Dopamine Nation PDF Download Book

March 4, 2022

Page Contents

Features of Dopamine Nation PDF

Dopamine Nation PDF-“Brilliant…riveting, scary, cogent, and cleverly argued.” (Beth Macy, author of Dopesick
As heard on Fresh Air)

This book is about pleasure. It’s also about pain. Most important, it’s about how to find the delicate balance between the two, and why now more than ever finding balance is essential. We’re living in a time of unprecedented access to high-reward, high-dopamine stimuli: drugs, food, news, gambling, shopping, gaming, texting, sexting, Facebooking, Instagramming, YouTubing, tweeting….

The increased numbers, variety, and potency is staggering. The smartphone is the modern-day hypodermic needle, delivering digital dopamine 24/7 for a wired generation. As such we’ve all become vulnerable to compulsive overconsumption.

In Dopamine Nation, Dr. Anna Lembke, psychiatrist and author, explores the exciting new scientific discoveries that explain why the relentless pursuit of pleasure leads to pain…and what to do about it. Condensing complex neuroscience into easy-to-understand metaphors, Lembke illustrates how finding contentment and connectedness means keeping dopamine in check. The lived experiences of her patients are the gripping fabric of her narrative. Their riveting stories of suffering and redemption give us all hope for managing our consumption and transforming our lives. In essence, Dopamine Nation shows that the secret to finding balance is combining the science of desire with the wisdom of recovery.

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Description of Dopamine Nation PDF

Dopamine Nation PDF is one of the best medical books for students and professionals on the subject of Psychology . It is a must download.

The Authors

ANNA LEMBKE is professor of psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine and chief of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic. A clinician scholar, she has published more than a hundred peer-reviewed papers, book chapters, and commentaries. She sits on the board of several state and national addiction-focused organizations, has testified before various committees in the United States House of Representatives and Senate, keeps an active speaking calendar, and maintains a thriving clinical practice.

In Dopamine Nation, Dr. Anna Lembke, psychiatrist and author, explores the exciting new scientific discoveries that explain why the relentless pursuit of pleasure leads to pain. Most important, she tells readers how to find the delicate balance between the two. Condensing complex neuroscience into easy-to-understand metaphors, Lembke illustrates how finding contentment and connectedness means keeping dopamine in check. The lived experiences of her patients are the gripping fabric of her narrative. Their riveting stories of suffering and redemption give us all hope for managing our consumption and transforming our lives.

Dimensions and Characteristics of Dopamine Nation PDF

Listening Length	6 hours and 11 minutes
Author	Dr. Anna Lembke
Narrator	Dr. Anna Lembke
Whispersync for Voice	Ready
Audible.com Release Date	August 24, 2021
Publisher	Penguin Audio
Program Type	Audiobook
Version	Unabridged
Language	English
Identification Number	B08LQZCGDJ

Book Name : Dopamine Nation PDF

Download Link 1

Top reviews

M. JEFFREY MCMAHON “With the world 18 months into the pandemic and with many of us medicating ourselves with addictive behavior to manage living in isolation during the lockdown, I’ve noticed a certain emotional flatlining. We’re living in social media and we’re numb from all the outrage, pleasure, and hyperbole that is rewarded by social media’s algorithms. While thinking about this collective emotional flatlining, I heard a Terry Gross Fresh Air ad for an interview with psychiatrist, author, and director of Stanford Addiction Medical Clinic, Anna Lembke, whose book Dopamine Nation addresses a culture beholden to an abundance of pleasures and a repulsion to pain and how these pursuits and avoidances cause us to get addicted to pharmaceuticals, consumerism, Internet licentiousness, food, anything that causes a dopamine spike. As a result, we have lost our dignity, our integrity, and our self-agency. We are on the verge of losing the gift of life. As the author writes, “We are at risk of titillating ourselves to death.” Lembke wants to motivate us to stop our addictive ways and reclaim our higher selves.

Knowing that dopamine spikes result in flatlining and other forms of mental disintegration, I immediately bought Dopamine Nation to glean insights into the numbness that seemed to be affecting me and others and perhaps give me an exit sign from this life of addiction and numbness.

Lembke does an excellent job of defining in layman’s terms our addiction to dopamine, the brain’s reward pathway and addiction: “continued and compulsive consumption of a substance or behavior despite its harm to self and/or others.”

