Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence

Dr. Anna Lembke

Aug 2021 · Sold by Penguin

About this ebook

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES and LOS ANGELES TIMES BESTSELLER
“Brilliant . . . riveting, scary, cogent, and cleverly argued.”—Beth Macy, author of Dopesick,
as heard on Fresh Air

This book is about pleasure. It’s also about pain. Most important, it’s about how to find the delicate balance between the two, and why now more than ever finding balance is essential. 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. The smartphone is the modern-day hypodermic needle, delivering digital dopamine 24/7 for a wired generation. As such we’ve all become vulnerable to compulsive overconsumption.
 
In Dopamine Nation, Dr. 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. Condensing complex neuroscience into easy-to-understand metaphors, Lembke illustrates how finding contentment and connectedness means keeping dopamine in check. The lived experiences of her patients are the gripping fabric of her narrative. Their riveting stories of suffering and redemption give us all hope for managing our consumption and transforming our lives. In essence, Dopamine Nation shows that the secret to finding balance is combining the science of desire with the wisdom of recovery.

Ratings and reviews

Recommended by Dr. P Jamnadas and Dr. A Huberman. I decided to give it a go, and I loved this book! Through storytelling, Dr. Lembke walks you through the complex works of dopamine in the human machinery, specifically, the brain. It’s scientific data made simple and easy to read. If I didn’t have to put it down, I’d read it in one sitting. Also, the stories were so relatable. I walked away empowered by Dr. Lembke’s suggested methods of working against “addictions.”

0 star This book is not a nonfiction on discussing how world is full of dopamine and how we should navigate through it. This book is a SCI-FI written by a MD who abused Prozac before. Fallacies and failed logics are not just the only features of the book, it also got a ton of anecdotes that has no coherence with data or the narratives. Many of the stories are about the high achievers in the silicon valley abusing substances, yet our MD author is correlating that with poor Brazilian kids living in the slum are more likely to abuse substances. Then suddenly she states how much effort we need to put to provide basic needs to the poor so they won't be abusing substances. Maybe I'm the one being blinded of how the rhetorics work out. What makes it the worst, in my opinion, is the lack of depth of her arguments while having the obsession of quoting Kant, Socrates and Nietzsche. The quotes did nothing but showing her so-called "pain therapy" and drug therapy a self delusional mirage. Avoid.

Very anti-drug and moralistic. She treats any enjoyment as if it's something to be squashed, except when those pleasures are ones that she accepts. There may be an opponent process to pleasure, but all she provides as evidence are anecdotes and finger-wagging. The whole thing seems blown out of proportion to reality. She cloaks herself in science, but refuses to engage in it when writing this book. Even if it's not outright, the reasoning she uses reeks of religiosity, no different than simply arguing that certain pleasures are sinful. It boils down to "Drugs are bad, m'kay." It's a waste of money, so don't bother with this if you want to be informed on a nuanced issue. This supremely lacks nuance.

About the author

Anna Lembke is the medical director of Stanford Addiction Medicine, program director for the Stanford Addiction Medicine Fellowship, and chief of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic. She is the recipient of numerous awards for outstanding research in mental illness, for excellence in teaching, and for clinical innovation in treatment. A clinician scholar, she has published more than a hundred peer-reviewed papers, book chapters, and commentaries in prestigious outlets such as The New England Journal of Medicine and JAMA. 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.