As it promised, Netflix has filed a petition to the FCC demanding that it deny the proposed merger between Comcast and Time Warner. The 256-age document claims that such a merger would result in “serious public interest harm, and no discernible…
If you’ve always wanted to take the plunge and get a Livescribe smartpen but shudder at the thought of giving up your beloved Moleskine notebooks, well, have we got great news for you. Yep, you guessed it: Livescribe has partnered with the iconic…
Verizon will begin its Voice over LTE (VoLTE) roll-out over the next few weeks, pushing HD Voice and video calls over the carrier’s 4G data network. The much-promised technology, which marks the beginning of a shift away from CDMA voice calls, will require compatible handsets on both ends of the call – whether audio or video – though Verizon says … Continue reading
The idea of Evernote selling physical goodies might have seemed weird at first, but people took to it quickly, enough (the company says) for the merchandise to rake in $8 million in revenues since fall. If that’s true, then it’s not surprising that…
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The US military’s latest test of the Advanced Hypersonic Weapon ended with a premature bang this week, with officials having to hit the self-destruct button just four seconds after blast-off. Though designed to travel at around five times the speed of sound to take out any target in the world, as part of the US government’s pledge to improve tactical … Continue reading
When I was in the murky depths of depression, I used to love it when it rained. The more gray, gloomy and miserable the weather, the better. My then-partner was always puzzled by this meteorological preference. “Who prefers bad weather?” he asked, “Why on earth do you like it so much?”
The answer came swiftly, taking me by surprise with its simplicity and bone-aching truth: “Because it’s the only time my outsides match my insides.”
Because it’s the only time my outsides match my insides.
In the middle of that five-year journey through my own private hell, crappy weather provided a sense of relief. When it was gloomy outside — as it always was within — it was such a relief. I didn’t have to pretend. I could finally exhale. It was such a blessed, welcome reprieve to feel aligned for a day or two while the heavens opened up… even if that alignment was not in the happy, shiny direction that most people prefer their inner compasses to point.
Mercifully, I climbed out of my depression. But at some stage during the reflection and dissection that was to follow, I came back to this point — to the intense feeling of relief and release that I got when “my outsides matched my insides.”
And I realized this truth: It’s still true. It’s always true. In fact, having outsides that match your insides is the key to happiness. Seriously. Except, of course, it’s not normally about the weather aligning with how we feel, but about our actions, behaviors and lifestyle matching up with our internal state.
This “matching up” is actually a well-recognized concept that far smarter people than me have described in far more intellectual terms. Psychologists call it the concept of “congruence,” and it refers to the human drive to live in alignment with who we are and who we want to be. Unhappiness and stress arise when there is tension and discord with who we think we are (or want to be) and how we actually show up in the world.
Most of us know all too well how this feels. It’s that feeling when you desperately ache to lose weight, yet spend your nights curled up with a family-sized block of Hershey’s finest.
It’s when your family is your biggest priority, and yet you find yourself stuck at work, missing your daughter’s ballet recital.
It’s when you know in your bones you’re meant to be a writer/actor/zookeeper, and yet you never get around to doing any writing/acting/zoo keeping because you “just don’t have time.”
This lack of congruence can show up in even the smallest moments of our day, creating tension that we aren’t even consciously aware of, but that is accumulating stress-fully nevertheless. Like when you walk into your room and dump all your belongings on the floor, even though you value staying organized and minimizing clutter. Or when you check your email throughout dinner, even though you highly value being present for your partner. Or when you stay up late binge-watching Suits, even though you know you need more sleep.
All these little actions which are out of alignment with who you are and who you desire to be are hurting you. Perhaps incrementally, perhaps a lot.
Yet the solution is so effortlessly simple (but let’s not get this concept confused with “easy” — it is not always easy). All you have to do is align your life with your values: align your actions with your intentions, align your habits with your desired outcomes, align your minutes with how you want your days to be.
That’s the secret to feeling happy, all the damn time. It’s how to achieve your goals and realize your purpose and feel the way you want to feel. If you can make your outsides match your insides… everything is possible.
And now, I am happiest when the sky is a clear and blazing blue.
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Have a story about depression that you’d like to share? Email strongertogether@huffingtonpost.com, or give us a call at (860) 348-3376, and you can record your story in your own words. Please be sure to include your name and phone number.
Mary Lynn R. is a journalist in Rome, Georgia. After being arrested over an Internet comment, she realized that she needed help managing her bipolar disorder. This is her story.
