Dopamine is a chemical that our brain makes. It mediates the experience of pleasure, reward, and motivation. Dopamine is very much a signal that alerts us to what is going on in our bodies. And it's a way that we are encouraged to approach pleasure and avoid pain. The more reinforcing and more pleasurable something is, the more dopamine gets released in that part of the brain.
In “Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence,” Dr. Anna Lembke says today’s superabundance of pleasurable stimuli makes us all vulnerable to overindulgence. But don’t lose hope. Anna, the medical director of addiction medicine at Stanford, says that by understanding how modern stimulants — from Instagram to masturbation machines — prey on our primitive brains, we can find ways to overcome the unhealthy dependencies that prevent us from leading balanced lives.
(This episode originally aired in December 2021.)
Host: Rufus Griscom
Guest: Anna Lembke
Executive Producer: Caleb Bissinger
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