#240 | Pleasure to Pain: The Dark Side of Dopamine and How to Improve Your Mental Health—Break Free from Bad Habits with This 8-Step Process
Quick SUMMARY:
Douglas Vigliotti discusses "Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence" by Dr. Anna Lembke, unraveling the intricate ties between dopamine addiction, mental health, and its outsized influence on our daily lives. Vigliotti breaks down Lembke's innovative "DOPAMINE" strategy for achieving balance, beating addiction, and breaking bad habits, and shares his own journey as a self-described pleasure junkie, offering tons of insights for navigating a 24/7 connected world brimming with distractions and indulgences.
Listen to the episode:
*Subscribe to The Books for Men Newsletter, a monthly round-up of every episode with full book and author info, all the best quotes, and newsletter-only book recommendations!
TOPICS COVERED IN the EPISODE:
Introduction to the Book (00:09) - Douglas introduces the book "Dopamine Nation" and its significance in understanding addiction.
Douglas's New Book (01:23) - He briefly discusses his book "Aristotle for Novelists" and its relevance to storytelling.
About Anna Lembke (02:23) - Douglas shares background information on the author, Anna Lembke, and her previous work.
Importance of the Book (03:25) - He emphasizes the book's importance for achieving better mental health in modern society.
Personal Reflection on Addiction (04:33) - Douglas reflects on his own struggles with pleasure and the concept of false idols.
Dopamine Addiction in Society (06:06) - He discusses how modern life is filled with dopamine stimuli and its societal implications.
Insights from Anna Lembke (07:17) - Douglas shares anecdotes from Lemke's life that illustrate her experiences with addiction.
The DOPAMINE Strategy (08:27) - He outlines the acronym "DOPAMINE" as a strategy for achieving balance and understanding addiction.
Data Collection (09:45) - The first step in the DOPAMINE strategy emphasizes gathering information about one's addiction.
Setting Objectives (09:45) - Douglas explains the importance of defining goals related to abstinence or moderation.
Identifying Problems (09:45) - He discusses exploring challenges associated with addictive behaviors.
The Importance of Abstinence (09:45) - The role of abstinence in resetting the brain's dopamine levels is highlighted.
Mindfulness Practice (11:01) - Douglas stresses the need for mindfulness in recognizing triggers and cravings.
Gaining Insight (11:01) - He discusses addressing underlying issues that contribute to addictive behaviors.
Next Steps in Recovery (12:29) - Douglas emphasizes the importance of planning for coping mechanisms and relapse strategies.
Experimentation in Recovery (12:29) - He talks about testing different strategies for moderation and viewing setbacks positively.
Conclusion and Disclaimer (13:37) - Douglas wraps up the episode, reminding listeners to seek medical help for addiction.
READ THE TRANSCRIPT:
Welcome back to “Books for Men”, a podcast to inspire more men to read and bring together men who do. So. This week, I am shifting back into a work of nonfiction. It is a really important book, one that I am really happy to share with you. It falls squarely in the science or big ideas genres, and it's around 304 pages. But like most of the books in that genre, it reads significantly shorter because probably a third of it is notes and references, so it probably reads more around the 220-230-page length. It is titled “Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence” by Anna Lembke, M.D. I will share more about the book and the author, and instead of providing a bunch of different takeaways, I am instead going to quickly outline her strategy, which utilizes the name DOPAMINE. So, the dopamine is a way to help you achieve more balance in the age of indulgence. Before I do that, I just want to quickly remind you that I have a new book out titled “Aristotle for Novelists: 14 Timeless Principles on the Art of Story”.
01:23 - So whether you're someone who's trying to tell a story in your life, which is pretty much everyone, or on the screen or definitely on the page as it is a book that is primarily aimed at novelists or inspiring novelists, this book will have a lot of relevance for you in helping you identify the core story principles that one needs to include in their story to have a working story. If you want more information about that, you can find that at AristotleforNovelists.com. All right. So who is Anna Lembke? She is the author of two books. So the previous book to this one, which came out in 2015 or 2016, I believe is called “Drug Dealer, MD”, and it's centered around the opioid crisis that hit America pretty hard, as I'm sure you've heard about or sadly, maybe even experienced in your own life. I know it's touched by life in some ways. Not me, personally, but people I know. It's probably a topic that deserves its own episode, and maybe it'll get one in the near future.