Lembke introduces us to some of her patients, all of whom suffer some addiction or other. They are debilitated, full of self-loathing, shame, and suicidal thoughts. They are addicted to online porn, antidepressants, and cannabis; one young man is an indulged snowflake whose parents give him no boundaries or responsibilities. Not surprisingly, he has no self-worth, is “psychologically fragile,” and takes drugs. All of these patients live in fear and despair. As one patient said, “I don’t want to die an addict.” Whatever differences they have in addiction, they have one thing in common: Their life of addiction has stripped them of meaning and a life of integrity. Their souls are in decay. They are consumers without a sense of the sacred. To underscore this point, Lembke quotes Philip Rieff from Triumph of the Therapeutic: “Religious man was born to be saved; psychological man was born to be pleased.”

As Lembke persuasively argues, we are pleasuring ourselves to death, and she makes references to Alduous Huxley’s Brave New World and Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death to support her thesis. She observes that in spite of our abundant sources of pleasure, we are becoming more and more miserable. In fact, she cites the World Happiness that shows we were happier in 2008 than we were in 2018.

With an expertise in neuroscience, she shows the futility of seeking pleasure. Repeated exposure to our desired stimulus results in weaker and weaker pleasure until we feel nothing and enter a state of anhedonia.

The second half of the book focuses on the principles of recovery. Most crucial is dopamine fasting. She writes it takes a month of such fasting to reset the brain’s reward pathway, reduce our anxieties, and achieve homeostasis or psychological equilibrium.

Another important technique to recovery is self-binding, creating barriers between us and our addictive substance. Some of us have to avoid triggers. For me, for example, I have to avoid timepiece YouTube channels because I suffer from a watch addiction.

Another form of self binding is eating only whole foods or going vegan or going paleo because these boundaries limit our calorie intake.

Another tool for recovery is honesty. If we lead a double life and keep our addiction a secret, we will be trapped in a shame-addiction cycle in which we seek pleasure to medicate ourselves from the very shame and isolation caused by our addiction.

The author argues that we should replace meaningless dopamine with intimacy dopamine, the kind that results from meaningful connections with others.

Reading Lembke’s helpful book, I thought of Viktor Frankl’s masterpiece Man’s Search for Meaning. If we ditch our addictive substance, we’re going to have a gaping hole in our soul to fill or what Frankl calls the “existential vacuum.” I would therefore recommend Frankl’s book as a way of living after recovering from addiction.”

Susan “I’m surprised a book of this caliber has been written by a University of Stanford clinician. The author has 3 main theses—one: we are a dopamine (immediate pleasure) nation, two: therefore we are a nation of many addictions to pleasure (addictions include hers—addiction to romance novels—is that in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th edition?) and three: we should make use of “pain” (which is loosely defined) rather than pleasure (modern medicine, specifically medicines; I don’t think I’d call modern medicine a pleasure. Again another loose definition to serve her purpose).

You’d never expect to read what you read in this book. Examples of “pain” (remember, loosely defined) that can offset real physical pain: taking ice water baths; worms exposed to temperatures they normally don’t live at; fruit flies spun in a centrifuge; being struck by lightning; intermittent fasting; and horrifyingly included with the above examples—Japanese people who lived outside the epicenter of the 1945 atomic attack; and so on. Supposedly these are examples of how use of “pain” can become pleasure (rather than use of medications, therapy—our existing modern medicine model of treatment).

Alcoholics Anonymous is thrown in at the end of the book out of the blue and also being “radically honest”. A section titled “Truthful Autobiographies Create Accountability” begs how this became a sub-topic in the book.

Some of what she says makes sense but has been said a gazillion times (eg: exercise and endorphins) but nowhere does she scientifically prove using “pain”to treat pain even using her loosely defined terminology nor does she adequately tie this concept into the dopamine nation and addiction or prove it.

The book ends with 10 lessons such as “Beware of becoming addicted to “pain.” And “Prosocial shame affirms that we belong to the human tribe.” That last page says it all.”

Smurf “After hearing the author on several podcasts, this is the first book in a while I’ve been really excited about. I even paid for it on Audible vs waiting out the list to get it for free on Libby (library loan.) Know that it’s there, though, if you were similarly curious– I wouldn’t spend the money on it.

Based on the podcasts I’d heard, I was hoping for a more biohackerish book about navigating dopamine pathways– instead, it’s all pro-AA (odd for a book that cites so much other research doesn’t cite the attrocious statistics there- in fact, she says ‘that’s why it works so well!’), thick with anti-medication bias and leaves you with frightfully simplified takeaways that have been in play for nearly a century. Nothing new, modern, surprising or actionable here for me.

Additionally, this is a great example of why authors shouldn’t narrate their own audiobooks– you could tell there were days she just did not want to be there. And, doubly so, you should NOT narrate an ethnic accent unless you’re a trained voice actor. That whole recurring storyline became almost unlistenable.”

Reference: Wikipedia

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