Ana Navarrette: I like to watch videos of podiatrists shaving away people's calluses and corns again. She says we find a source of pleasure, and it's almost immediately counterbalanced with pain. If you continue to tap the pleasure bar too many times, our experience of the pleasure erodes, she says. "It gives a neuroscience frame for why we are the ultimate seekers," writes Navarrette.
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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