Wellness, Science & Tech, Business
Take Your Brain Back
Lesson time 01:01:15 min
Follow Dr. Lembke’s 30-day dopamine reset to rewire your brain, cut compulsive habits, and feel focused.
Students give MasterClass an average rating of 4.7 out of 5 stars
Topics include: The Age of Indulgence: How We Got Here Your 30-Day Dopamine Fast Breaking the Bind
With Dr. Anna Lembke
Dr. Anna Lembke, Chief of Addiction Medicine at Stanford, helps you break compulsive behaviors, reset your dopamine, and rebuild focus.
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I want to tell you a story, and it's about how I became addicted to romance novels. I was in my early 40s, and some moms on the playground were talking about this amazing book that they were reading. Oh, Twilight, Twilight. I thought, oh, I'm a reader. That sounds good. I'll give that a try. I can't really explain what happened to me, but it completely transported me. I read it and then I read the other three books in the series. And then I read the whole series again, and I read the series a third time. And then I thought, I wonder if there are any more vampire teenage romance novels out there. Turns out there's a whole world. Once I discovered that world, I was reading about vampires and werewolves and necromancers and soothsayers. The whole world of romantasy. My friends said to me, you know what? Anna, you should get a Kindle. That was the beginning of the end, because I could read anonymously. My husband could think that I was reading War and Peace when I was really reading some bodice ripper. As soon as I would finish one novel, I was already looking at the next one. I also started looking for free novels on Amazon. It didn't even really matter the quality of the writing. I just needed to get my fix. I think romance novels kind of came to replace that desire for attachment that I wasn't experiencing at that moment in my own life, and I think that it sort of filled that vacuum. I had very little awareness that I was getting into an addictive pattern. So what was going on in my brain while I was doing all of this? Turns out it all comes down to a molecule called dopamine. Dopamine is a chemical that's been identified as essential for the experience of pleasure, reward, and motivation. Now, it's not the only neurotransmitter involved in that process, but it's become a kind of common currency for neuroscientists to measure how addictive something is. One of the big misconceptions about dopamine is that we're getting addicted to dopamine itself, which is not true. When we talk about dopamine hits or dopamine addiction, that's really just a metaphor for talking about what's happening in the brain. But dopamine itself isn't addictive. It's a signal. Ultimately, dopamine really is more about motivation than it is about pleasure or reward. So for example, there's a very famous experiment in which rats were engineered to not have dopamine receptors. And what the scientists discovered is if you give a rat like that food, it will eat the food and seem to get pleasure from the food. But if you put the food even a body length away, that rat will starve to death. Which tells us something very important about dopamine, which is that we need dopamine in order to be motivated to do the work to get our rewards. If we didn't have dopamine, we wouldn't care. We would just sit around and eventually probably die. You know that feeling when you can't stop scrolling? For me, it was romance novels. And over time, the content got more graphic, more intense. That's do...
About the Instructor
Your habits aren’t harmless. Quick hits of pleasure—scrolling, sugar, shopping—quietly rewire your brain and drain your motivation. In this class, Dr. Anna Lembke explains how dopamine drives your choices and shows you how to reset your system. Discover how to spot your triggers, help break addictive loops, and use a 30-day framework to rebuild focus and steady energy.
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Dr. Anna Lembke
Dr. Anna Lembke, Chief of Addiction Medicine at Stanford, helps you break compulsive behaviors, reset your dopamine, and rebuild focus.
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