Anna, thank you for taking time out of your teaching and psychiatry practice and Dr. Pimple Pop Reviewing to be with us today. You've said that there's power in acknowledging that you're never going to be fully comfortable in the world. It's always going to be painful and unpleasant to some degree. And that's just the way it is.
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
The Next Big Idea is produced in partnership with LinkedIn Presents