Constant craving: how digital media turned us all into dopamine addicts

Global depression rates have been climbing significantly in the past 30 years and, according to a World Happiness Report, people in high-income countries have become more unhappy over the past decade or so. We’ve forgotten how to be alone with our thoughts. We’re forever “interrupting ourselves”, as Lembke puts it, for a quick digital hit, meaning we rarely concentrate on taxing tasks for long or get into a creative flow.

She wrote Dopamine Nation because she believes her recovering patients – whether 60-something Jacob who built a masturbation machine to satiate his sex habit; teenaged Delilah, who couldn’t get out of bed unless she was high on cannabis; or Chi, who bought thousands of cheap consumer goods online just to experience the thrill of opening the package – have “acquired a wisdom we all could benefit from"

Rather than giving us pleasure itself, as is commonly thought, dopamine motivates us to do things we think will bring pleasure. As the brain’s major reward and pleasure neurotransmitter, it’s what drives us to seek pizza when we’re hungry and sex when we’re aroused. Scientists use dopamine to measure “the addictive potential of any experience,” writes Lembke. The higher the dopamine release, the more addictive the thing.