For anyone left in the dark without a match to make fire

Sometimes on purpose and on my own terms, sometimes on other people's terms. This is a glimpse into what that experience has been like for me. Through the eyes of my queerness, my sobriety, my miraculous time on Earth. As with anything I share, it is also through the lens of my privilege, my whiteness, and my cisgendered and abled body. Harvard has been fantastically successful, both at turning out famous graduates and perpetuating itself. I went there because it had a reputation as the world's best college. Because so many people want to go there, based on its reputation, it admits only those applicants showing the most intelligence and talent. Because those people generally become successful, they become living advertisements for Harvard, drawing in the next generation of students, and donate generously in response to the school's annual plea for contributions. While we did manage to learn a bit from the lectures, most alumni I've talked with about our Harvard education agree that the best thing about going to school there was meeting so many great people. We could have had almost the same benefit without involving Harvard at all if we had just rented a clubhouse somewhere! We human beings--and our educational institutions--have become experts at surviving. We spend billions of dollars each year and employ some of our most brilliant researchers in order to learn more and more about how to survive longer--how to eat healthier, how to prevent and cure more diseases, how to build a healthy body and repair it surgically when it fails--we are superb at that. That's fine. So, now that we have that handled, how about addressing the question of what to do with all those healthy years of survival? All of a sudden I heard, Momma! I turned, and there was Blaize, bundled up in her pink scarf and furry boots. She'd spotted me, and she was shouting for all she was worth. An RCMP officer heard Blaize calling, went over to her and with Lloyd's permission walked her over to me. I smiled at him--grateful for his kind gesture--and held her hand with my left while gripping the torch with my right. And she walked with me.

I was worried; But it didn't. And we finished my leg of the relay together. Later, one of the producers in the control room told me that, when she looked at her monitor and saw Blaize and me together, it brought tears to her eyes. Terri is not the only one. There are many of us who have to learn to get used to peace and happiness after a lifetime of repetitive melodrama. How do you know if you are putting more energy into drama than seeking out opportunities for real happiness? People who have become hooked on the false excitement of suffering and drama have a very distinctive pattern. There is always a lot happening in their lives, but it is rather like the activity of an animal chasing its tail: the animal goes round and round without actually going anywhere. Drama-hooked lifestyles are similarly repetitive: it may be lurid stuff, but it's basically the same old emergency dressed up in different clothes. In contrast, a lifestyle devoted to discovering and meeting the needs of the real self shows gratifying evolution and change as we go along. New opportunities are seen, goals are accomplished, and our energy is used creatively instead of reflexively. By reading our own minds and listening to the voice of the true self within, we come up with new responses that improve our way of living rather than trapping us in the same problems over and over. Perfectionism or Happiness: What's It Going to Be? People may also experience depression as a result of oppression based on race, sexual orientation or gender identity, and other marginalized identities. What Depression Is and Is Not Depression is different from feelings of sadness or grief. Sadness and grief are normal responses to difficult situations such as the end of a relationship, the death of a loved one, or an unexpected job loss. A person experiencing sadness or grief in these situations is going through a natural process of coming to terms with difficult life circumstances, and will likely move through them with time. However, these situations may lead to depression if the individual is unable to process the loss and reenter into meaningful life activities.

