Welcome to the Buddhist Boot Camp Podcast. Our intention is to awaken, enlighten, enrich, and inspire a simple and uncomplicated life. Discover the benefits of mindful living with your host, Timber Hawkeye.

Our brains are hardwired to protect us from harm, from pain, and from discomfort. This is a great feature that all animals have and it works like an internal alarm that goes off when sensing danger.

Problem with this built-in security system is that it's not as highly sophisticated as you might think.

While it can save us from experiencing pain if we get too close to fire,

sometimes the alarm goes off unnecessarily the way a guard dog barks at an intruder but also at the mail carrier.

Our mind can't always distinguish between a real threat and a perceived one.

My old apartment had a smoke detector that beeped whenever I was cooking and not because anything was actually on fire. It would have been so nice if I could simply turn it off by yelling I'm just making dinner.

Familiarizing ourselves with some of the ways our mind works is great because we tend to repeat the cycles we don't acknowledge.

It's like troubleshooting a car.

Some issues are easy to figure out because we have a fuel gauge, a battery indicator,

and fancy cars even show the tire pressure measurements right on the dashboard.

But sometimes all we get is a check engine light which could mean any number of things.

Once we know what needs to be fixed we are halfway to a more enjoyable ride and the same is true with

our minds if you can name it you can tame it and that's what this episode is

about I don't like anyone playing tricks on me especially my own mind

so I've been keeping track of its sneaky little ways.

You have probably heard me say before that the best piece of advice I have ever received was

don't believe everything you think. Our mind is capable of believing just about anything, especially if we don't know what patterns to look for.

I've recorded a podcast episode before called Negativity bias about some people's tendency to focus on the bad aspects of any situation more than the good,

often imagining worst-case scenarios.

And just the last episode included a reference to confirmation bias,

which is when we give more weight to information that reconfirms what we already believe

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