Hello and welcome back to practicing human, the podcast where every day we're getting a little better at life.

I'm your host, Corey Mascara.

And in today's episode, I'm going to talk about the opposite of paranoia and why it can make your life much better.

More to come on that in a moment.

First, let's settle in together with the sound of the bells. So I recently came across a new word.

I love discovering new words.

Most of us are familiar with the term paranoia. Although there's a clinical

definition of paranoia, a lot of us use it in lay language and in general typically refers to the

belief that the world is conspiring to do you harm or is out to get you.

But there's another less well-known word that I'm pretty sure is just made up within the spiritual

communities, but it's called pro noia.

And this is the belief that the world is conspiring to do you good.

Paranoia, the belief that the world is conspiring to do you harm.

Pronoya, the belief that the world is conspiring to do you good.

Hmm, interesting, right? I think one could argue that both are equally irrational.

The universe conspiring to do you harm. The universe conspiring to do you good. Who knows?

But one thing I have found in my life is that if I hold a certain belief and I hold it deeply,

I can tend to marshal all sorts of evidence to support that belief.

And so when it comes to paranoia or prognoya, I think these can become self-fulfilling prophecies. If we go through life with the

belief that the world is conspiring to do us harm, well, we'll be able to find moments where that

seems to be the case and tell a story about why that happened and how it has to do with the world being out to get us.

If we hold the belief that the world is conspiring to do us good,

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