Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence

great actionable and approachable book

Filled with anecdotes from the author's career in counseling people with various addictions, the book does a good job in contextualizing what went wrong, how to debug the problem and then how to solve it using various techniques. A lot of this is obvious but then again, the solution to most of our problems is obvious.

It's not quite one star because I spent most of my time going, "eh? 🤨" instead of, "ugh 😵‍💫" but it was another case of me putting a book on my tbr because I saw it somewhere once and didn't look into it. I don't know if it was because I had the audiobook, but the entire time I felt like I just wanted to ditch it and read a summary instead. I struggled to connect the stories with any actual point or takeaway. The conclusion at the end helped but otherwise I felt like, what are we doing here?

Pleasure/ pain balance info re dopamine was interesting. Taking a reset is sound advice. But there was some moralistic stuff in here that was not for me. Plus a lack of nuance about causes of obesity and some bs about how using antidepressants will make you be out of touch with your feelings. (Like, yes, for some people? Also life saving for others. She eventually says that she's glad they are available to prescribe at the very end of that section. It was weird. ) Anyway, just ok.

It's an important book because I am going through some of these issues, and I can see it in people around me. I'm not sure it really gave me any answers but maybe it motivated me too try to be a better person to recognize everyone's struggles, and that different people deal with these struggles in ways that are counterproductive, but I should not hold it against them, including myself.