Anna Lembke

And this is perhaps one of the great antidotes to our time, to the erosion of trust, to the sense of constant distraction.

And I believe that you interviewed Anna Lembke, or you mentioned her.

Yes, the author of Dopamine Nation.

Right.

So I wanna bring in a little bit of neuroscience.

You know, why is it that people are having such a hard time with smartphones or, you know, uh, highly processed foods? So part of the answer comes from Anna Lembke.

She's a psychologist at Stanford, and she wrote the book Dopamine Nation.

She said, "It's finding balance in the age of indulgence." So what is she talking about? She is saying that we live in a society where highly processed, highly palatable food is easily and cheaply available, that we have all these things, you know, smartphones, cigarettes, alcohol, that there's overabundance, and we have just gotten used to just feeling good.

For some folks, it's sugar.

But for some folks, it's pornography.

So once, let's say, that is something that your brain initially really gave you a high dopamine response for, but like I showed in Anna Lembke's book, you know, those graphs were borrowed from her book, that if you keep doing that over and over, if you're just overusing, you become addicted to that behavior, then the amount of pleasure from watching pornography is ultimately less and less and less.

The, you know, nature automatically sets a limit on this.

But, um, I think in the next five years or so, we're just gonna see a slew of studies showing that vaping is just bad for us, especially for the developing brain, because it's bringing in at a very rapid rate high-potency nicotine and high-potency cannabis.

And you know from Anna Lembke's work, and we know, my colleague at Stanford, that the, the slope of that increase in dopamine and epinephrine, adrenaline, and acetylcholine is so important.

The sharper that slope, the faster the rise, the more addictive potential these compounds have.

And so it's so far and away different than the kind of dopamine or epinephrine or acetylcholine increase that one sees with exercise or with cold plunges or with, um, with sex or with these other things-

And children's brains, you know, adolescent, not just children, but adolescents maybe until the age of 25, maybe even later, they're developing, they're more malleable, they can be particularly vulnerable.

In the first bellwether social media addiction case in Los Angeles, we heard extensively from top specialists, including, uh, Dr. Anna Lembke from Stanford.

She runs the adolescent addiction program there.

And she was, you know, she told the court that around 40% of patients at the school's adolescent recovery clinic, the medical school's adolescent recovery clinic, which has historically treated drugs and alcohol addiction, they're now presenting with social media addiction.