Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence by Anna Lembke (Englis

Description: Dopamine Nation by Anna Lembke This book is about pleasure. Its also about pain. Most important, its about how to find the delicate balance between the two, and why now more than ever finding balance is essential. Were 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 weve 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. FORMAT Hardcover LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Author Biography Anna Lembke is the medical director of Stanford Addiction Medicine, program director for the Stanford Addiction Medicine Fellowship, and chief of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic. She is the recipient of numerous awards for outstanding research in mental illness, for excellence in teaching, and for clinical innovation in treatment. A clinician scholar, she has published morethan a hundred peer-reviewed papers, book chapters, and commentaries in prestigious outlets such as The New England Journal of Medicine and JAMA . 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. Review Quote "We all desire a break from our routines and those parts of life that upset us. What if, instead of trying to escape these things, we learn to turn toward them, to reach a peaceful harmony with our selves and the people we share our lives with? Lembke has written a book that radically changes the way we think about mental illness, pleasure, pain, reward, and stress. Turn toward it. Youll be happy you did." -- Daniel Levitin , New York Times bestselling author of The Organized Mind and Successful Aging Excerpt from Book Introduction The Problem Feeling good, feeling good, all the money in the world spent on feeling good.-Levon Helm This book is about pleasure. Its also about pain. Most important, its about the relationship between pleasure and pain, and how understanding that relationship has become essential for a life well lived.Why?Because weve 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 havent met your drug of choice yet, its 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 brains 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.Weve 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 brains 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. Theyve 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 its sugar or shopping, voyeuring or vaping, social media posts or the Washington Post, we all engage in behaviors we wish we didnt, or to an extent we regret. This book offers practical solutions for how to manage compulsive overconsumption in a world where consumption has become the all-encompassing motive of our lives.In essence, the secret to finding balance is combining the science of desire with the wisdom of recovery. Part I The Pursuit of Pleasure Chapter 1 Our Masturbation Machines I went to greet Jacob in the waiting room. First impression? Kind. He was in his early sixties, middleweight, face soft but handsome . . . aging well enough. He wore the standard-issue Silicon Valley uniform: khakis and a casual button-down shirt. He looked unremarkable. Not like someone with secrets. As Jacob followed me through the short maze of hallways, I could feel his anxiety like waves rolling off my back. I remembered when I used to get anxious walking patients back to my office. Am I walking too fast? Am I swinging my hips? Does my ass look funny? It seems so long ago now. I admit Im a battle-hardened version of my former self, more stoic, possibly more indifferent. Was I a better doctor then, when I knew less and felt more?We arrived at my office and I shut the door behind him. Gently, I offered him one of two identical, equal-in-height, two-feet-apart, green-cushioned, therapy-sanctioned chairs. He sat. So did I. His eyes took in the room. My office is ten by fourteen feet, with two windows, a desk with a computer, a sideboard covered with books, and a low table between the chairs. The desk, the sideboard, and the low table are all made of matching reddish-brown wood. The desk is a hand-me-down from my former department chair. Its cracked down the middle on the inside, where no one else can see it, an apt metaphor for the work I do. On top of the desk are ten separate piles of paper, perfectly aligned, like an accordion. I am told this gives the appearance of organized efficiency.The wall decor is a hodgepodge. The requisite diplomas, mostly unframed. Too lazy. A drawing of a cat I found in my neighbors garbage, which I took for the frame but kept for the cat. A multicolored tapestry of children playing in and around pagodas, a relic from my time teaching English in China in my twenties. The tapestry has a coffee stain, but its only visible if you know what youre looking for, like a Rorschach. On display is an assortment of knickknacks, mostly gifts from patients and students. There are books, poems, essays, artwork, postcards, holiday cards, letters, cartoons. One patient, a gifted artist and musician, gave me a photograph he had taken of the Golden Gate Bridge