Essentials: Understanding & Treating Addiction | Dr. Anna Lembke

Huberman Lab

Scicomm Media

Science, Health & Fitness, Life Sciences

4.8 • 26.2K Ratings

🗓️ 26 June 2025

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this Huberman Lab Essentials episode, my guest is Dr. Anna Lembke, MD, Chief of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic at Stanford University School of Medicine. We discuss how dopamine drives reward, motivation and addictive behaviors. Dr. Lembke explains the concept of the pleasure-pain balance of dopamine and how this cycle plays a key role in the development and persistence of addiction. We also discuss some of the challenges of addiction recovery, including withdrawal, relapses and the potential benefits of psychedelic-assisted therapy. Read the episode show notes at hubermanlab.com. Thank you to our sponsors AG1: https://drinkag1.com/huberman Wealthfront**: https://wealthfront.com/huberman BetterHelp: https://betterhelp.com/huberman **This experience may not be representative of the experience of other clients of Wealthfront, and there is no guarantee that all clients will have similar experiences. Cash Account is offered by Wealthfront Brokerage LLC, Member FINRA/SIPC. The Annual Percentage Yield (“APY”) on cash deposits as of December 27,‬ 2024, is representative, subject to change, and requires no minimum. Funds in the Cash Account are swept to partner banks where they earn the variable‭ APY. Promo terms and FDIC coverage conditions apply. Same-day withdrawal or instant payment transfers may be limited by destination institutions, daily transaction caps, and by participating entities such as Wells Fargo, the RTP® Network, and FedNow® Service. New Cash Account deposits are subject to a 2-4 day holding period before becoming available for transfer. Timestamps 00:00:00 Anna Lembke 00:00:15 Dopamine, Reward & Movement 00:01:54 Baseline Dopamine; Genetics, Temperament & Addiction 00:05:24 Addiction, Modern Life & Boredom 00:07:18 Sponsor: AG1 00:08:55 Pleasure-Pain Balance, Dopamine, Addiction 00:14:17 Resetting Dopamine, Substance or Behavior Recovery, Tool: 30-Day Abstinence 00:16:04 Relapse, Addiction, Reflexive Behavior, Empathy 00:20:17 Triggers, Relapse, Dopamine 00:23:15 Sponsor: Wealthfront & BetterHelp 00:26:04 Shame, Truth Telling & Recovery 00:28:26 Addiction, Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy, Psilocybin, MDMA 00:33:29 Social Media & Addiction, Tool: Intentionality Disclaimer & Disclosures Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable
0:05.8	science-based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance.
0:11.4	And now for my discussion with Dr. Anna Lemke.
0:15.7	I and many listeners of this podcast are obsessed with dopamine. What is dopamine? And what are maybe some
0:25.3	things about dopamine that most people don't know? And probably that I don't know either.
0:30.5	So dopamine is a neurotransmitter. And neurotransmitters are those molecules that bridge the gap between
0:37.0	two neurons. So they essentially
0:39.3	allow one neuron, the presynaptic neuron, to communicate with the post-synaptic neuron.
0:45.4	Dopamine is intimately associated with the experience of reward, but also with movement,
0:52.8	which I think is really interesting because movement
0:54.9	and reward are linked, right? If you think about, you know, early humans, you had to move
1:02.0	in order to go seek out the water or the meat or whatever it was. So dopamine is this really
1:09.2	powerful, important molecule in the brain that helps us experience pleasure.
1:17.7	It's not the only neurotransmitter involved in pleasure, but it's a really, really important one.
1:22.8	And if you want to think about something that most people don't know about dopamine, which I think
1:28.2	is really interesting, is that we are always releasing dopamine at a kind of tonic baseline rate,
1:34.9	and it's really the deviation from that baseline rather than like hits of dopamine in a vacuum
1:41.2	that make a difference. So when we experience pleasure, our dopamine release goes above baseline.
1:47.4	And likewise, dopamine can go below that tonic baseline.
1:51.0	And then we experience a kind of pain.
1:54.4	Interesting.
1:55.0	So is it fair to say that one's baseline levels of dopamine,
	...

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