Anna Lembke says we are becoming a nation of addicts. She makes that pretty clear in her books with titles like Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance In The Age Of Indulgence and Drug Dealer, MD: How Doctors Were Duped, Patients Got Hooked, And Why It's So Hard To Stop.
Her argument is in a world where we’re constantly chasing pleasure, it's not just that we're using up our dopamine and then we go back to baseline. It's that there's a price to pay for every pleasure.
Anna Lembke is a Professor of Psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine, and joins Greg today to talk about what being an addict in our modern, digital world really means; touching on America is a nation of pain, opioids, identity in illness narratives, and the balance of pain, pleasure and homeostasis.
Episode Quotes:
A bit on Dopamine Nation:
Almost everything has become drugified. It's not just that medications are incredibly potent. it's that everything's become more potent or novel, more accessible. Large to even infinite quantities. So it's not just that we're all vulnerable to addiction because of pharmaceuticals, we're vulnerable to addiction because investing money has become gamified and addictive. Playing games has become addictive. Reading - the combination of the formula of storytelling, plus the technology of e-readers has made reading potentially a drug. So the point really is that we're surrounded by feel good drugs and behaviors.
The pursuit of pleasure can destroy our capacity for it:
Dopamine is like money in the bank. And if you spend all that money, and then you want to keep going, you have to borrow money. And then you go into debt and that's that dopamine deficit state. And you can only do that for so long before people won't lend you money anymore. And then you're really in trouble. So it's this idea that, it's not just that we're using up the dopamine and then we go back to baseline. It's that there's a price to pay for every pleasure.
How can we minimize the likelihood of addiction?:
I think we have to go out into the world today with an appreciation that almost everything has been engineered to be addictive. And to have us consume more of it than is actually healthy for us. Desire is healthy. So this is not to say that we should never use intoxicants or that we should never play video games or never use pornography, but we need to go into those endeavors with a full on awareness that they are inherently addictive, that they were made to be that way. And that really anybody is vulnerable.
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