Understanding & Treating Addiction | Dr. Anna Lembke
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN people send it to others in addiction and digital-habits threads as an expert explanation of dopamine baselines.
What it is
Andrew Huberman interviews Stanford addiction psychiatrist Dr. Anna Lembke about the biology and psychology of addiction to drugs, food, gambling, screens and more. They discuss dopamine, the opioid crisis, and her book Dopamine Nation.
Recommended by 1 HN commenters across 1 different months, 2022 to 2023.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec blueyes · 2023-04 · on “Digital Addiction: Focusing on the Cure, Not the Disease”
"Dopamine reset" refers to resetting your baseline levels of dopamine. Highly recommend listening to Huberman's interview of Dr. Anna Lembke: [this video] As well as her book, Dopamine Nation: [LINK] Frequent, large spikes in dopamine, like those people get from drugs and to a lesser extent Twitter, can both lower your baseline and also make other activities seem uninteresting. They often lead to addiction, which is the primary example of people feeling low dopamine baselines and chasing high spikes.
Cites throwingawayyou · 2022-02 · on “On Being Broke”
Poor people have more 45% more leisure time than wealthy. Society as a whole has more leisure time than any time of history before. We still bitch day after day, minute after minute. source... [this video]
Cites yamrzou · 2022-05 · on “I'm an addict”
> I'm simply incapable of doing things I've set out to do. Simple things. Everything is difficult. “Independent discharges of dopamine neurons (tonic or pacemaker firing) determine the motivation to respond to such cues. As a result of habitual intake of addictive drugs, dopamine receptors expressed in the brain are decreased, thereby reducing interest in activities not already stamped in by habitual rewards. ” From: Dopamine and Addiction | Annual Review of Psychology — [LINK] ---- Edit: I'd like to add a couple more ideas, because what you're describing in your article is spot on, and I believe can be generalized past your own experience. > Another angle that makes this ever more distressi
Cites haswell · 2022-06 · on “TikTok Pedagogy: Teaching Philosophy in 60 Seconds or Less”
> I doubt the author's thirst for knowledge genuinely borders on 'compulsion or even addiction'. That's ridiculous self-aggrandizement I think there might be more to this than it seems at first glance. For many people, work is their addiction. Others, the acquisition of knowledge. Others still, Tik-Tok and social media. Less ideally, heroin and hard drugs. I recently listened to an episode of Andrew Huberman's podcast focused on addiction [0]. He interviews Dr. Anna Lembke, an addiction expert, and they explore aspects of addiction that aren't necessarily well understood by outsiders. The thing that stood out to me was their acknowledgement that most of us are addicted to something, even if