183: Combating Addiction in a Dopamine-Saturated World | Stanford Professor Dr. Anna Lembke

Dr. Anna Lembke is a Stanford Professor and Medical Director of Addiction Medicine at Stanford University’s School of Medicine. Her latest book, Dopamine Nation, is a New York Times bestseller and has been translated into 30 languages. It examines the effects of being surrounded by abundant sources of instant gratification, such as food, social media, gaming, pornography, and drugs. Anna combines the neuroscience of addiction with the wisdom of recovery to explore the problem of compulsive overconsumption in a dopamine-overloaded world.

In this episode we discuss the following:

• Anna learned from her patients in addiction recovery that if they wanted to maintain their recovery, they couldn’t tell a single lie.
• One of the reasons lying hurts ourselves and others is because it denies us access to reality, which of course makes it more difficult to deal with reality.
• Radical honesty applies to more aspects of life than we may realize. For example, Anna is able to reduce her anxiety before interviews by being radically honest with herself and remembering that she doesn’t have to be all things to all people, she doesn’t have to be anything more than she already is.

 

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