Another Friday and another little bonus episode for you. Now, we often look at mental health as being a brain thing rather than a body thing.

But of course, her brain is part of our body. It's an organ that needs looking after just like every other organ does.

It's just that because our brain is the seat of our consciousness, who we are as a

human, when things aren't working well in it, it's our personality that changes. And much as I spend

a lot of time thinking about mental health as being all about thoughts, feelings and behaviour,

there is more to us than that. And I think we all realise this.

Deep down, most of you would have heard about Abraham Maslow and his hierarchy of needs. And if you

haven't, or you need a quick refresher on it, I'll lay it out for you briefly. So back in the early 40s, Maslow promoted the

idea that to be fully content with our life, we have to go through certain layers of our needs,

with the foundations being the very basic physiological ones, moving up through safety aspects,

then relationships, then self-esteem,

with the very top being what he called self-actualization, where you're happy with who you are

and what you bring to the world. His idea was that you can't get to that top point unless you go

one by one through those four deficiency needs

and in that order as well. Because if our focus is on the third level of building relationships,

friendships, intimacy, then we're likely to still feel that we're missing something

because we don't even have anything to drink and a toilet. So that's what Abraham Maslow was on about. Start with the basics.

Food, water, shelter. Get those needs met before anything else. But the thing is, it's too easy

to get out of touch with what our body actually needs,

isn't it? We don't always notice that we're thirsty. For example, that's a really common one.

And of course, there's a right knock-on effect everywhere else in our body, including our brain,

as anybody with a hangover can testify to. Because our body needs water. And not Diet Coke or

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