Dopamine Nation

Author: Dr. Anna Lembke

Genre: Science, Non-fiction, Self-Help

Pages: 304

Other books: Drug Dealer, MD: How Doctors Were Duped, Patients Got Hooked, and Why It's So Hard to Stop

Star Rating: 5.0 = Highly Recommend

As an informative book, the author does a fantastic job diving deep into what dopamine is and how it is triggered defined by neuroscientists. I believe most of us have an idea what dopamine is and how it works but we may not know how it is triggered or why. Have you ever thought why our brains make us feel good when we release dopamine? What else is effected when dopamine is involved?

What is addiction? When individuals are addicted to drugs, smoking, etc. we want to feel that release of dopamine. We want to feel good. What happens to our brains and what is being communicated when we have an addiction? This book will take you into the detailed studies of what happens to our bodies and even how we can quit. We also learn that addictions don’t have to be drugs, sex, alcohol, it can be every day things like eating, reading, exercise, social media. If something is taking away from our everyday lives and we can’t get enough of it, maybe we have a small addiction too something? For example, the author had an addiction to romance novels. She couldn’t get enough of them and it started to interfere with work, kids and her life. Once she realized this was an addiction, she learned how she can move away from it. How difficult it could be and how she can balance her life again.

If you are at all like me, I am not a big fan of self help books but I do find them very informative. This book is under a self-help genre and can be used if I had someone close to me that has an addiction or if I myself did. The author starts with how we get addicted to something, why we stay addicted and how we can move away from addition. She gives real life examples of patient addictions and how they processed their life. She goes into great detail about how our brains become unbalanced between pleasure and pain. If we love something too much (pleasure) it can turn to pain and vice versa. How do we live a normal life by balancing the two?

The most informative and helpful section in this book was learning about balance between pleasure and pain. As for me, I always want to be happy. I thrive on people around me that feel that happiness and love to give it off but when things are going badly in my life I am so hard on myself. I always think how I can be better and do better next time to never have that bad thing happen in my life again! But this book allowed me to take a step back and think, with pain comes pleasure! It might sound weird at first but when you read how she defines the balance amongst pleasure and pain the words spoke to me!

Let me give another example, at a point in my life I wanted to understand happiness. I wanted to define it what it means and how we can always be brought back to happiness. I read books, study the Bible and am still learning! As I am continuing to learn, like this book mentions, it’s all about balance. Balance in our heads, balance in our brains. We can’t always feel good because then it could be throwing off the balance and what is the opposite of good, bad, pain! Take the good with bad to sum it up! It’s the ongoing challenge of us everyday to balance ourselves in all that we do as we take on the outside world. Balance our food intake good with bad, balance our work lives with family life. Balance our good thoughts with painful thoughts. Balance our spending with our saving. Balance our wants with our needs. Balance social media with real life. That’s why life is challenging we are always working though something. We can be great in one area but struggling in another. So let’s compete in life, take on the challenge and take on life.

I wish someone out there to read this book, take in all it’s meaning and just save it in their pocket. Save it for a bad day, bad time in life, I know it can help. 5 start for this book if you are in the informative mood. If you want to learn something new, this is a great book to absorb. All factual based, not driven by the authors opinions or experience, references in the bad of the book.