02:23 - But Lembke is also a clinical psychiatrist, so she sees patients and specializes in addiction, also being a professor of psychiatry at Stanford University, which is what led her to the book that I am sharing with you today, “Dopamine Nation”. So, I want to jump right into what the book is actually about. Bottom line: it's really a book that will help you achieve better mental health. It is about the chemical dopamine that regulates the pain and pleasure part of our brains. More specifically, how you can find balance and peace in a life that seems dogged to keep you from both. and in my eyes. I don't think that there is a more important book today than this one, and I realize the gravity of the statement that I just made. But I do truly believe it is that important, and I'll explain why. But I should quickly mention that I read this book shortly after it came out. So it was about four years ago at this point, and I've just found it to be incredibly interesting and useful.
03:25 - I will admit that I am a recovering pleasure junkie, so this has a lot of relevance for me. So there's this concept that is not covered in this book, but I first came to it via Thomas Aquinas, and it is called the Four False Idols. So as humans, we all have a weakness to one of these four. And, of course, you can have a blend, and everything is on a spectrum. But if you really look at your life, you can quickly spot which of these you have a weakness for, or at least which of them you do. Not at all. And those for false idols are power, money, fame, and pleasure. And for me, when I take an accounting of my life, pleasure is far in a way the thing that has dominated my life and in some respects been detrimental in some cases. So, as I alluded to, this book has particular interest. Having said that, I do think that there are more mundane levels of pleasure that we all experience every day that could become addictions.
04:33 - And as this book will point out, there are many of those. And even though you may not be dominated by physical forms of pleasure, I certainly think we have entered a world where we are over indexing on the idea of pleasure because of the ease and the comfort associated with many forms of it. And I've heard Lemke talk about this subject matter on a zillion podcasts since I've read this book, and I just never get sick of hearing about it because of how prevalent it is in our daily lives. No matter where you fall on the pleasure spectrum, I would say, you know, we are living in a time where dopamine stimuli are everywhere. So whether it be drugs, food, news, gambling, shopping, gaming, texting, social media, pornography, you name it. And so when you expand the idea of addiction to a dopamine addiction, you could see just how perverse this problem actually is in society. What seems innocent is really harming us in a great way. Aside from just the literal things that many of these dopamine addictions are keeping us from, there is a quote she has in the book where she says, “The implication here is that we are all now vulnerable to prefrontal cortex atrophy, as our reward pathway has become the dominant driver of our lives.”
06:06 - So there's also this changing of our brain wiring and probably going to affect us evolutionarily. And just for the sake of hitting the nail on the head. The problem, of course, with these addictions in many cases, is that they're the great source of our dissatisfaction in life, our sadness, our loneliness, our helplessness. It is this imbalance that we have with pleasure in pain. In the book, she shares insights from her patients and also her own life, which for me, was probably the best part. So she shares her journey of getting addicted to smutty romance novels, which she openly shares and talks about, and says that it had all the hallmarks of addiction. This is what drew her to look at this subject matter in the first place, so it was always looking for the next one, lying to people. So she would put another book inside of that book so people wouldn't see that she was reading the book that she was reading, or it was even taken up a notch when she would read on her Kindle because nobody could see what she was reading.
07:17 - Another hallmark of addiction, of course, is shame. Right? So if you are ashamed of the behavior that you're doing and you're hiding it from people, there's probably a good chance that there might be some addictive quality there. She calls it in an interview that I heard her do legally sanctioned porn, and so she would stay up late at night, often flipping to the exact page, because in many of these genre novels that are, you know, high spice or smutty or however you want to describe it, they follow a formula. And so you would know exactly where the part was that she wanted to get to and read about, and she could see how the problem kept escalating and escalating and escalating, ultimately culminating in her doing something about it. And she mixes these anecdotes of her life and patients which are resonate in their own right, but also combines them with science to give you a very well rounded, practical and clear understanding of why your brain is getting fucked up from this never ending stream of dopamine.
