"I think just stay open and curious and don't shy away from doing things that are hard. And don't shy away from asking the hard questions. And I guess one of the things that I really do recommend to young people is to not necessarily be looking always over the fence you know, to try to find their passion or the thing that they were meant to do, but instead, you know, stop and remain still and look around at what is already in their lives that they could do to make a contribution.

I think many times, we've had this kind of restless sense of, Oh, I need to go and find my passion, or I need to go and do this, or do that when there's something right in front of us that is already calling us or we're already set up to offer, and we sort of minimize it. And yet when we really immerse ourselves in the lives that we've been given you know, we can make an incredibly valuable contribution in an iterative way, day after day, and really find a lot of purpose and meaning there."

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.

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