I’ve been told I’m really funny. I know I’m funny, actually.
I have bipolar disorder, so I created this alter ego to be hilarious in person with other people. It sounds crazy, but I didn’t want to show anyone any sort of negative reaction.
But I was very, very volatile by myself. I would blame myself for literally everything and tell myself what I was feeling was wrong. It’s like tunnel vision — you can only see one part of yourself and it’s the worst part of yourself.
When I was in college in 2008, it just got a lot worse. I was in school and I didn’t care anymore. I just wanted out of the situation. I called my parents and told them I wanted to drop out of that school, and my parents told me I needed to get my associate’s degree there.
I made a statement on the internet, kind of lashing out for help. And I got in trouble for an online threat. I was ordered to go to court-ordered therapy, and the charges were dropped. I was banned from campus and I had to go to court-ordered therapy wherever I went to college, from there on out.
I guess it was kind of a self-sabotaging incident, because [my parents] told me I had to stay there and I wanted to leave … Not to say it wasn’t anyone’s fault but my own.
I came back home and I got my associate’s degree at a community college here, and then I went to Statesboro, Georgia. That’s about five hours south of Rome. When I first started school there, I did not know anyone and I was just clinically depressed. I was just going to class and going home and looking out from my apartment and watching everyone have fun, and I just thought to myself, I really can’t do this anymore.
My dad found me a good therapist down there. But to be honest, when I first started going to my counselor in Statesboro, I did my alter ego, where I was just hilarious all the time.
She kind of saw right through that, after a couple of sessions in. So I was just doing my usual self-deprecation, like in a funny way (or what I thought was funny), and she just called me out on it. I remember I was making fun of these people in one of my classes and then making fun of myself, talking about how I hated everything — you know, just trying to be funny.
And then she said, “I don’t think you’re very funny. I think you’re a really sad individual and I think you need to talk through that.”
And then I just started crying. That was the first time I cried in front of someone in probably 10 years. That was when I had my first breakthrough, and ever since then, it’s been an uphill battle.
Everything changed. Whereas I was self-destructive and reclusive and just hung out with myself, I called on friends with substance instead of party friends who just go out and have a good time and laugh at everything. I started dating someone. Because of therapy and because of my own hard work, I was more willing to open up to people and be myself.
But every now and then someone will say, “Have you taken your medicine today?” if I say something they don’t agree with. Sometimes people can be assholes, but for the most part people think it’s kind of brave that I talk about it. They’re pretty respectful and treat me like a normal person, and the people that don’t are just kind of ignorant.
I think therapy does work, but you have to want it. I also take medicine, too. You have to disregard all the stigma associated with this illness and put in the work. All therapists do is talk to you. You have to provide all the breakthroughs.
I want people to know, mainly, that they’re not alone. This affects a large population. If people don’t talk about it, it’s because there’s stigma associated with it. It doesn’t have to define who you are.
As told to Anna Almendrala. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Have a story about depression that you’d like to share? Email strongertogether@huffingtonpost.com, or give us a call at (860) 348-3376, and you can record your story in your own words. Please be sure to include your name and phone number.
Need help? In the U.S., call 1-800-273-8255 for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.
CANBERRA, Australia (AP) — The Australian government said Tuesday it will spend 64 million Australian dollars ($60 million) on measures to counter violent extremism and radicalization as Islamic State continues to recruit foreign fighters to its ranks in Iraq and Syria.
The measures include strengthened community engagement programs aimed at preventing young Australians from becoming involved with extremist groups and new multi-agency investigation teams to disrupt foreign fighters and their supporters. The Australian government is giving high priority to reducing the domestic terrorism threat created by homegrown extremists who travel to Syria and Iraq to fight.
Australia and the United State will raise at the United Nations General Assembly in September the need for governments to cooperate against the common threat.
“This is the highest national security risk that we face and we will not rest until we are sure that the Australian people are safe and secure from it,” Foreign Minister Julie Bishop told Parliament.
Prime Minister Tony Abbott said at least 60 Australians were fighting for Islamic State overseas, and another 100 were working or fund-raising within Australia to support the al-Qaida offshoot group and other terror groups.
Islamic leaders have complained that Australia’s Muslim minority is being unfairly targeted by draconian counterterrorism measures, such as a proposed new onus on Australians traveling to terrorism hotbeds to prove that they had legitimate reasons for going there.
