Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence (Anna Lembke)
- Your Highlight on Location 110-111 | Added on Sunday, July 24, 2022 11:57:43 PM
Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia 1. In the drawing, Melancholia personified as a woman sits stooped on a bench surrounded by the neglected tools of industry and time:
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Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence (Anna Lembke)
- Your Highlight on Location 205-206 | Added on Monday, July 25, 2022 12:08:34 AM
Addiction broadly defined is the continued and compulsive consumption of a substance or behavior (gambling, gaming, sex) despite its harm to self and/or others.
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Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence (Anna Lembke)
- Your Highlight on Location 637-638 | Added on Friday, July 29, 2022 12:37:25 AM
Neuroscientist Nora Volkow and colleagues have shown that heavy, prolonged consumption of high-dopamine substances eventually leads to a dopamine deficit state.
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Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence (Anna Lembke)
- Your Highlight on Location 659-660 | Added on Friday, July 29, 2022 12:40:26 AM
If we wait long enough, our brains (usually) readapt to the absence of the drug and we reestablish our baseline homeostasis: a level balance. Once our balance is level, we are again able to take pleasure in everyday,
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Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence (Anna Lembke)
- Your Highlight on Location 671-672 | Added on Friday, July 29, 2022 12:42:01 AM
The pre-reward dopamine spike in response to the conditioned cue explains the anticipatory pleasure we experience when we know good things are coming.
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Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence (Anna Lembke)
- Your Highlight on Location 675-676 | Added on Friday, July 29, 2022 12:42:54 AM
Dopamine levels below baseline drive craving. Craving translates into purposeful activity to obtain the drug.
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Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence (Anna Lembke)
- Your Highlight on Location 694-696 | Added on Saturday, July 30, 2022 4:03:05 PM
There were no distinct differences between the two groups when they won money; however, when compared to the control group, the pathological gamblers showed a marked increase in dopamine levels when they lost money. The amount of dopamine released in the reward pathway was at its highest when the probability of losing and winning was nearly identical (50 percent)—representing maximum uncertainty.
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Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence (Anna Lembke)
- Your Highlight on Location 702-705 | Added on Saturday, July 30, 2022 4:08:26 PM
The brain encodes long-term memories of reward and their associated cues by changing the shape and size of dopamine-producing neurons. For example, the dendrites, the branches off the neuron, become longer and more numerous in response to high-dopamine rewards. This process is called experience-dependent plasticity. These brain changes can last a lifetime and persist long after the drug is no longer available.
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Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence (Anna Lembke)
- Your Highlight on Location 735-736 | Added on Saturday, July 30, 2022 4:15:06 PM
Those with depression, anxiety, and chronic pain start with a balance tipped to the side of pain, which may explain why people with psychiatric disorders are more vulnerable to addiction.
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Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence (Anna Lembke)
- Your Highlight on Location 753-754 | Added on Saturday, July 30, 2022 4:17:27 PM
With prolonged and repeated exposure to pleasurable stimuli, our capacity to tolerate pain decreases, and our threshold for experiencing pleasure increases.
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Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence (Anna Lembke)
- Your Highlight on Location 823-824 | Added on Saturday, July 30, 2022 4:25:18 PM
As they say in AA, “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.”
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Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence (Anna Lembke)
- Your Highlight on Location 860-862 | Added on Saturday, July 30, 2022 4:28:24 PM
Schuckit, a professor of experimental psychology at San Diego State University, is best known for demonstrating that biological sons of “alcoholics” have an increased genetic risk of developing an alcohol use disorder, compared to those without this genetic load.
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Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence (Anna Lembke)
- Your Highlight on Location 1015-1017 | Added on Saturday, July 30, 2022 4:42:29 PM
The key to creating effective self-binding is first to acknowledge the loss of voluntariness we experience when under the spell of a powerful compulsion, and to bind ourselves while we still possess the capacity for voluntary choice.
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Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence (Anna Lembke)
- Your Highlight on Location 1466-1468 | Added on Saturday, July 30, 2022 11:38:03 PM
Patients with anxiety and insomnia who take benzodiazepines (Xanax and Klonopin) and other sedative-hypnotics daily for more than a month may experience worsened anxiety and insomnia.
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Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence (Anna Lembke)
- Your Highlight on Location 1474-1476 | Added on Saturday, July 30, 2022 11:39:01 PM
Recent data show that even antidepressants, previously thought not to be “habit forming,” may lead to tolerance and dependence, and possibly even make depression worse over the long haul, a phenomenon called tardive dysphoria.
