Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence

Summary:

This book focuses on how to balance between pleasure and pain to avoid addictions.

Notes:

• Relationship between pleasure and pain and how understanding that relationship has become essential for a life well lived.

• The brain processes pleasure and pain in the same place. They work like opposite sides of balance.

• The secret of finding balance is combining the desire with the wisdom of recovery.

• Mindfulness is the ability to observe what our brain is doing while it is doing it without judgement. Practicing mindfulness is like observing the Milky Way. Be a part of something but look so far away and separate.

• What kinds of barriers can you put into place to make it harder for you to get easy access to your drug of choice?

1. Physical strategies: space

2. Chronological strategies: time

3. Categorical strategies: meanings

• Lessons of the balance

1. The relentless pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance to pain leads to pain

2. The recovery begins with abstinence

3. Abstinence resets the brain’s reward pathway and with it our capacity to take joy and simple pleasures

4. Self-binding creates literal and metacognitive space between desire and consumption, a modern necessity dopamine overloaded world

5. Medications can restore homeostasis but consider what we lose by medicating away our pain

6. Pressing on the pain side resets our balance to the side of pleasure

7. Beware of getting addicted to pain

8. Radical honesty promotes awareness and enhances intimacy and fosters a plenty mindset

9. Prosocial shame affirms that we belong to the human tribe

10. Instead of running away from the world we can find escape by immersing ourselves in it