Ana Navarrette: I've had several patients in the last 10 years or so who explicitly have an Amazon shopping addiction. She says we replace natural rewards with these other sort of fetishized substances and behaviors like round ice cube makers that we buy on Amazon. They will give it up for their drug of choice because essentially their brain has become confused with what is actually necessary for survival, she says.
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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