Welcome back to episode 1,8402.

How are you doing today?

How is your challenge coming along?

This is a mind map as I shared with you in yesterday's episode where you scan your environment

and look for joy, instances of joy.

I will say that humor works really well too.

If you scan your environment and look for humorous things that make you laugh or make you smile,

I often find this with children and animals, especially pets like a dog or a cat.

So if you could, when you enter an environment, scan it for things that make you laugh or

kashu, joy, that will help you manage anxiety.

And remember, just as with meditation, when you do this consistently, you begin to access

the frontal part of your lobes, of your brain, and so you set in motion new neural pathways

so that pretty soon you automatically scan for joy or for humor.

You may have programmed yourself to scan for other things such as fear or anger to

justify things that happened to you or things that you may even hear in the news or gossip.

When you scan for those things, that's what you said in motion in your brain.

So reverse that and begin to scan for things that uplift you.

I was so excited about the research I did for this week's series because it's so possible

to manage social anxiety, and many times the thinking is that, oh, this is just the way I am,

I'm stuck with this, I avoid these situations because I experience such extreme anxiety,

or if I have to be in a situation like this, I can't help but experience intense discomfort

with my anxiety. So I just have to brace myself for it and just muddle my way through it.

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