I bought this book on 29th January, 2023, and remember reading it within just a few weeks. This book is written by Anna Lembke, a psychiatrist, who shares her insights about the delicate balance between pain and pleasure. It’s a wonderful book on neuroscience that explains things very simply, and she uses child-like drawings to illustrate her points.
I picked up this book due to my keen interest in how the brain works, and why we get so addicted with things like social media, food, and shopping. One of the biggest insights I gained from this book was the concept of addiction itself. When I did my Masters in Family Counselling, we had a subject on psychopathology. I had a copy of the DSM-5, and was always reading up various mental health illnesses and its risk factors. But what I never knew was how addiction worked, and this was the first book that really made me understand what happens to an addicted brain.
When we get addicted to something, we tend to crave it more. Like with chocolate (because sugar is highly addictive). We get a really wonderful piece of chocolate, and immediately want more. But the second or third bite will never be as pleasurable as the first bite. The only way to experience that pleasure again is actually to go weeks, or months, without chocolate—once our brain resets and our dopamine downregulates, then we’ll experience the same pleasure when we have chocolate again. I have read another book that talks about this (Bright Line Eating by Susan Pierce Thompson, M.D.), where this is experienced more intensely by the addicted brain. The addicted brain feels the loss of that lack of dopamine, so it drives us to consume our drug to feel, not high, but normal.
Even if you’re not “addicted”, it’s still a good book to read. There are some wonderful insights in this book even for parents, and the role that delayed gratification plays in raising resilient kids. Of course it’s too much to write in one review, but there’s a lot of great information in this book. Lembke also presents a lot of case studies from her psychiatric clients, which is always an added bonus.
My favourite quotes from the book:
Any reward that is not potent enough won’t feel like a reward, which is why when we’re consuming high-dopamine rewards, we lose the ability to take joy in ordinary pleasures.
I worry that we have both oversanitized and overpathologized childhood, raising our children in the equivalent of a padded cell, with no way to injure themselves but also no means to ready themselves for the world.
Science teaches us that every pleasure exacts a price, and the pain that follows is longer lasting and more intense than the pleasure that gave rise to it. With prolonged and repeated exposure to pleasurable stimuli, our capacity to tolerate pain decreases, and our threshold for experiencing pleasure increases.