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Informationen zum Autor Anna Lembke, MD Klappentext NOW IN PAPERBACK: Dopamine Nation is "brilliant… riveting, scary, cogent, and cleverly argued."-Beth Macy, author of Dopesick 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. Leseprobe Introduction The Problem Feeling good, feeling good, all the money in the world spent on feeling good.-Levon Helm This book is about pleasure. It's also about pain. Most important, it's about the relationship between pleasure and pain, and how understanding that relationship has become essential for a life well lived.Why?Because we've transformed the world from a place of scarcity to a place of overwhelming abundance: Drugs, food, news, gambling, shopping, gaming, texting, sexting, Facebooking, Instagramming, YouTubing, tweeting . . . the increased numbers, variety, and potency of highly rewarding stimuli today is staggering. The smartphone is the modern-day hypodermic needle, delivering digital dopamine 24/7 for a wired generation. If you haven't met your drug of choice yet, it's coming soon to a website near you.Scientists rely on dopamine as a kind of universal currency for measuring the addictive potential of any experience. The more dopamine in the brain's reward pathway, the more addictive the experience.In addition to the discovery of dopamine, one of the most remarkable neuroscientific findings in the past century is that the brain processes pleasure and pain in the same place. Further, pleasure and pain work like opposite sides of a balance.We've all experienced that moment of craving a second piece of chocolate, or wanting a good book, movie, or video game to last forever. That moment of wanting is the brain's pleasure balance tipped to the side of pain.This book aims to unpack the neuroscience of reward and, in so doing, enable us to find a better, healthier balance between pleasure and pain. But neuroscience is not enough. We also need the lived experience of human beings. Who better to teach us how to overcome compulsive overconsumption than those most vulnerable to it: people with addiction.This book is based on true stories of my patients falling prey to addiction and finding their way out again. They've given me permission to tell their stories so that you might benefit from their wisdom, as I have. You may find some of these stories shocking, but to me they are just extreme versions of what we are all capable of. As philosopher and theologian Kent Dunnington wrote, "Persons with severe addictions are among those contemporary prophets that we ignore to our own demise, for they show us who we truly are."Whether it's sugar or shopping, voyeuring or vaping, social media...
