Book Review 2024.09: Dopamine Nation-Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence, 234 pages, Paperback, 2002
A byproduct of my online book buying habit is that I get a lot of articles about books in my mobile. One such article was about this book and its byline of ‘balance in the age of indulgence’ caught my attention resulting in this book purchase. Being a reasonably short and well written book, I completed reading it in a week.
The need for this book is based on the idea that human beings have evolved with psychological and pathological response systems to respond to a scarcity era in which they evolved, in contrast to the second half of 20th century and the 21st century that is the age of plenty. Many problems that humans face today is that of ‘a cacti growing in the rain forest’, i.e. the ability of human beings to handle historically perceived scarce items in plenty resulting in addiction to compulsive eating, intoxicating substances, compulsive shopping, porn, gambling and other excessive over consumption resulting in dysfunctional individuals, harmful to their families, friends and society.
Packed with interesting case studies and research findings from the American society where individuals chase pleasure, the author unfolds its consequences using the concept of pleasure-pain sensitivity balance, where more intense, varied and more frequent stimuli is required to get the same pleasure due to marginal diminishing sensitivity to pleasures resulting in addiction and leading to dysfunctional individuals. The sensitivity balancing has the effect of making an addict less sensitivity to pleasure oversensitive to pain, requiring medical and psychiatric treatment to help the addict find the balance again.
To combat overconsumption addiction, which at a less harmful level could be of even binge TV watching, overeating, or chronic mobile phone addiction, the book outlines two steps, the first step being abstinence through different self-binding techniques to restore the pleasure-pain sensitivity balance. The second step is counter intuitive and involves pursuit of pain, where, as the tolerance to pain increases, the sensitivity to pleasure too increases. Physical exercise as a cure to addiction, where individuals voluntarily expose themselves to pain of exercising is one of the illustrated examples for them to lower their thresholds for experiencing simple pleasures. The two other steps of radical honesty, starting with admitting and accepting your addiction to show how honesty as a concept furthers human well-being, and having a supportive social setting, termed ‘prosocial shame’ where your community helps you resolve the addiction once you admit it are key elements to finding balance.
This book made me introspective and examine my hardcore habits that I feel incomplete without, of daily exercise, compulsive reading, music listening, and following Arsenal football team for what they are; sometime inhibiting my ability to socially engage, and often irritating me when forced to do without, to conclude, these were habits not obsessive enough to make me dysfunctional, but to be on guard.
Recommend this book for those interested in the topic of indulgence and wanting to change their hard-core habits.
Happy Reading
