Anna Lembke explains the neuroscience of dopamine and addiction, discussing how to conquer addictive behaviors and prevent relapse.
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In this episode I interview Dr. Anna Lembke, MD, Chief of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic at Stanford University School of Medicine. Dr. Lembke is a psychiatrist and expert in treating addictions of all kinds: drugs, alcohol, food, sex, video games, gambling, medication etc. She is also an expert in the opioid crisis and the author of Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence.
We discuss the biology and psychology of why people become addicted to certain substances and behaviors and the key role that our “dopamine balance” plays in creating addiction. We also explore the science and practice of how to conquer addictions, why people relapse and how to avoid relapsing. Dr. Lembke shares her expertise on topics closely related to addiction such as community, shame and lying, and she explains why telling the truth—even about the most basic things in daily life—adjusts dopamine levels in our brains.
This episode is an important one for anyone struggling with addictions of any kind, for their friends and families and for health care professionals. It is also for anyone who has defeated addiction and is determined to stay clean. Last but not least, it helps explain why all humans do what we do and how we can all maintain a healthy sense of pleasure seeking in life.
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Dr. Anna Lembke
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Timestamps
Dr. Anna Lembke, Addiction Expert
Disclaimer & Sponsors: ROKA, InsideTracker, Headspace
Dopamine, Happiness & Impulsivity
What Is Pleasure?
Addiction, Boredom & Passion for Life
Pain-Pleasure Balance Controls Addiction
Dopamine Deficits, Anhedonia
Are All Addictions the Same?
Boredom & Anxiety Lead to Creativity
Finding Your Passion Starts with Boredom & Action Steps
How to Break an Addiction
Relapse, Craving & Triggers
Can People Get Addicted To “Sobriety”?
Are We All Wired for Addiction?
Bizarre Addiction
Recovered Addicts Are Heroes
Lying, Truth Telling, Guilt & Shame
Clinical Applications of:
Why it's here
1 person recommends this
What people say. Recommended as an insightful explanation of how dopamine spikes lower baseline levels and drive digital and behavioral addictions.
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blueyesin Hacker News • Recommends
On “Digital Addiction: Focusing on the Cure, Not the Disease”
"Dopamine reset" refers to resetting your baseline levels of dopamine. Highly recommend listening to Huberman's interview of Dr. Anna Lembke: link to this video As well as her book, Dopamine Nation: link Frequent, large spikes in dopamine, like those people get from drugs and to a lesser extent Twitter, can both lower your baseline and also make other activities seem uninteresting. They often lead to addiction, which is the primary example of people feeling low dopamine baselines and chasing high spikes.
Poor people have more 45% more leisure time than wealthy. Society as a whole has more leisure time than any time of history before. We still bitch day after day, minute after minute. source... link to this video
> I'm simply incapable of doing things I've set out to do. Simple things. Everything is difficult. “Independent discharges of dopamine neurons (tonic or pacemaker firing) determine the motivation to respond to such cues. As a result of habitual intake of addictive drugs, dopamine receptors expressed in the brain are decreased, thereby reducing interest in activities not already stamped in by habitual rewards. ” From: Dopamine and Addiction | Annual Review of Psychology — link ---- Edit: I'd like to add a couple more ideas, because what you're describing in your article is spot on, and I believe can be generalized past your own experience. > Another angle that makes this ever more distressi…
On “TikTok Pedagogy: Teaching Philosophy in 60 Seconds or Less”
> I doubt the author's thirst for knowledge genuinely borders on 'compulsion or even addiction'. That's ridiculous self-aggrandizement I think there might be more to this than it seems at first glance. For many people, work is their addiction. Others, the acquisition of knowledge. Others still, Tik-Tok and social media. Less ideally, heroin and hard drugs. I recently listened to an episode of Andrew Huberman's podcast focused on addiction 0. He interviews Dr. Anna Lembke, an addiction expert, and they explore aspects of addiction that aren't necessarily well understood by outsiders. The thing that stood out to me was their acknowledgement that most of us are addicted to something, even if…
