Here’s a homework assignment I give almost every client I see, usually within the first few sessions, sometimes within the first one.
It is, on its face, a simple exercise. I ask them to start a document, a page in a notebook, a note on their phone, a file on their desktop, whatever’s easiest to come back to, and to begin writing down what they need and what they want, across the different domains of their life.
The catch is in the word begin.
This isn’t a worksheet you fill out in twenty minutes and hand back. It’s a living document. It’s something you keep open in the background of your life. As things come up, you add to it. As things change, and they will, you revise it. As you grow, the entries grow with you.
I don’t have my clients fill it out in my office. They take it home, because the point isn’t to perform the exercise for me. The point is to keep being in honest conversation with themselves about what they actually need to be okay, what they want for their life, and how those answers shift as the years move.
And in couples, they each keep their own. Separately. Privately. No cross-referencing.
Now, here’s why this is harder than it sounds. Most adults, and I mean most, including the very high-functioning, well-spoken, professionally accomplished ones, have not actually sat down and asked themselves the question. People assume they know the answers. When they actually start writing, they discover they don’t.
The first thing that tends to come up is the difference between needs and wants. In my practice I distinguish them clearly. A need is something that, if absent, you start to wither. A want is something that, if absent, you’d be disappointed but you’d still be you. Both matter. They’re not the same.
The simplest way I explain it to clients: I need a car is not the same as I want a Mercedes G-Wagon. Both are real. They aren’t the same kind of thing. The first is a need; the second is a want sitting on top of it. Most people collapse the two, get confused, and then can’t figure out why their life keeps feeling off.
In your self domain, needs run the full range from the obvious to the easily forgotten. The obvious are biological: food, water, air, sleep. You know what happens if those go missing. But your self also has needs that are easier to lose track of: I need personal space. I need at least an hour of solitude every day. I need physical movement to regulate my mood. I need quiet sometimes. These are not preferences. They are the conditions of your continued functioning, and the cost of ignoring them shows up in your body and your mood long before it shows up anywhere else.
A want in the self domain might be: I want to take a pottery class this year. Or: I want to read more. Or: I want to feel beautiful in my body. Still important. Different category.
In your relational domain, things get more interesting, because the need and the want can pull in different directions inside the same area. A need might be: I need open communication with my partner. That’s real. But the want underneath that isn’t necessarily I want to know everything they think and feel. Probably not, honestly. The need is communication itself. The want is the texture and the limit of what gets communicated, what you actually want shared, and what you’d rather they keep to themselves. Other relational needs are simpler: I need to be touched in non-sexual ways. I need to know my partner won’t raise their voice at me. I need someone who tells me the truth. Wants might be: I want a partner who likes the same music I do. I want surprise gifts. I want someone curious about my work.
In the work domain, for those who include it, the tension shows up especially sharply. Sometimes what you need is money. Sometimes what you need is fulfillment. Sometimes you need both. But the answer to which one matters more right now changes over the years, and getting it wrong is the difference between a job you can sustain and a job that makes you want to bash your head into a wall out of sheer boredom. The needs-vs-wants split is the place where you find out which one you’ve been pretending not to need.
I consider two domains essential: personal (what’s just about you, your body, your inner life) and relational (the people you’ve chosen to be in connection with). The other domains, work, family, spiritual, creative, financial, are optional. Add whatever is relevant to your life.
The reason this has to be a living document, and not a one-time worksheet, is that needs change. Your need for solitude at twenty-two is not the same as your need for solitude at forty-five with a toddler. Your need for honesty from your partner deepens after the first time someone you trusted lies to you. The pottery class you wanted at thirty becomes the thing you actually need at fifty. The exercise only works if it grows with you.
For couples, the practice is simple: each person keeps their own document. They update it as things come up. When something arises that they’d like to share with their partner, a need they’ve finally been able to name, a want that’s been quietly important, they can bring it to them, on their own timing. But the document itself stays theirs. Your needs are not up for negotiation with the person whose job it is to meet some of them; they are information you’re choosing to share when you’re ready.
This is also a practice you can do entirely on your own. No partner required. In some ways it matters more before there’s another person involved, because then you’re not negotiating, you’re discovering. You’re letting yourself find out what your one body and your one life actually require.
Here’s how I’d suggest you start, if you want to try.
Open a fresh document somewhere you’ll see it again, your notes app, a journal, a single page tucked into a book you actually open. Make two columns: Needs and Wants. Make rows for the domains that matter to you. Personal and relational at minimum. Then begin writing, not finishing. Don’t think too long. Don’t edit. Don’t ask yourself if it’s reasonable. Don’t ask yourself if you’re being too much or too little. Just begin.
Then leave it where you can find it. Come back when something stirs, when you catch yourself wanting something you couldn’t have named yesterday, when a need announces itself in the middle of an argument, when you notice the absence of something you didn’t know to ask for. Add it. Edit it. Let it be alive.
Over time, you’ll have something rare: an actual record of yourself paying attention to yourself.
The gap between what you’ve been asking for and what you actually need is where most of your tiredness lives.
It’s also where the real work begins.