But Abbott said Muslims were not being targeted.
“I want to make it absolutely crystal clear that the enemy here is terrorism, it’s not any particular faith, it’s not any particular community,” Abbott told Parliament.
A poll published in The Australian newspaper on Tuesday found that 77 percent of respondents supported laws that would require travelers to prove that they had no contact with terrorist groups while overseas. Another 18 percent opposed the move and 5 percent were undecided.
The poll by Sydney-based market researcher Newspoll was based on a random, nationwide telephone survey of 1,207 voters last weekend. It has 3 percentage point margin of error.
Co-authored with Robert Martin
China’s plan to create a new development bank for Asia — the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) — has generated much fanfare since Chinese premier Xi Jinping announced China’s intentions to create the Bank last year. Since then, there has been a great deal of speculation about which governments may join, and considerable discussion about the AIIB’s true intent, with some quarters speculating that the ultimate purpose is to challenge Japan’s regional financial primacy through its leadership of and large shareholding in the Asian Development Bank (ADB).
Given that all international financial institutions are at their core political entities, disguised as development banks, this challenge to Japan must ring true in Tokyo. All member countries of the ADB have been invited to join the AIIB — including the United States, Japan and South Korea. There is considerable debate at the highest levels of government about whether these countries will indeed join the Bank. Our guess is that few will want to be perceived as preventing further development in the region because the AIIB happens to be a Chinese initiative.
An important part of the debate is not only perceived financial supremacy in Asia — and in that regard, China already reigns supreme — but the acknowledgement that China is stepping up to the plate to transition from being primarily a recipient of development aid to becoming a primary donor.
Development banks such as the ADB have wanted China to keep borrowing from them given that China accounts for a significant percentage of their loan portfolios, which they wish to maintain. Why China should be accepting any development assistance has been a subject of ongoing debate in the development community, given that it is the world’s second largest economy and has the world’s largest foreign exchange reserves. The creation of the AIIB would be a big step in the direction of encouraging China’s transition from borrower to lender.
But in order to be successful as a political institution, the AIIB will first need to be successful as a development institution. As de facto leader of the bank, China will need to be seen as being a leading advocate not only for the development process and the alleviation of poverty, but also best international practices in good governance, environmental compliance, anti-corruption initiatives, and transparency — subjects which are not generally associated with Chinese political and business practices. Whether China is up to the task will remain an open question.
There is no question that Asia would clearly benefit from an additional infusion of capital, as the region struggles to meet its growing infrastructure needs. The ADB currently estimates that Asia will need $8 trillion in national infrastructure and $290 billion in regional infrastructure through 2020 in order to sustain the region’s growth trajectory. Neither the ADB nor the AIIB can raise anywhere near these sums.
Indeed, the ADB currently finances less than 2% of Asia’s needs, a sum the AIIB can only hope to match in the coming decade. The remainder must come from a combination of private sector funding, government funding, and public/private partnerships. The problem is that Asia has fallen so far behind in meeting its infrastructure needs that only a large, sustained, and lengthy effort can make a difference in the longer term. That effort needs to start now.
To entice the private sector to step up its investments into long term infrastructure projects, Asian governments must start by improving their governance regimes. The rule of law, independent regulators and judiciaries, predictability, clean politics, and political stability are all essential elements in the highly competitive race for private capital. Singapore and Hong Kong have demonstrated that it can be done well.
To a limited degree the ADB understands this. Promoting these ideals has been an important element in the success of its private sector operations since 2000. Development banks more generally have much more to do in that regard, but they are heading in the right direction.
Major donor countries must be honest in asking themselves whether Asia would be better off with the additional development capital the AIIB promises to deliver to the region. If these countries can get over the politics associated with joining hands with China, it should be a simple question to answer. In the interim, China faces an enormous task in getting the AIIB up and running — the right way.
If China will publicly stress the importance of good governance as an essential component of making the development process work, the AIIB has a chance of being successful, and may work well in generating significantly more financial resources for the region. If not, the AIIB could become an embarrassment for China’s government, and, in the end, its own commercial interests. With Xi Jinping’s personal endorsement and credibility on the line, there is a better chance that it will succeed, than not. The proof will be in the pudding.
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*Daniel Wagner is CEO of Country Risk Solutions, senior advisor with Gnarus Advisors, and author of the book “Managing Country Risk.” Robert Martin is a former senior official at the Asian Development Bank.
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