Understanding & Treating Addiction | Dr. Anna Lembke

(instrumental music) Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today, I have the pleasure of introducing Dr. Anna Lembke. Dr. Lembke is a psychiatrist and the Chief of the Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic at Stanford University School of Medicine. She's a psychiatrist who treats patients struggling with addiction. She has successfully treated patients dealing with drug addiction, alcohol addiction, and behavioral addictions, such as gambling and sex addiction, as well as other types of addiction. In fact, during our discussion, I learned that there are a huge range of behaviors and substances to which people can become addicted to, and that there is a common biological underpinning of all those addictions. I also learned that there's a common path to the treatment and recovery from essentially all addictions. Dr. Lembke explained that to me and explained how to think about and conceptualize our own addictions, as well as the addictions of other people who are struggling to get treatment, move through treatment, and stay sober from their addictions. In addition to treating patients, Dr. Lembke is an author and was featured in the 2020 Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma. I'm excited to tell you that she has a new book coming out called Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence. The book comes out August 24th and is an absolutely fascinating read into addiction and ways to treat various types of addiction. I've read the book cover to cover, and all I'll tell you is that at the very first chapter and throughout, you are going to be absolutely blown away. The stories about her patients are extremely engaging. It brings forward the real struggle of addiction and the incredible, I think it's fair to say, heroic battles that people fight in order to get through addictions of various kinds. And all of that is woven through with story, with science in ways that make it very accessible to anyone, whether or not you have a science background or not. I can't recommend it highly enough. So again, the book is Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence. It comes out August 24th of this year, 2021, and you can pre-order that book by going to Amazon. We will provide a link to that in the show caption. Before we begin, I just want to mention that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero-cost-to-consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is ROKA. ROKA makes sunglasses and eyeglasses that are of the absolute utmost quality. Founded by two all-American swimmers from Stanford, everything about the sunglasses and eyeglasses that ROKA makes was designed with performance in mind. First of all, they're very lightweight. You don't even really notice that they're on your face. Second of all, even if you get sweaty, they don't slip off. In fact, they were designed to be worn at work or around the house, but also if you're running or biking, so you can move seamlessly between different activities without having to change your sunglasses or eyeglasses. In addition, the lenses are designed with the science of the visual system in mind. I've spent my career working on the science of the visual system, and I can tell you that it's not trivial to build a lens that allows you to see with perfect clarity whether or not you're in bright sunshine and then move into shadows, but the ROKA glasses allow you to do that. You always see things with absolute clarity. Another terrific thing about ROKA eyeglasses and sunglasses is the aesthetic. A lot of so-called performance sunglasses and eyeglasses, they're not really built with the best aesthetic, and they kind of make people look like cyborgs. With ROKA, they have a lot of different styles to choose from, but all those styles are of the sort that you could wear out to dinner or to work or when engaging in physical activity. If you'd like to try ROKA glasses, you can go to ROKA, that's R-O-K-A, .com and enter the code HUBERMAN at checkout, and if you do that, you'll get 20% off your first order. Today's podcast is also brought to us by InsideTracker. InsideTracker is a personalized nutrition platform that analyzes data from your blood and DNA to help you better understand your body and reach your health goals. I'm a big believer in getting regular blood work done, and I've been doing that for a number of years for the simple reason that most, if not all of the factors that impact your immediate and long-term health can only be analyzed in detail with a quality blood test. And now with the advent of modern DNA tests, you can get further insight into what's going on beneath the hood, so to speak. The problem with a lot of blood and DNA tests, however, is you get numbers back, you get the levels back of various things, and you find out if certain things are too high or too low or right on target, but there are no directives about how to move those numbers in the direction that you would want them to go. With InsideTracker, they have a dashboard that makes all of that very easy, and that dashboard takes your numbers and can help direct you towards particular lifestyle factors, nutrition factors, exercise, supplementation, et cetera, that can help you bring those numbers into the ranges that are right for you. If you'd like to try InsideTracker, you can go to insidetracker.com/huberman, and if you do that, you'll get 25% off any of InsideTracker's plans. Just use the code HUBERMAN at checkout. Today's episode is also brought to us by Headspace. Headspace is a meditation app that's backed by 25 published peer-reviewed studies and has over 600,000 five-star reviews. I've been meditating for a very long time. I'm 45 years old now, almost 46, and I started meditating when I was about 15 years old. The problem, however, is keeping up a meditation practice. I've experienced this myself. I've had periods of time where I'm meditating regularly and then periods of time where I just kind of fall off the rails and I'm just not doing it at all. There's now tons of evidence, evidence from neuroscience, evidence from psychology, evidence from areas of biology focused on stress and the immune system, that a meditation practice, when done regularly, is extremely beneficial for mental and physical health and things like focus and creativity.However, you have to do the meditation practice and so if you're not doing it regularly, that's a serious problem. And if you are doing it regularly, great. With Headspace, I find that I can stick to a meditation practice very easily. In fact, that's why I started using it and that's why I continue to use it. I try and get a meditation practice in every day, but sometimes that requires that it be a brief meditation practice. With Headspace they have a huge range of different meditations of different durations, and so that's really helpful in building and maintaining these powerful meditation practices. If you want to try Headspace, you can go to headspace.com/specialoffer, and if you do that you'll get a free one-month trial with Headspace's full library of meditations. This is the best deal offered by Headspace. Basically, you get access to everything they've got completely free for a one-month trial. So if you'd like to try that, go to headspace.com/specialoffer. And now for my discussion with Dr. Anna Lembke. All right. Great to have you here.