Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence
Ratings45
Average rating3.1
15
Ratings45
Average rating3.1
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.
Reviews with the most likes.
great actionable and approachable book
Filled with anecdotes from the author's career in counseling people with various addictions, the book does a good job in contextualizing what went wrong, how to debug the problem and then how to solve it using various techniques. A lot of this is obvious but then again, the solution to most of our problems is obvious.
??Super interesting, it???s an explainer on how dopamine works in our brains and the duality between pleasure and pain. It???s a good introductory book to the subject. A takeaway for me was that a good strategy to break an addiction pattern might be total avoidance of the thing I???m addicted to for at least 3 weeks. It might not work for everybody and not for every intensity of addiction, but for me, it works.??
General Precepts on Pleasure, Pain, and the Path to Addiction
This was an informative book, less about digital addiction than I had hoped but still a good primer on steps those on the path to addiction can take to avoid it.
It's not quite one star because I spent most of my time going, "eh? 🤨" instead of, "ugh 😵💫" but it was another case of me putting a book on my tbr because I saw it somewhere once and didn't look into it. I don't know if it was because I had the audiobook, but the entire time I felt like I just wanted to ditch it and read a summary instead. I struggled to connect the stories with any actual point or takeaway. The conclusion at the end helped but otherwise I felt like, what are we doing here?
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