Dr. Anna Lembke, Professor of Psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine, and chief of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic, presented a webinar as part of the Alan Hu Foundation Mental Health Lecture Series on Friday, March 8, 2024, from 12:00-1:00 PM PT. Her lecture was free to the public thanks to a generous grant from Three Valleys Community Foundation. The webinar included 20 minutes for questions and answers following Dr. Lembke’s presentation.
3:26 Learning Objectives
5:29 The Pleasure-Pain Balance
21:20 The Plenty Paradox
23:51 What to Do About It (DOPAMINE)
39:27 Learning Objectives
39:51 The 24-Hour Phone-Free Challenge
40:30 Q&A
Dr. Lembke explained, “This is a time of unprecedented access to high-reward, high-dopamine stimuli: drugs, food, news, gambling, shopping, gaming, texting, Facebooking, Instagramming, tweeting…the increased numbers, variety and potency are staggering. As such, we’ve all become vulnerable to compulsive overconsumption. Yet it is possible to find contentment and connectedness by keeping dopamine in check.” In this talk, Professor Lembke provided a practical, science-informed approach to addressing compulsive overconsumption of everything from food to sex, to video games.
Her latest book, Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence (Dutton/Penguin Random House, August 2021) was an instant New York Times and Los Angeles Times bestseller and has been translated into 30 languages. It combinesthe neuroscience of addiction with the wisdom of recovery to explore the problem of overconsumption in a dopamine-overloaded world.
Mental Health Association for Chinese Communities (MHACC) https://www.mhacc-usa.org collaborated with Alan Hu Foundation to provide instant Chinese interpretation.
We were honored and privileged that Dr. Lembke shared the concept of dopamine fasting. We were grateful to our audience for tuning in across United States as well as from American Samoa, Canada, Italy, San Marino, Sweden, and Taiwan. Thank you, MHACC Founder and President Elaine Peng. Thank you, Ida Shaw, for simultaneous Chinese Interpretation.