08:27 - But more importantly, she provides a solution to the problem, and it's outlined with the acronym DOPAMINE, which I am going to quickly and briefly run through right now. Of course, encouraging you to read the book to get more detail on all of it. So the D stands for data, as in we must collect real information on the person's addiction. So if it's your own, what are you addicted to? You know that includes the frequency, the pattern, and having a clear understanding of what you're really dealing with. Is it social media? Is it a drug? Is it texting? Is it I don't know any of the things that I had mentioned earlier. Understanding the real data is important. The O is for objectives, identifying what you want to achieve with abstinence or moderation. So if I were to abstain or moderate this behavior, what will I achieve in place of it? P is for problems. So, exploring the challenges associated with the behavior past and future. So what are the real challenges that make you want to do it more and that you will face moving forward in the face of abstinence or moderation.
09:45 - And then A is probably the most important piece. It stands for abstinence. And she doesn't mean that you have to always abstain unless that of course, is your goal. But there is a required period of abstinence to allow the brain to reset and rebalance its dopamine levels. I think that as a general rule, it's always good to start from the baseline of anything if you're going to try to improve on something, so it's very hard to build on top of chaos. But if you have a strong foundation, it's much easier to do so. Right. And that's, I think, what abstinence for a certain period of time is getting at. So that way, you are reduced back down to a proper baseline for you to build a new habit on top of. There is scientific importance to this with the structure and method by which your brain works. M is for mindfulness, so you must observe the thoughts, feelings, and triggers when cravings arise. So after or during your bout of abstinence, and then in the steps following, it's a good idea to take note of when and why you are triggered to want to do that behavior.
11:01 - The I is for insight. You are addressing any underlying issues that caused the behavior. So this is something that goes well beyond the dopamine chemical. It relates to your life experiences, how you grew up, where you live. In many respects, this is probably the more important piece to your life as a whole. Just like getting to the baseline level of dopamine to build your new habit, getting to the baseline issues of your life is probably a good idea. But again, this goes much further than just dopamine. And what this book covers the N is the next steps. This is a plan for the abstinence or coping mechanisms that one will have to implement in their life to avoid doing the behavior or even going as far as having a relapse strategy. So if you were to imagine relapsing into your dopamine addiction, whatever form that takes, do you have a plan to recover from that setback? This leads to the E, which is to experiment. So testing strategies for moderation and knowing ultimately that recovery from any habit, especially highly addictive ones like this book is addressing, is an iterative process.
12:29 - You are going to have setbacks. And I always say this is not covered in the book, that how you view a setback is the most important thing to learning anything. If you view a setback as, oh, we're going to have to start all over from scratch, then that is going to be very heavy on you as a learner and as someone trying to improve or do whatever you are doing. But if you look at the setback as an inevitable point on the journey or the learning curve, then it's much easier to cope with and move forward. And that's what this A is trying to tackle in the DOPAMINE acronym. As I mentioned before this, you can find out more information about this strategy by reading the book, which I highly encourage you to do. On that note, to wrap this up, I did want to just be clear that if you do think you are dealing with an addiction of any kind, it's probably best that you seek medical help. Do not confuse this podcast with medical help.
13:37 - I am not a doctor. I am just conveying the information that I have read in this book and that has impacted me. Having said that, I want to thank you so much for listening, and I want to remind you that if you enjoyed this podcast or the podcast more broadly to please click subscribe on whatever podcast platform you're listening to this on. If you have it in, you take two seconds to rate it. Either one of those goes a long way and inspires more men to read. Also, if you want to tell me what you thought about this podcast or the podcast more broadly, then you could reach out to me in 1 or 2 ways, either on Instagram @DouglasVigliotti. It's the only social media that I have, or on my website, DouglasVigliotti.com. As I mentioned at the top of this episode, I do have a new book out. It's called “Aristotle for Novelists” and you can find out more information about that at AristotleforNovelists.com. All of these links will be in the show notes. And last but not least, I wanted to thank you so much for listening. If you want more information on this podcast, which includes signing up for the monthly newsletter, all you have to do is visit the website BooksforMen.org.
