Life Insurance in Mind!
After our mortgage, life insurance is probably the most important thing we own. Life insurance gives peace of mind to the policyholder and financial security to the beneficiaries. Seen in this light life insurance is not an optional extra but rather an essential part of all our lives. Life insurance is not logical it’s psychological! It literally is, all in the mind.
In 1943 Abraham Maslow proposed a mind bogglingly simple theory of human motivation and called it a ‘hierarchy of needs’. At the foundation of life we have our physiological needs for air, food, water, sex, warmth and excretion (begging your pardon). The next essentials for life once these are met are all about ‘safety’: security of body, of employment, of resources, of family, of health and property.
Clearly life insurance sits fairly and squarely in this category of human needs. Just for completion sake the other categories in ascending order are ‘love/belonging’, ‘esteem’ and ‘self-actualization’ on the top.
But to come back to security of family and resources, it is what Maslow ‘described’ as a deficiency need. We do not so much feel satisfaction when and if they are met as feel anxiety when they are not. So what is it like to be without life insurance? Well it’s all in the head and in the heart.
In our minds eye we see images of our loved ones struggling to make ends meet without us on the scene. Our children don’t have the education we want for them or our spouses struggle without our income to provide for them. Our inner voice berates us for not doing what we know to be right when we have the chance. Our chests are constricted and our stomachs churn with the absence of a sense of security to surround the ones who matter to us most. We become chronically tormented at a continuous low level by the thought of what might be. This is the reality of how the mind works.
So is life insurance the solution to this most fundamental of psychological needs. The answer is yes to a very large extent. Because life insurance is plan under which regular payments are made to a company during your lifetime, and in return the company pays a specified sum of money to your named beneficiaries, after you have shuffled off the old mortal coil.
Physically it is pieces of paper, called policies, with strange symbols on them that amount to promises and explanations. Promises to provide money, which is other paper with even stranger symbolic promises on them. Promises to pay the bearer on demand. So you see what we mean when we say it is all in the mind!
The right life insurance policy for your individual needs is a prerequisite to satisfying an innate need within us all for security of family, resources and property. So if you have a mind for a more satisfying life and you are thinking about removing a nagging source of anxiety, the first thing to do is reassure yourself that your insurance policies are adequate and up to date with your needs.
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