Thank you for listening to Owning It. If you would like to support the series, the best thing you can do is just tell a friend or better yet share it on social media. If you really, really want to support, you can subscribe to me on Substack where I write a weekly column. Listeners of the pod get a 20% discount forever at carolineforin.substack.com. Thank you.

Hello, dear listener and welcome to owning it the anxiety

podcast, the series that helps you better understand and manage anxiety with me, Caroline Forin. I am so

excited about this week's guest. She has been on my wish list for the longest time. She is the mega

bestselling author of Dopamine Nation, and her name is Anna Lemke.

She's an American psychiatrist and chief of the Stanford Addiction Medicine dual diagnosis clinic at Stanford University,

and she's also a specialist in the opioid epidemic in the United States.

Here we talk about the relationship between anxiety, pleasure and pain, the pleasure, pain balance and the way in which

we move towards pleasure to solve anxiety and it works short term. But for many of the things

we do such as picking up our phones to scroll, we only create more anxiety in the long term.

We talk about medication, addiction and not just addiction to drugs or alcohol. We talk about

our intolerance of boredom, the importance of what she calls

pro-social shame and her go-to self-binding strategies. This is honestly one of the most

interesting and helpful conversations I've had on the podcast and there's a lot to take from it.

Also, Anna has to have one of the most soothing voices you're likely to hear on a podcast.

So thanks for being here and as always please consider

signing up to my substack where you can get a discount as a valued listener of this podcast. All the

links will be in the show notes. Thanks so much. Anna Lemke, thank you so much for joining me as a

guest on owning it the Anxiety podcast. You have been top of my wish list for such a long time and I'm so glad that

we could make this work. Thank you for being here. Oh, you're very welcome. I'm excited to be here.

I'm glad it worked out. I read your book quite a while ago now, but I have to say I just hoovered it up.

It was so digestible the way you distill the neuroscience and that world, which can be sort of

...