Author: Anna Lembke is a professor of psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine and chief of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic. She sits on the board of several state and national addiction-focused organizations has testified before various committees in the United States House of Representatives and Senate, keeps an active speaking calendar, and maintains a thriving clinical practice.
Book: Dopamine Nation explores the new scientific discoveries that explain why the relentless pursuit of pleasure leads to pain, as well as what can we do to avoid it. The author condenses complex neuroscience into easy-to-understand metaphors to illustrate how finding contentment and connectedness means keeping dopamine (the neurotransmitter that regulates reward and motivation) in check. The author uses the stories of suffering and redemption of her patients to show how addictions are created, and how we can change our behaviour to stop/modify consumption and transform our lives.
Opinion: I think this book (along with others in the field – i.e., The Molecule of More by Lieberman and Long) is a must for everyone (especially young men). We have shifted from a world of scarcity to a world of abundance, with unlimited access to low-effort high reward (high dopamine) stimuli: food, drugs, social media, porn, etc. Every young person I know has developed an addiction to at least one of these rewards, and most of them do not have a clue about it. I strongly believe that high dopamine stimuli (along with socialism) are the single most important challenges that the world is facing right now. I think that this book is the best introduction to the field and can help people develop healthier and happier life. The main takeaway for me is that we should make sure that the rewards we experience are in consonance with the effort we put to get them. Besides, we can also play with the pain/pleasure principle & homeostasis and delete most of our (quick) rewards from time to time to increase our baseline dopamine levels and transform ourselves into more productive/positive/happier individuals.
Comments