Anna Lembke - Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence

Feelin good, feelin good, all the money in the world spent on feelin good.

LEVON HELM

This book is about pleasure. Its also about pain. Most important, its about the relationship between pleasure and pain, and how understanding that relationship has become essential for a life well lived.

Why?

Because weve transformed the world from a place of scarcity to a place of overwhelming abundance: Drugs, food, news, gambling, shopping, gaming, texting, sexting, Facebooking, Instagramming, YouTubing, tweeting... the increased numbers, variety, and potency of highly rewarding stimuli today is staggering. The smartphone is the modern-day hypodermic needle, delivering digital dopamine 24/7 for a wired generation. If you havent met your drug of choice yet, its coming soon to a website near you.

Scientists rely on dopamine as a kind of universal currency for measuring the addictive potential of any experience. The more dopamine in the brains reward pathway, the more addictive the experience.

In addition to the discovery of dopamine, one of the most remarkable neuroscientific findings in the past century is that the brain processes pleasure and pain in the same place. Further, pleasure and pain work like opposite sides of a balance.

Weve all experienced that moment of craving a second piece of chocolate, or wanting a good book, movie, or video game to last forever. That moment of wanting is the brains pleasure balance tipped to the side of pain.

This book aims to unpack the neuroscience of reward and, in so doing, enable us to find a better, healthier balance between pleasure and pain. But neuroscience is not enough. We also need the lived experience of human beings. Who better to teach us how to overcome compulsive overconsumption than those most vulnerable to it: people with addiction.

This book is based on true stories of my patients falling prey to addiction and finding their way out again. Theyve given me permission to tell their stories so that you might benefit from their wisdom, as I have. You may find some of these stories shocking, but to me they are just extreme versions of what we are all capable of. As philosopher and theologian Kent Dunnington wrote, Persons with severe addictions are among those contemporary prophets that we ignore to our own demise, for they show us who we truly are.

Whether its sugar or shopping, voyeuring or vaping, social media posts or TheWashington Post, we all engage in behaviors we wish we didnt, or to an extent we regret. This book offers practical solutions for how to manage compulsive overconsumption in a world where consumption has become the all-encompassing motive of our lives.

In essence, the secret to finding balance is combining the science of desire with the wisdom of recovery.