One of the most important discoveries in the field of neuroscience in the past 75 years is that pleasure and pain are co-located. To understand how too much of a good thing becomes a bad thing, we need to understand how our brains process pleasure and pain. SUGGESTED READING Paul Bloom: The Pleasure of Suffering By Paul Bloom Any child with access to the Internet can consume digital media, which lights up the same parts of our brains as drugs and alcohol. We also have drugs that didn’t exist before. Wired for scarcity and a world of ever-present danger, the human brain is woefully mismatched for this world of dopamine overload, in which almost every human activity has become druggified in some way – made more reinforcing, more accessible, more potent, more novel, and nearly infinite in quantity. Abundance itself has become the source of our suffering. I suggest to you that the primary cause of our unhappiness today is The Plenty Paradox. Today I’m more likely to suggest a dopamine fast: Abstaining from our drug of choice for four weeks Twenty years ago the first thing I would have done for a patient presenting with anxiety or depression was prescribe an antidepressant or recommend psychotherapy. Some argue that trauma is the source of our suffering, but what kind of trauma are we talking about, beyond the trauma we create for ourselves? Can we honestly say that life today is more traumatic than it was thirty years ago? Even the poorest of the poor living in rich nations today have more leisure time, more disposable income, and more access to luxury goods than at any point in recorded history. But the long view tells us that in fact the gap between rich and poor is smaller than it has been in centuries. Some argue that our despair is the result of a widening income gap. Rates of anxiety, depression, and chronic pain are increasing all over the planet but especially in rich nations. Global happiness surveys show that people today are less happy than they were 20 years ago. My clinical experience broadly mirrors what is happening in the rest of the world. Groundbreaking Stanford psychiatrist and author of Dopamine Nation, Anna Lembke, provides a fresh perspective on why anxiety, chronic pain and depression have been on the rise, locating the problem in a mismatch between the modern world and our brain’s pain and pleasure apparatus.Īs a practicing psychiatrist in the heart of California’s Silicon Valley for more than two decades, I’ve seen growing numbers of patients struggling with depression, anxiety, and chronic pain, despite otherwise good health, loving families, robust social networks, financial privilege, and access to elite education … all the things we’ve come to associate with the ‘good life’. ‘Dr Anna Lembke is a whiz on why we get hooked on things – and how we can enjoy pleasurable things in healthier doses.Happiness has been declining precipitously in the West for 30 years, despite better access to healthcare and education and decreases in poverty and violence. In essence, Dopamine Nation shows that the secret to finding balance is combining the science of desire with the wisdom of recovery. Their riveting stories of suffering and redemption give us all hope for managing our consumption and transforming our lives. The lived experiences of her patients are the gripping fabric of her narrative. Condensing complex neuroscience into easy-to-understand metaphors, Lembke illustrates how finding contentment and connectedness means keeping dopamine in check. Anna Lembke, psychiatrist and author, explores the exciting new scientific discoveries that explain why the relentless pursuit of pleasure leads to pain…and what to do about it. As such we’ve all become vulnerable to compulsive overconsumption. The smartphone is the modern-day hypodermic needle, delivering digital dopamine 24/7 for a wired generation. ![]() We’re living in a time of unprecedented access to high-reward, high-dopamine stimuli: drugs, food, news, gambling, shopping, gaming, texting, sexting, Facebooking, Instagramming, YouTubing, tweeting… The increased numbers, variety, and potency is staggering. Most importantly, it’s about how to find the delicate balance between the two, and why now more than ever finding balance is essential. ![]() Dr Anna Lembke provides a clear way back to a balanced life. Our world is addicted to fleeting distracting pleasures that get us nowhere. All around us people are looking at their phones too much, eating too much, drinking too much.
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