Takeaways from Dopamine Nation by Dr. Anna Lembke
I read Dopamine Nation by Dr. Anna Lembke recently and learnt A LOT. The book itself doesn’t go deep into the neuroscience of addictive behavior but uses anecdotes and basic principles to call out behavioral trends. These are my top 5 takeaways from the book: 1/ Looking inwards with mindfulness. This book got me to start practicing mindfulness with the added layer of removing judgement. Essentially, when we start to judge our thoughts, we make it difficult to actually learn from our mental processes and observe. 2/ Conscious self-binding. This is basically creating barriers between an addictive activity and our access to triggers E.g. deleting the Instagram app to avoid doom scrolling. Conscious/ intelligent self-binding lets us replace these activities with better ones. 3/ Concept of balance. The book specifically talks about the pain-pleasure balance. When we keep indulging, our capacity to tolerate pain decreases and our threshold for exp...