Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence

⚡️ 10 Quotes from the book

“Scientists rely on dopamine as a kind of universal currency for measuring the addictive potential of any experience. The more dopamine in the brain’s reward pathway, the more addictive the experience.”

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“We’re all running from pain. Some of us take pills. Some of us couch surf while binge-watching Netflix. Some of us read romance novels. We’ll do almost anything to distract ourselves from ourselves. Yet all this trying to insulate ourselves from pain seems only to have made our pain worse.”

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“The reason we’re all so miserable may be because we’re working so hard to avoid being miserable.”

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“Dopamine may play a bigger role in the motivation to get a reward than the pleasure of the reward itself. Wanting more than liking.”

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“The paradox is that hedonism, the pursuit of pleasure for its own sake, leads to anhedonia, which is the inability to enjoy pleasure of any kind.”

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“With prolonged and repeated exposure to pleasurable stimuli, our capacity to tolerate pain decreases, and our threshold for experiencing pleasure increases.”

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“Practicing mindfulness is something like observing the Milky Way: It demands that we see our thoughts and emotions as separate from us and yet, simultaneously, a part of us.”

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“The victim narrative reflects a wider societal trend in which we’re all prone to seeing ourselves as the victims of circumstance and deserving of compensation or reward for our suffering. Even when people have been victimized, if the narrative never moves beyond victimhood, it’s difficult for healing to occur.”

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“I urge you to find a way to immerse yourself fully in the life that you’ve been given. To stop running from whatever you’re trying to escape, and instead to stop, and turn, and face whatever it is.”

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“The rewards of finding and maintaining balance are neither immediate nor permanent. They require patience and maintenance. We must be willing to move forward despite being uncertain of what lies ahead.”

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