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 experiencing pleasure increases. This recalibrates our neural set point.

4/ Act of consumption has become a drug. Consumer culture, unhealthy nutritional habits, doom scrolling - all provide a little dopamine hit, a mini-rush of pleasure. Recalibration of neural set point takes place and our ability to tolerate boredom diminishes. 

5/ Growing inability to deal with pain.
As a generation, we are losing about ability to tolerate even minor forms of discomfort and we are willing to dedicate more and more resources (even if not our own) to negating it. Let’s take a simple example of those not financially dependent spending money on flying business class instead of economy.