![]() The next three chapters go through some treatment approaches. ![]() These three chapters follow the overarching idea of exploring human’s search for pleasure. The first three chapters set the foundation of the book by exploring the basic and main constructs related to dopamine and addiction in relation to three real-life experiences from clients and Anna. The book catches our attention right from the first page of the first chapter, diving straight into the experience of one of Anna’s patients – a problem of a sexual nature. In only 150 pages or so, she has brought the usual scientific and complex neurological explanations to life through metaphors and made the explanations engaging by adding a human touch through relevant anecdotes of her clients’ experiences, her experience, and a colleague’s experience. She holds several positions at Stanford and is a well-known figure in the field of addiction, with more than a hundred published peer-reviewed papers and being a recipient of many awards for her research and teaching. Anna Lembke is a psychiatrist as well as a professor at Stanford. It's been an interesting mix.The Dopamine Nation, written by Anna Lembke, aims to explain human’s chase for pleasure in an easily digestible manner. But again, I think it's important to say that some patients are doing much, much better - have found it easier not to drink alcohol, for example, because there aren't so many parties where people are consuming large amounts of alcohol. I've also seen more people spend more time on their screens and really struggle and wonder about how to manage compulsive overconsumption of their digital devices. Of course, we've seen an uptick in overdose-related deaths, including some of my own patients. Again, for some people, it's been absolutely terrible. So I would say I've seen sort of a bimodal distribution in terms of the COVID response in my patient population. And quarantine forced them to slow down and also eliminated a lot of the types of interactions and stimuli that would typically trigger relapse or reuse for them. And what they tell me is that the world is kind of a hyperstimulated, triggering place for them. ![]() I think it's important for me to tell you that I've also had a lot of patients who have done better during quarantine. Shots - Health News Opioid Addiction Is 'A Disease Of Isolation,' So Pandemic Puts Recovery At Risk It can be very subtle, but I'm just sort of aware of wanting to have another piece of chocolate. It's not like I'm even consciously aware of that aftereffect or the comedown. And I will say, too, it's very reflexive. But that's also in many ways what craving is: wanting to have the pleasure, again, being preoccupied with eliminating the experience of pain that we feel in the aftermath. ![]() One of is a subjective feeling of being uncomfortable, restless, irritable, unhappy and wanting to re-create the feeling of pleasure. When that pleasure/pain balance tilts to the side of pain after the experience of pleasure, that pain is subjectively experienced as a number of different things. On the comedown - when pleasure quickly becomes pain or discomfort Now, if I wait long enough, that feeling passes - and homeostasis is restored. And that's the aftereffects or the comedown or, in my case, that moment of wanting a second piece of chocolate. So that when I eat a piece of chocolate, immediately what my brain will do is adapt to the presence of that pleasurable stimulus by tipping my balance an equal and opposite amount to the side of pain. It doesn't want to be deviated for very long, either to the side of pleasure or pain. When we do something that's pleasurable - for example, when I eat a piece of chocolate - then my pleasure/pain balance tilts just a little bit to the side of pleasure, and I experience a release of dopamine in my brain's reward pathway.īut one of the governing principles regulating this balance is that it wants to remain level, which is what neuroscientists call homeostasis. So if you imagine that in your brain, there's a teeter-totter, like something you would find in a kid's playground, and when that teeter-totter is at its resting baseline, it is level with the ground. One of the most fascinating findings in neuroscience in the last 75 years is that the same areas of the brain that process pleasure also process pain and that pleasure and pain work like a balance. ![]() On how pleasure and pain processing overlaps in the brain ![]()
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