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Dr.Anna Lembke is a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine and chief of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic.

In 2016, she published Drug Dealer, MD: How Doctors Were Duped, Patients Got Hooked, and Why It’s So Hard to Stop (Johns Hopkins University Press), which was highlighted in the New York Times as one of the top five books to read to understand the opioid epidemic.

Dr. Lembke also appeared in the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma, which provides an unvarnished look at the impact of social media on our lives.

In her new book, Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence (Dutton/Penguin Random House, August 2021), an instant New York Times bestseller, Dr. Lembke explores how to moderate compulsive overconsumption in a dopamine-overloaded world.

In this episode, Dr Lembke and I explore the questions and issues around the following:

• What is dopamine? When does it get released? Why is it so important to us?
• Could you elaborate on the pleasure and pain network in our brain?
• What is the pleasure pain seesaw? What are its implications?
• What is neuro adaptation?
• What is the evolutionary explanation for dopamine reward system?
• What is an addiction and what can we become addicted to? How is it related to dopamine up regulation and down regulation?
• Could you explain the relationship between our will power network and the dopamine reward network? What is the reason we run out of willpower?
• Cannabis is now a socially acceptable behaviour. What is the unseen risk of using cannabis over a long period of time?
• How can we break our addiction to social media, email, work and other model forms of addiction?
• Could you explain some of your proven methodologies to shift people from addiction to rebalancing reward system?
• Could you explain the 30 day dopamine detox, self binding techniques, hormesis, radical honesty and the power of writing?

Dr. Lembke's contact information:
Website::    https://www.annalembke.com/

RESOURCES:

Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence

Hardcover
Paperback
Audio book
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. 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.

REFERENCES:

S1 E13:    Escaping the Addiction of Narcotics, Crime & Violence: Interview with Michel Mateos

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