deeper alignment, an inner vocation.

This reflects Maslow’s insight that growth does not end with competence. In fact, B-needs often require a surrender of what once worked, and an openness to what now calls.

Doing mode builds the container. Being mode fills it with soul.

The Thread That Connects

Across all these frameworks, one truth holds:

The shift from doing to being is not an escape from life, but a return to it, not resignation, but reorientation.

Maslow gave us the architecture. Modern psychology, neuroscience, and spirituality are adding the wiring, plumbing, and soul.

Being mode is not a passive state. It is the awakened capacity to relate, to receive, and to express, beyond the striving of the ego, into the unfolding of the self.

3. Languishing: A Threshold State

Languishing arises when the relationship between doing and being becomes imbalanced, whether due to survival demands, nervous system dysregulation, or existential drift.

While the outcome, a felt sense of flatness, disconnection, or inner dullness, may look similar on the surface, the entry points into languishing vary.

There are many entry points, but here are three of the most common:

1. Survival Loop: When We Are Locked in D-Needs

The first entry point is when life remains organized around deficiency needs, safety, stability, belonging, and esteem. These are essential for survival, and many people, especially in insecure or inequitable environments, must prioritize them.

But when these needs dominate for too long, especially without room for rest or reflection doing mode becomes permanent. The nervous system remains locked in forward motion: solve, strive, prove, repeat.

Even without acute trauma, the constant preoccupation with survival or social performance can prevent access to deeper aspects of being. Over time, this leads to emotional wear, reduced meaning, and eventual stagnation: languishing.

2. Dysregulation Loop: When the Nervous System Can’t Shift

Another path is through trauma or chronic stress, conditions that overwhelm the body’s capacity to regulate itself. Even when external needs are met (a home, job, relationships), the nervous system may remain dysregulated.

People in this state are not lacking will or awareness; they are physiologically stuck in patterns of hypervigilance, collapse, or emotional shutdown. Doing mode becomes a coping mechanism, not a choice.

In this scenario, languishing arises not from external deficiency, but from internal disconnection. Being mode feels inaccessible or unsafe, even when someone desires change. The absence of vitality, curiosity, or creative engagement becomes a kind of silent despair.

3. Existential Drift: When “Is This All There Is?” Becomes the Question

A third pathway is more existential in nature. Life may look successful from the outside. D-needs are well-met. The nervous system is relatively stable. And yet, something still feels hollow.

This is often the entry point for those who feel:

• Uninspired by routine success

• Disconnected from meaning or purpose

• Caught in a life that no longer fits who they’re becoming
  
  

Here, languishing is less about survival or trauma, and more about the quiet erosion of aliveness. Doing mode has brought stability, but not depth. Being mode has not been cultivated or has been forgotten. The question “Is this all there is?” marks the beginning of that realization.

Doing and Being: The Underlying Structure of All Three

While the content and causes differ, what unites these three entry points into languishing is the same foundational imbalance: a disconnection between doing and being.

• In prolonged survival, doing dominates because we are still actively meeting D-needs often with little space for reflection or rest.

• In dysregulation, doing becomes automatic because the body does not feel safe, even if conditions have improved. The nervous system remains on high alert or shut down, and being mode with its openness and stillness feels dangerous or intolerable.

• In existential drift, doing continues by habit, long after its urgency has passed. Life appears stable, but the motions have lost their meaning.
  
  

In all three cases, the structure of doing remains intact, but the substance of being is missing. What once kept us moving now leaves us disconnected. The rhythms of survival persist, even when the season has changed.

Languishing emerges when doing no longer brings us closer to life, and being has not yet returned to show us how.

Psychologist Corey Keyes coined the term languishing to describe a state that is neither depression nor flourishing, a kind of psychological gray zone marked by:

• Diminished sense of meaning

• Emotional flatness or dullness

• Reduced motivation or engagement

• Low but not clinical levels of anxiety or sadness
  
  

Languishing is the in-between state: the absence of crisis, but also the absence of aliveness.

Vitality: The Fuel, the Bridge, and the Signal of Readiness

Languishing arises when the structure of doing remains, but the inner spark, the energy that animates purpose, direction, and presence, has faded. What’s missing is vitality.

Vitality can be defined as energy, motivation, and aliveness. It is the internal force that allows us to meet life not just with effort, but with engagement. It’s what makes action feel meaningful, and rest feel nourishing. Vitality is not an abstract ideal, it is what enables us to function, connect, and flourish across every stage of development.

But vitality is more than a bridge between doing and being; it is also the fuel that sustains both.

• In the realm of survival, vitality supports our capacity to meet D-needs with resilience. It provides the strength to seek safety, stability, and belonging without burning out. This is restorative vitality, the kind that helps us recover from depletion and rebuild capacity at the most foundational levels.
  

• At the threshold between doing and being, vitality becomes the bridge, the signal that the nervous system is regulated enough to begin shifting from coping to becoming.
  

• In the domain of being, vitality becomes generative, a source of creativity, presence, and inner fulfillment. It fuels the pursuit of B-needs: truth, beauty, meaning, and self-transcendence. This is generative vitality, and it arises not from deficit, but from fullness, not from pressure, but from inspiration.
  
  

Vitality is the animating current of the human experience.
Without it, doing becomes mechanical.
Without it, being becomes unreachable.
With it, we reawaken the capacity to grow, connect, and come alive.

Yet for many, especially after long periods of depletion, chronic stress, or existential drift, vitality doesn’t simply return on its own. It must be restored: gently, holistically, intentionally, and in alignment with where someone is on their developmental path.

This is the foundation of our work.
We help people restore and renew their vitality, so they can shift from surviving to thriving, from doing to being, from languishing to flourishing, not as a linear path, but a regenerative spiral of becoming.