E125 - Dr. Anna Lembke: Addiction To Dopamine Enslaves Us, Reclaim Your Mind & Life
Know Thyself
André Duqum
4.8 • 658 Ratings
🗓️ 3 December 2024
⏱️ 92 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In a world of overindulgence, from drugs, food, news, and social media, Dr. Anna Lembke reveals the science that explains why the relentless pursuit of pleasure leads to pain... and what to do about it. She explains how addiction works in the brain and how this plays out on an individual level from the micro decisions we make every single day to the macro. She shares the proven methods to escaping this cycle of suffering and how by intentionally choosing pain through healthy practices like cold plunges, exercise, and meditation, we can reset our dopamine levels in our brain.
She explores the concept of delayed gratification as defined by "The Marshmallow Experiment" which discovered a correlation between success in life and ability to delay gratification.
This episode is full or practical takeaways for anyone looking to better understand their brain and relationship to dopamine/addiction.
André's Book Recommendations: https://www.knowthyself.one/books
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0:00 Intro
2:27 Defining Addiction and Dopamine
8:25 How Pleasure & Pain Work in the Brain
14:01 Our Biology Dooms Us in the Modern World
16:32 The Plenty Paradox: Convenience is Killing Us
22:05 Cold Plunges, Exercise, & Mediation: Healthy 'Pain' that Balances Our Dopamine
25:09 Resetting through Vipassana & Darkness Retreats
34:58 How She Started Doing This Work
37:43 Spectrum of Addiction: From the Intense to the Subtle
41:30 Becoming Resilient to Addiction
44:23 Breaking the Cycle of Shame and Guilt
50:06 Shedding an Addiction to Your Identity
54:45 The Pain That’s Good For You
56:58 4 Things that Determine Addiction Risk
1:00:43 Danger of Social Media Addiction
1:08:27 Strategies for Overcoming Compulsive Behaviors
1:11:52 How Our Morning Sets Us Up For Success (or failure!)
1:13:20 Delayed Gratification: The Marshmallow Experiment
1:18:48 Practices to Change Negative Behaviors
1:24:54 Your Personal Growth Changes the World
1:27:22 The Beauty that Hides in Pain
1:30:38 Conclusion
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Dr. Anna Lembke received her undergraduate degree in Humanities from Yale University and her medical degree from Stanford University. She is currently Professor and Medical Director of Addiction Medicine, Stanford University School of Medicine. She is also Program Director of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Fellowship, Chief of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic, and a diplomate of the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology and the American Board of Addiction Medicine.
Dr. Lembke appeared in the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma, an unvarnished look at the impact of social media on our lives.
Her latest book, "Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence" (Dutton/Penguin Random House, August 2021) was an instant New York Times and Los Angeles Times bestseller and has been translated into 30 languages. It combines the neuroscience of addiction with the wisdom of recovery to explore the problem of compulsive overconsumption in a dopamine-overloaded world.
Website: https://www.annalembke.com
Book "Dopamine Nation": https://a.co/d/ccpgrk4
Dopamine Nation Workbook: https://a.co/d/6vADILi
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Know Thyself
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Website: https://www.knowthyself.one
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André Duqum
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | We are wired to seek out pleasure and avoid pain, |
| 0:03.0 | and yet now when we do that, we're bound to encounter misery. |
| 0:08.0 | From the get-go, social media has been engineered to keep our attention for as long as possible. |
| 0:14.0 | It takes the most reinforcing aspects of human connection, |
| 0:17.0 | and it distills them down into its most addictive forms. |
| 0:20.0 | And the more time we spend in that fantasy world, the less salient and desirable the real world becomes. |
| 0:26.6 | The thing about pleasure and pain is that they're actually co-located in the brain, |
| 0:30.6 | and they work like opposite sides of a balance. |
| 0:33.6 | The problem is you take that ancient wiring and you put it in our modern day ecosystem. |
| 0:38.3 | That's a perfect storm for all of us getting addicted. |
| 0:42.3 | The kernel of that is also the answer to our problems, which is that we have to. |
| 0:48.3 | All we can change really with any kind of exactitude is ourselves. |
| 0:52.3 | Once we've done that, there's an enormous ripple effect that can improve not just our lives, |
| 0:57.4 | but other people's lives as well. |
| 0:59.0 | And I think that's really important. |
| 1:06.0 | Hey, everyone. |
| 1:06.7 | Welcome back to Know Thyself. |
| 1:08.3 | Our guest today is a professor of psychiatry at the Stanford University School of Medicine. She has authored many, many book chapters and articles and really powerful teachings around pain, pleasure, dopamine meaning in life, and very popular book, Dopamine Nation and the new workbook, Dr. Annal-nalamke, thanks for being here. Thanks for inviting me. I'm excited to be here. Yeah. I like your necklace, by the way. Thank you. I mentioned that. It's cool. Thank you. What is that? You know, I inherited it, so I don't know the progeny at all, but it's these two joining hands with a kind of a yin-yang |
| 1:47.0 | symbol in it. So it's also like very on point for your work. Yeah, and for this podcast. I didn't |
| 1:55.2 | really even think about, but it just kind of happened. Yeah, nice. You know, I think of so much |
| 2:00.4 | of your work and how it aligns |
| 2:02.6 | with ancient wisdom traditions and the Buddhist understanding of suffering, of our craving for pleasure |
... |
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