Big Idea Daily | Dopamine Nation
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Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgenceby Anna Lembke, MD |
“Today, more than one in four American adults—and more than one in twenty American children—takes a psychiatric drug on a daily basis.”ANNA LEMBKE, MD |
BIG IDEA
Cacti in a Rainforest
FROM THE BOOK“Science teaches us that every pleasure exacts a price, and the pain that follows is longer lasting and more intense than the pleasure that gave rise to it.
With prolonged and repeated exposure to pleasurable stimuli, our capacity to tolerate pain decreases, and our threshold for experiencing pleasure increase. By raising our neural set point with repeated pleasures, we become endless strivers, never satisfied with what we have, always looking for more.
But herein lies the problem. Human beings, the ultimate seekers, have responded too well to the challenge of pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain. As a result, we’ve transformed the world from a place of scarcity to a place of overwhelming abundance.
Our brains have not evolved for this world of plenty. As Dr. Tom Finucane, who studies diabetes..., said, ‘We are cacti in the rain forest.’ And like cacti adapted to an arid climate, we are drowning in dopamine.
The net effect is that we now need more reward to feel pleasure and less injury to feel pain. This recalibration is occurring not just at the level of the individual but also at the level of nations. Which invites the question: How do we survive and thrive in this new ecosystem? How do we raise our children? What new ways of thinking and acting will be required of us as denizens of the twenty-first century?”
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Brian's Notes
The book has three parts.
We start with Part I called “The Pursuit of Pleasure” in which we learn about the shocking rates of addiction and mental health issues along with the underlying causes.
Then we move on to Part II called “Self-Binding” in which we explore techniques to deal with addictions.
Then we move on to Part III called “The Pursuit of Pain” in which we explore paradoxical ways to reset our pleasure-pain balance by, you guessed it, PURSUING pain!
That passage above is from a chapter called “The Pleasure-Pain Balance.”
Anna starts the book by walking us through a case study of a man with a SEVERE addiction.
Families listen to these Notes together so I’ll skip the details but let’s just say it’s a shocking, humbling look at the challenges one man faced that serves as a common humanity reminder of the challenges we ALL face.
Anna also shares her own stories of addiction with romance novels to further cement the fact that we ALL have our own issues.
As she says: “We’re all running from pain. Some of us take pills. Some of us couch surf while binge-watching Netflix. Some of us read romance novels. We’ll do almost anything to distract ourselves from ourselves. Yet all this trying to insulate ourselves from pain seems only to have made the pain worse.”
In that chapter, she also gives us a quick overview of how dopamine works.
She tells us: “Dopamine is not the only neurotransmitter involved in reward processing, but most neuroscientists agree it is among the most important. Dopamine may play a bigger role in the motivation to get a reward than the pleasure of the reward itself. Wanting more than liking. Genetically engineered mice unable to make dopamine will not seek out food, and will starve to death even when food is placed just inches from their mouth. Yet if food is put directly in their mouth, they will chew and eat the food, and seem to enjoy it.
Debates about differences in motivation and pleasure notwithstanding, dopamine is used to measure the addictive potential of any behavior or drug. The more dopamine a drug releases in the brain’s reward pathway (a brain circuit that links the ventral tegmental area, the nucleus accumbens, and the prefrontal cortex), and the faster it releases dopamine, the more addictive the drug.”
There’s so much more we can discuss, but I want to highlight one of the most poetically beautiful metaphors I’ve ever read that perfectly captures the challenges we face in modernity: “Our brains have not evolved for this world of plenty. As Dr. Tom Finucane, who studies diabetes ..., said, ‘We are cacti in the rain forest.’ And like cacti adapted to an arid climate, we are drowning in dopamine.”
P.S. Anna echoes the theme of a number of books we’ve been exploring lately on the challenges our younger Heroes are facing when she tells us: “Perceiving children as psychologically fragile is a quintessentially modern concept. … I worry that we have oversanitized and overpathologized childhood, raising our children in the equivalent of a padded cell, with no way to injure themselves but also no means to ready themselves for the world.
By protecting our children from adversity, have we made them deathly afraid of it? By bolstering their self-esteem with false praise and a lack of real-world consequences, have we made them less tolerant, more entitled, and ignorant of their own character defects? By giving in to their every desire, have we encouraged an age of hedonism?”
Those are the EXACT themes we explore in our Notes on Jonathan Haidt’s The Coddling of the American Mind and David Yeager’s 10 to 25: The Science of Motivating Young People.
Big Ideas
01: THE PLEASURE-PAIN BALANCE
02: DOPAMINE FASTING
03: SELF-BINDING
04: RADICAL HONESTY
05: PROSOCIAL SHAME
“The smartphone is the modern-day hypodermic needle, delivering digital dopamine 24/7 for a wired generation.”ANNA LEMBKE, MD |
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