overlaid with his hand-drawn musical notes. He was no longer suicidal when he made it, yet its a mournful image, all grays and blacks. Another patient, a beautiful young woman embarrassed by wrinkles that only she saw and no amount of Botox could erase, gave me a clay water pitcher big enough to serve ten. To the left of my computer, I keep a small print of Albrecht Durers Melencolia 1. In the drawing, Melancholia personified as a woman sits in a room surrounded by the neglected tools of industry and time: a protractor, a scale, an hourglass, a hammer. Her starving dog, ribs protruding from his sunken frame, waits patiently and in vain for her to rouse herself.To the right of my computer, a five-inch clay angel with wings wrought from wire stretches her arms skyward. The word courage is engraved at her feet. Shes a gift from a colleague who was cleaning out her office. A leftover angel. Ill take it. Im grateful for this room of my own. Here, I am suspended out of time, existing in a world of secrets and dreams. But the space is also tinged with sadness and longing. When my patients leave my care, professional boundaries forbid that I contact them. As real as our relationships are inside my office, they cannot exist outside this space. If I see my patients at the grocery store, Im hesitant even to say hello lest I declare myself a human being with needs of my own. What, me eat?Years ago when I was in my psychiatry residency training, I saw my psychotherapy supervisor outside his office for the first time. He emerged from a shop wearing a trench coat and an Indiana Jones-style fedora. He looked like hed just stepped off the cover of a J. Peterman catalogue. The experience was jarring. Id shared many intimate details of my life with him, and he had counseled me as he would a patient. I had not thought of him as a hat person. To me, it suggested a preoccupation with personal appearance that was at odds with the idealized version I had of him. But most of all, it made me aware of how disconcerting it might be for my own patients to see me outside my office. I turned to Jacob and began. "What can I help you with?" Other beginnings Ive evolved over time include: "Tell me why youre here," "What brings you in today," and even "Start at the beginning, wherever that is for you." Jacob looked me over. "I am hoping," he said in a thick Eastern European accent, "you would be a man." I knew then we would be talking about sex. "Why?" I asked, feigning ignorance. "Because it might be hard for you, a woman, to hear about my problems." "I can assure you Ive heard almost everything there is to hear." "You see," he stumbled, looking shyly at me, "I have the sex addiction." I nodded and settled into my chair. "Go on. . . ." Every patient is an unopened package, an unread novel, an unexplored land. A patient once described to me how rock climbing feels: When hes on the wall, nothing exists but infinite rock face juxtaposed against the finite decision of where next to put each finger and toe. Practicing psychotherapy is not unlike rock climbing. I immerse myself in story, the telling and retelling, and the rest falls away. Ive heard many variations on the tales of human suffering, but Jacobs story shocked me. What disturbed me most was what it implied about the world we live in now, the world were leaving to our children. Jacob started right in with a childhood memory. No preamble. Freud would have been proud. "I masturbated first time when I was two or three years old," he said. The memory was vivid for him. I could see it on his face. "I am on the moon," he continued, "but it is not really the moon. There is a person there like a God . . . and I have sexual experience which I dont recognize. . . ." I took moon to mean something like the abyss, nowhere and everywhere simultaneously. But what of God? Arent we all yearning for something beyond ourselves? As a young schoolboy, Jacob was a dreamer: buttons out of order, chalk on his hands and sleeves, the first to look out the window during lessons, and the last to leave the classroom for the day. He masturbated regularly by the time he was eight years old. Sometimes alone, sometimes with his best friend. They had not yet learned to be ashamed. But after his First Communion, he was awakened to the idea of masturbation as a "mortal sin." From then on, he only masturbated alone, and he visited the Catholic pri Details ISBN152474672X Short Title Dopamine Nation Language English Year 2021 ISBN-10 152474672X ISBN-13 9781524746728 Format Hardcover Imprint Dutton Subtitle Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence Audience General/Trade Pages 304 AU Release Date 2021-08-24 NZ Release Date 2021-08-24 US Release Date 2021-08-24 Publisher Penguin Putnam Inc Illustrations HALFTONE ART THROUGHOUT Place of Publication New York Country of Publication United States Publication Date 2021-08-24 UK Release Date 2021-08-24 Author Anna Lembke We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! TheNile_Item_ID:133004686;

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