Dopamine Nation

In today’s episode, I speak with Dr. Anna Lembke, psychiatrist and author of Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence. 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 are staggering. we’ve all become vulnerable to compulsive overconsumption. Anna helps explain how Dopamine works and the exciting new scientific discoveries that explain why the relentless pursuit of pleasure leads to pain. Most important, Anna helps us understand how we can find the delicate balance between the two.

Books by Anna

Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence

Drug Dealer, MD: How Doctors Were Duped, Patients Got Hooked, and Why It’s So Hard to Stop

Guest Bio.

Anna Lembke is professor of psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine and chief of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic. A clinician scholar, she has published more than a hundred peer-reviewed papers, book chapters, and commentaries. 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.

In 2016, she published Drug Dealer, MD – How Doctors Were Duped, Patients Got Hooked, and Why It’s So Hard to Stop (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), which was highlighted in the New York Times as one of the top five books to read to understand the opioid epidemic (Zuger, 2018). Dr. Lembke recently appeared on the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma, an unvarnished look at the impact of social media on our lives.

Connect with Anna here.

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