Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence
Ratings102
Average rating3.5
Whew, a tough read, especially when you recognize yourself in the stories shared by the author. A must-read for everyone who wonders if they suffer from addiction in any form.
Insightful book on how we are wired for addiction and some of us primed for it from an early age.
Some pretty great things in here. Especially around breaking the cycle of isolation in shame and the role of prosocial shame.
It's not quite one star because I spent most of my time going, "eh? 🤨" instead of, "ugh 😵💫" but it was another case of me putting a book on my tbr because I saw it somewhere once and didn't look into it. I don't know if it was because I had the audiobook, but the entire time I felt like I just wanted to ditch it and read a summary instead. I struggled to connect the stories with any actual point or takeaway. The conclusion at the end helped but otherwise I felt like, what are we doing here?
An illuminating book on addiction and how we can take steps to find balance. Especially a good follow-up to the book The End of Cravings.
It's an important book because I am going through some of these issues, and I can see it in people around me. I'm not sure it really gave me any answers but maybe it motivated me too try to be a better person to recognize everyone's struggles, and that different people deal with these struggles in ways that are counterproductive, but I should not hold it against them, including myself.
This is a very important book for anyone interested in being satisfied in life. In today's culture, most of us have damaged a so-called pleasure-pain balance with all the easy dopamine-inducing products like social media, junk food, gambling, TikTok, etc. Understanding the mechanism behind our pleasure regulatory system might be one of the keys to achieving a satisfied life, something we all strive towards.
Dopamine is not a thing that only neuroscientists should be concerned about. It is a chemical that's crucial for you to feel pleasure, and if you overstimulate dopamine receptors, you'll have to release more and more of it to keep yourself satisfied in life, so you consume lots of dopamine-producing substances and services, including drugs, junk food, even social media, especially that because today all of the internet is consumed with attention-grabbing economy and every platform is integrating a TikTok style short videos which destroy attention span and flood your system with dopamine, to the point that you aren't even able to read a book for 15 minutes, it doesn't click, can't compete with all the freshness of short 5 second videos that you get on every scroll for hours, you're like hooked on it.
This book also discusses that it's a good idea to swing the pendulum towards the side of pain by for example having a strict workout routine even if we don't want it, engaging in cold exposure with cold showers and ice baths, and generally, doing things that are painful at first. With that, the author claims that the pleasure-pain balance will be adjusted so that we'll feel more pleasure after indulging in pain. So as she says, avoiding pain will lead to misery, which I can also see in my experience. When I'm not challenging myself physically or intellectually, I get very dissatisfied.
In summary, the main takeaway from this book for me is to always keep in mind the pleasure-pain balance, and not indulge in behaviors that produce high levels of dopamine. Maybe that turns out to be one of the keys to enjoying life in today's society.
Pleasure/ pain balance info re dopamine was interesting. Taking a reset is sound advice. But there was some moralistic stuff in here that was not for me. Plus a lack of nuance about causes of obesity and some bs about how using antidepressants will make you be out of touch with your feelings. (Like, yes, for some people? Also life saving for others. She eventually says that she's glad they are available to prescribe at the very end of that section. It was weird. ) Anyway, just ok.
great actionable and approachable book
Filled with anecdotes from the author's career in counseling people with various addictions, the book does a good job in contextualizing what went wrong, how to debug the problem and then how to solve it using various techniques. A lot of this is obvious but then again, the solution to most of our problems is obvious.
General Precepts on Pleasure, Pain, and the Path to Addiction
This was an informative book, less about digital addiction than I had hoped but still a good primer on steps those on the path to addiction can take to avoid it.