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Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence (Anna Lembke)
- Your Highlight on Location 1531-1532 | Added on Saturday, July 30, 2022 11:48:45 PM
The sci-fi movie Serenity (2005), directed by Joss Whedon,
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Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence (Anna Lembke)
- Your Highlight on Location 1642-1642 | Added on Sunday, July 31, 2022 12:00:50 AM
Just as pain is the price we pay for pleasure, so too is pleasure our reward for pain.
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Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence (Anna Lembke)
- Your Highlight on Location 1643-1645 | Added on Sunday, July 31, 2022 12:01:10 AM
Hormesis is a branch of science that studies the beneficial effects of administering small to moderate doses of noxious and/or painful stimuli, such as cold, heat, gravitational changes, radiation, food restriction, and exercise.
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Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence (Anna Lembke)
- Your Highlight on Location 1671-1674 | Added on Sunday, July 31, 2022 12:03:58 AM
Exercise increases many of the neurotransmitters involved in positive mood regulation: dopamine, serotonin, norepinephrine, epinephrine, endocannabinoids, and endogenous opioid peptides (endorphins). Exercise contributes to the birth of new neurons and supporting glial cells. Exercise even reduces the likelihood of using and getting addicted to drugs.
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Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence (Anna Lembke)
- Your Highlight on Location 1691-1693 | Added on Sunday, July 31, 2022 12:06:01 AM
Exercise has a more profound and sustained positive effect on mood, anxiety, cognition, energy, and sleep than any pill I can prescribe. — But pursuing pain is harder than pursuing pleasure.
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Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence (Anna Lembke)
- Your Highlight on Location 1770-1771 | Added on Sunday, July 31, 2022 12:13:59 AM
I was doing fine until I spilled a little bit of my coffee on the counter. I was so embarrassed. When I told my therapist about it, she told me to do it again—spill my coffee—on purpose this time.
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Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence (Anna Lembke)
- Your Highlight on Location 2073-2075 | Added on Tuesday, August 2, 2022 12:33:51 AM
Oxytocin, a hormone much involved with falling in love, mother-child bonding, and lifetime pair bonding of sexual mates, binds to receptors on the dopamine-secreting neurons in the brain’s reward pathway and enhances the firing of the reward-circuit tract. In other words, oxytocin leads to an increase in brain dopamine,
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Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence (Anna Lembke)
- Your Highlight on Location 2101-2103 | Added on Tuesday, August 2, 2022 12:36:59 AM
I have become convinced that the way we tell our personal stories is a marker and predictor of mental health. Patients who tell stories in which they are frequently the victim, seldom bearing responsibility for bad outcomes, are often unwell and remain unwell.
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Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence (Anna Lembke)
- Your Highlight on Location 2108-2109 | Added on Tuesday, August 2, 2022 12:37:35 AM
One of the jobs of good psychotherapy is to help people tell healing stories. If autobiographical narrative is a river, psychotherapy is the means by which that river is mapped and in some cases rerouted.
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Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence (Anna Lembke)
- Your Highlight on Location 2331-2334 | Added on Thursday, August 4, 2022 1:18:37 AM
The psychological literature today identifies shame as an emotion distinct from guilt. The thinking goes like this: Shame makes us feel bad about ourselves as people, whereas guilt makes us feel bad about our actions while preserving a positive sense of self. Shame is a maladaptive emotion. Guilt is an adaptive emotion.
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Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence (Anna Lembke)
- Your Highlight on Location 2481-2481 | Added on Saturday, August 6, 2022 11:26:18 PM
or “There but for the grace of God go I.”
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Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence (Anna Lembke)
- Your Highlight on Location 2490-2492 | Added on Saturday, August 6, 2022 11:27:58 PM
those behaviors that seem excessive, gratuitous, or even irrational in existing religious institutions, such as wearing certain hairstyles or certain clothing, abstaining from various foods or forms of modern technology, or refusing certain medical treatments, are rational when understood as a cost to the individual to reduce free riding within an organization.
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Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence (Anna Lembke)
- Your Highlight on Location 2625-2628 | Added on Tuesday, August 9, 2022 11:32:35 PM
The rewards of finding and maintaining balance are neither immediate nor permanent. They require patience and maintenance. We must be willing to move forward despite being uncertain of what lies ahead. We must have faith that actions today that seem to have no impact in the present moment are in fact accumulating in a positive direction, which will be revealed to us only at some unknown time in the future.
