'The Interview': Digital Drugs Have Us Hooked. Dr. Anna Lembke Sees a Way Out.
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From The New York Times, this is The Interview. I'm Lulu Garcia Navarro. We live in a moment where things are more available than ever. You can whip out your phone right now and order lunch, bet on sports, listen to this podcast, watch porn, buy a car, meet a friend, get therapy from an AI bot. But all that convenience isn't making us any happier. In fact, in the developed world, we are more lonely, anxious, and depressed than ever. Dr. Anna Lembke likens it to the plenty paradox. The more we have, the less satisfied we are. Lemke is a psychiatrist who works at Stanford University, and she's written extensively, including in her bestselling book, Dopamine Nation, about the science behind addiction.
Turns out our brains are wired to constantly seek stimulation, which our modern era delivers in overdrive. I'm sure if you look at your life, maybe there's something you are indulging in a little too frequently than is good for you. For me, the turning point came at the start of the pandemic, when my sister died of liver failure brought on by alcoholism, something I shared with Dr. Lemke before our interview. It made me take a hard look at my life. After a lifetime of obesity, I ended up taking Ozempic, which curtailed my obsessive relationship with food. Then two years ago, I stopped drinking alcohol.
Hi, how are you? I'm good. How are you? I'm good. So
You published your book, Dopamine Nation, in 2021 with the thesis that the overabundance of modern culture has us constantly stimulated by dopamine. And that's only accelerated since your book was published. And I'm just wondering, broadly, does it feel like a whole new world for your research has opened up just since you've written your last book?
I think the irony is that amazing research has been going on for a long time, but for whatever reason, the American public hasn't been particularly interested until very recently. And why that shift? I mean, I have my theories. I think that with the advent of smartphones and 24-7 access to the Internet online, All of a sudden, people who saw addiction as a problem that somebody else had began wondering about their own compulsive consumption of digital media. And then I think COVID just really, like, you know, we just went off a cliff with COVID. Sure did. Yeah. And it was, I think, along the lines of, like, life is really weird. Like, I am at home all day long in my pajamas consuming more alcohol, more cannabis, more YouTube shorts. And I think all of a sudden people were like, wow, this addiction thing is real. And I do think that that's been a big cultural shift. And so I think it's more that the spotlight has turned toward this problem.
You work in Stanford's Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic, which is a bit of a mouthful, but essentially you see patients, right, about addiction. Yes. So generally speaking, have you seen things in your practice that weren't there before that you're seeing now since the pandemic? Yes.
It's not like all of a sudden things shifted in 2020. I think what happened was COVID just accelerated the trends that were already happening. So to put it in perspective, just from my clinical front row seat, such as it is, in the early thousands, what we were seeing is a sudden increase in people addicted to the very same pills their doctors were prescribing to them. foremost opioids for chronic and minor pain conditions leading to our current day opioid epidemic, but also a signal early on in the early 2000s, middle-aged men coming in with severe internet pornography addiction and compulsive masturbation, primarily men who had been able to consume pornography in reasonable moderation without a lot of harm to their lives until the advent of the internet.
And then especially, you know, in the first decade of the 2000s, the smartphone. And that was probably our earliest signal for behavioral addictions. And then around 2012, 2013, we were seeing a bunch of teenage boys brought in by their parents primarily for Internet gaming disorders.
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