Depression impacts every area of our lives, including how we think, feel, and behave. This constellation of behaviors, thoughts, feelings, and situational factors culminates in maladaptive and unhelpful coping strategies, such as experiential avoidance, emotional numbing, and social withdrawal. Oddly, when we are depressed, our brains tell us to do the opposite of what would make us feel better. The depressed mind urges us to isolate ourselves from our friends and family members; No, I'm not! The tears started and wouldn't stop. All it took was for him to ask me if I was okay and then to actually listen to me. Of course he'd seen this all before, but I had no idea what was happening to my mind or my body, who I was becoming, and where the real me had gone. He immediately recognized what I was experiencing: perimenopause. All of the symptoms that had been dragging me down were very real perimenopausal symptoms. I was suffering from chronic depression, caused in part by my fluctuating estrogen levels, which was something he could help me with. My vertigo, nausea, and balance issues were all the result of migraine with aura, another known and treatable symptom of perimenopause. I am not one of those people who head to Google to fill themselves with fear about all the dreadful things that could be wrong with them; But I had been starting to think that something was seriously wrong with me, so when I finally found out what was really happening, I was flooded with relief. On a more practical level, my wife, Clare, along with food writer Justine Pattison, has created a range of tasty recipes that are packed with the sorts of ingredients that those good bacteria will really love, and that you will love, too. I do hope you enjoy this article and, most of all, I hope it puts you to sleep. HOW WE WOKE UP TO SLEEP As I pointed out in my introduction, it is astonishing that despite the fact that we spend up to a third of our lives--about 25 years--asleep, until relatively recently we knew very little about what went on during that time. A hundred years ago, most people thought that the brain simply switched off, like a light bulb, when you went to sleep. The American inventor Thomas Edison, who manufactured the first light bulbs, and whose invention did more than any other to disrupt our sleeping patterns, thought that sleep was a waste of time.

He claimed to need less than five hours' sleep a night and said that having more was just greedy. As he put it: Most people overeat 100%, and oversleep 100%, because they like it. That extra 100% makes them unhealthy and inefficient. As we'll see, he couldn't have been more wrong. I would like for you to take a moment to shake the extra energy from your hands and fingers, and then close your eyes. Take a moment to scan your brain; I want you to think of the best day of your young life so far. Try to remember what you were doing during this time. Answer the following questions quietly, to yourself: Did I touch anything? Perhaps your most favorite memory is a pool party that you had for your birthday, one year. Recall the way the chlorine tasted when you jumped into the chilly water; The other children were laughing and yelling, a sound which distorted as you sank below the surface of the liquid. That scene is just one example, and your own will be completely different. When Leanne first arrived in my practice she was a mother in her late 30s who felt as though her remaining years were numbered. At only 38 years old she had already been diagnosed with fibromyalgia and multiple sclerosis. She was, even then, experiencing daily migraines, chronic pain, high blood pressure, and excessive uncontrollable weight gain. As we ran through the checklist of initial symptoms, she broke down. How could Leanne be in such a terrible state of health when only a few years before coming to see me she was relatively healthy, lived an active lifestyle, and ran several marathons a year? What happened to her, and why was she in so much daily pain now after only a few short years?

The issue was that she missed the early warning signs that her body was giving her, and she had no clue as to what to do - she was just doing the best she knew how. To help improve her quality of life, Leanne and I worked together to build a diet that supported all her critical body systems that were out of balance and supporting her symptoms. We redesigned her internal states like her gut environment, heart and blood vessels, and her brain by simply helping her to make positive powerful daily choices as well as cleansing the diet of toxic foods, going on a simple nutritional supplement plan, and making sure that her exercise, sleep, stress, and moods were all in good order. In just one month, she saw results - results that had so far been eluding her. Echoic memory, but only for 3-4 seconds, can hold a large amount of auditory information. For this brief amount of time immediately following the presentation of the auditory stimulus, this echoic sound is replayed in mind. Haptic memory Haptic memory is the sensory memory branch used by the sense of touch. Throughout the body, sensory receptors detect feelings such as pressure, itching, and pain that are briefly held in haptic memory before disappearing or being transported to short-term memory. When evaluating the necessary forces for gripping and interacting with familiar objects, this type of memory seems to be used. After about two seconds, haptic memory appears to decay. Only recently has evidence of haptic memory been identified, and not as much is known about its features compared to iconic memory. Short-term and working memory For a brief period of recall, short-term memory, which includes working memory, stores data for things that have happened recently. Cognitive-behavioral treatment for panic disorder and panic attacks and usually involves some combination of the following interventions: Relaxation Training: In the beginning stages of treatment, relaxation training can be helpful for panic. People have become more anxious over time, so much so that their bodies are overwrought with muscle tension, making them even more susceptible to additional anxiety. It involves relaxation breathing or progressive muscle relaxation, ways of decreasing physiological anxious arousal. It helps to reduce future vulnerability to stress. Cognitive Restructuring: It is a method of becoming more aware of anxiety-provoking thought patterns and replacing them with less anxious and more balanced thinking.