Shankar Vedantam

Thank you for watching.

This is Hidden Brain.

I'm Shankar Vedantam.

Psychiatrist Anna Lemke is the author of Dopamine Nation, Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence.

She argues that when we seek out pleasures on a nonstop basis, whether those pleasures are legal indulgences or illegal substances, we mess with the neurochemistry of the brain.

Paradoxically, the more we chase pleasure, the more the brain tries to compensate, leaving us in a dopamine-depleted state.

Anna recommends multiple techniques to help get indulgences under control.

She calls these self-binding techniques.

So what would some of these look like?

For example, the physical or spatial self-binding that you talk about, what does that look like?

It could also sometimes help to decide when you are going to engage in an activity.

I understand you had a patient, Mitch, who was addicted to sports gambling, and he had to take some pretty extreme measures to bind himself, to keep himself from using his drug of choice.

I mean, this is like people who have, let's say, an alcohol dependence problem, and you're taught, don't walk by the bar on your way home from work.

Take a different route.

So in other words, the things that you put in your environment end up shaping the choices that you make.

Oh, absolutely.

So one of the most radical suggestions that you have, and radical in the sense that I think it would appear to many people to be very counterintuitive and hard to digest, is that one way to deal with compulsive overconsumption is to actively seek out its opposite.

You say that we should deliberately seek out experiences of pain and hardship.

Now, most of us try our best to avoid pain.

Why would we choose to deliberately invite pain into our lives?