Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence

Is it any wonder that poverty is a risk factor for addiction, especially in a world of easy access to cheap dopamine?

we’ve transformed the world from a place of scarcity to a place of overwhelming abundance: Drugs, food, news, gambling, shopping, gaming, texting, sexting, Facebooking, Instagramming, YouTubing, tweeting . . . the increased numbers, variety, and potency of highly rewarding stimuli today is staggering. The smartphone is the modern-day hypodermic nee

Researchers interviewed nearly 150,000 people in twenty-six countries to determine the prevalence of generalized anxiety disorder, defined as excessive and uncontrollable worry that adversely affected their life. They found that richer countries had higher rates of anxiety than poor ones. The authors wrote, “The disorder is significantly more preva

A typical day for the average laborer in the United States just before the Civil War (1861–1865), whether in agriculture or industry, consisted of working ten to twelve hours a day, six and a half days per week, fifty-one weeks per year, with no more than two hours a day spent on leisure activity. Some workers, often immigrant women, worked thirtee

In his book Bad Religion, writer and religious scholar Ross Douthat describes our New Age “God Within” theology as “a faith that’s at once cosmopolitan and comforting, promising all the pleasures of exoticism . . . without any of the pain . . . a mystical pantheism, in which God is an experience rather than a person. . . . It’s startling how little

The paradigm shift around pain has translated into massive prescribing of feel-good pills. Today, more than one in four American adults—and more than one in twenty American children—takes a psychiatric drug on a daily basis. The use of antidepressants like Paxil, Prozac, and Celexa is rising in countries all over the world, with the United States t

Club goods are threatened by free riders who attempt to benefit from the group without sufficient participation in that community, similar to the more colloquial terms freeloaders or moochers.

relapse to the AA fellowship augments club goods by creating the opportunity for other group members to experience empathy, altruism, and, let’s

According to Winnicott, the false self is a self-constructed persona in defense against intolerable external demands and stressors. Winnicott postulated that the creation of the false self can lead to feelings of profound emptiness. No there there.