The following podcast is a Dear Media production.

Hello. Oh my goodness. Thank God, you guys. I was having some technical difficulties here trying to get my mic to work and my headphones to work.

And, you know, I'm just, I'm not cut out to be a technology gal. And I record this at home.

And some days, I love it. And other days, I just go, what am I doing? What am I doing? On that note, what's up you guys? Hey, what's up? Hello and welcome

to this week's episode of Don't Think. This is the podcast for anyone who wants to run away from

their own brain. At the same time, you want to run away. You also never want to leave the house,

which makes it pretty hard to get a break from your own brain. I mean, especially if you're like me and you live alone. I spend a lot of time alone. I love being

alone, but at the same time, sometimes I crave leaving my apartment for my mental sanity. And oddly enough,

sometimes I miss the camaraderie, if you will, of going into a workplace. I miss being offered a stale oat cake that somebody made at home and being like, fuck yeah, I want an oat cake at nine in the morning. And you know what I miss about the office? If someone offers you food, doesn't matter if you want it or not. It's not really a choice. You eat the food. If somebody made food

and they brought it to the office, you eat the food and you eat it good. Miss those days.

Nobody cooks for me around here. Anyway, today we are talking about social anxiety. I'm no stranger

to social anxiety. I want to start by saying that actually people love to claim that I don't

know social anxiety because I

talk about it online. And then of course, at the same time, I do share content of me socializing.

And people will be like, excuse me. But the thing is that I don't believe people who have

social anxiety necessarily don't socialize at all. It's like being like, oh, I'm scared of flying so I never, ever get on an airplane. People can do things in spite of being scared of to do them. And maybe in some cases where it's very severe, some people don't socialize or go out at all due to their social anxiety, which I'm sorry if that's the case for you. That sounds terrible. And I actually did an episode about this. I think it was my second or third episode. It was called Do It Scared. And it was about how kind of early in life I trained myself to do things in spite of the anxiety. Because as I mentioned in that episode, I'm scared of a lot of shit. And I always have been, but I don't not do things because I'm scared.

And if you want to go back and listen to the episode, I would encourage you to, if any of this is

resonating, like being scared of everything, but wanting to do shit anyway.

If you haven't heard it, it really talks about how the more you do things scared, the less scary they become.

Because really, your brain is kind of like this algorithm that you're constantly feeding

information to and rewiring and coding. And when you do something that you're scared up and it's

not scary, your brain's little algorithm learns that. And when you don't do

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