![]() ![]() “I just wanted my fix, and these books, written according to a formula, were designed to hook me….” She writes. Soon Lembke’s habits were interfering with sleep and paying attention to her husband and children. At some point, tame love stories no longer satisfied, so I searched out increasingly graphic and erotic renditions of the classic boy-meets-girl fantasy. When I finished Twilight, I ripped through every vampire romance I could get my hands on, and then moved on to werewolves, fairies, witches, necromancers, time travelers, soothsayers, mind readers, fire wielders, fortune-tellers, gem workers…. The problem began innocently enough with her reading the Twilight novels, a popular series about vampire romance. She introduces a story of her own addiction-to erotic novels. ![]() Lembke treats patients with the sorts of addiction and levels of addiction that might seem foreign to the typical reader, she suggests that our on-demand culture makes us all susceptible to these problems. The answer, it seems, is that we have more access to pleasure than ever before. Lembke, the medical director of Stanford Addiction Medicine, asks: “Why, in a time of unprecedented wealth, freedom, technological progress, and medical advancement do we appear to be unhappier and in more pain than ever?” Depression, too, is up significantly with the highest increases in new cases seen in North America. As Dr. Anna Lembke reports in her new book, Dopamine Nation, more than a third of Americans said they felt pain often or very often compared to 19% of people in China, 18% of people in Japan, 13% of people in Switzerland and 11% of people in South Africa. Why are Americans in such pain? When researchers asked people in 30 countries: “During the past four weeks, how often have you had bodily aches and pains?” Americans seemed to top the charts. ![]()
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