Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a passage of ancient wisdom

designed to help you find strength, insight, and wisdom every day life.

Each one of these passages is based on the 2000 year old philosophy that has guided some

of history's greatest men and women.

For more, you can visit us dailystoic.com.

Your mind is not your friend.

How would you describe someone who lies to you, who riles you up, who makes you anxious

and afraid, who questions whether you're good enough, who has preposterous blind spots

and disturbing biases, who prods you to suspect the worst of others, who tricks you into

doing things you'll regret, who encourages your worst impulses?

And yet this is what our mind does to us on a daily basis.

Your mind is not your friend, the national saying, it takes you by the hand, and it leaves

you nowhere.

And they're not wrong.

As much faith as the Stoics had in our ruling reason, they were quite skeptical, even suspicious

of our mind.

That's why Epictetus talked about putting every impression to the test.

That's what Marcus Aurelius was doing in his meditations, working through his thoughts,

having a kind of debate with himself about things he was sometimes inclined to think,

but new might be wrong.

And this is what we must do.

Our mind can be a partner and a friend, sure, but we have to be of two minds about it.

...