Dr. Anna Lembke is professor of psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine and chief of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic. A clinician scholar, she has published more than a hundred peer-reviewed papers, book chapters, and commentaries. She sits on the board of several state and national addiction-focused organizations, has testified before various committees in the United States House of Representatives and Senate, keeps an active speaking calendar, and maintains a thriving clinical practice. Dr. Lembke explores how to moderate compulsive overconsumption in a dopamine overloaded world in her NYTimes bestselling book Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence. Her previous book Drug Dealer, MD – How Doctors Were Duped, Patients Got Hooked, and Why It’s So Hard to Stop was highlighted in the New York Times as one of the top five books to read to understand the opioid epidemic.

"Well, news is fascinating because news is now engineered to be addictive, right? It's that sort of 24/7 sensational presentation through this visual medium. And what's so interesting about our consumption of news is how little new information we actually glean per unit of time we spend getting our news, especially if we're getting it from social media. But what happens is that it really engages our novelty seeking and our desire for dopamine, which looks for something similar, but with just a slight variation. So that really where we get to a point where we're not chasing new information, although we tell ourselves that, we're really chasing dopamine and wanting to experience the emotional reaction that we get from certain types of news stories, whether it's a validation of our own beliefs and values or that kind of communal outrage when people experience an emotion at the same time that other people are experiencing an emotion, that releases quite a lot of do meaning because of course we're social tribal creatures, and that's one of the ways that we wire together is that we have the same emotional reaction together, and that's very reinforcing."

www.annalembke.com

https://med.stanford.edu/psychiatry/patient_care/addiction.html

www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/624957/dopamine-nation-by-anna-lembke-md/

www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/11360/drug-dealer-md

www.creativeprocess.info

www.oneplanetpodcast.org