SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Welcome to the Husband Material podcast, where we help Christian men outgrow porn. Why? So you can change your brain, heal your heart, and save your relationship. My name is Drew Boa, and I'm here to show you how. Let's go. Thank you for listening to my interview with Anna Lemke. Wow. She gives us so much wisdom about how addiction works and what it looks like to break free through resetting your brain's dopamine levels. She makes neuroscience and research really easy to understand. Her book, Dopamine Nation, is fantastic. It also has a companion, the Dopamine Nation workbook. And I would highly recommend both. I think Anna's voice is prophetic, frankly, for our culture, for our time, where we have 24-7 access to drugified digital devices that she calls masturbation machines. And she's also incredibly vulnerable in sharing her own personal story of becoming addicted to erotic novels. I think you guys are going to resonate with her and learn a lot. Enjoy the episode. Welcome to Hudson Material. I have been looking forward to this conversation literally for years, hoping that I would get the chance to interview Anna Lemke. She is the author of Dopamine Nation and the Dopamine Nation workbook. And it's all about finding balance in an age of indulgence, which is so important for us, for everyone, but especially for anyone who wants freedom from porn. So welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_01: 1:42

Thank you for having me. I love the title of your podcast, by the way. I think it's great.

SPEAKER_00: 1:46

When I read your book, I was really moved that you decided to be vulnerable and share some of your personal story as it relates to addiction. What did that look like for you?

SPEAKER_01: 1:57

Well, thank you for saying that. It was hard to share, but a couple things tipped me over. First of all, I felt like I couldn't reasonably ask my par my patients to share their stories, you know, to let me share their stories in the book and not also be willing to share mine. And also I have learned over the years, again, mostly from my patients, that when we share a part of ourselves and make ourselves vulnerable, like we think that people are going to be grossed out, but you know, in fact, the opposite happens and it really draws people in. We see our own humanity, our own brokenness. So I know, I know how healing that can be, having been on the receiving end of other people sharing with me in a professional context, but also outside of that context. So yeah, that that's why I decided to do it.

SPEAKER_00: 2:48

For anyone who hasn't read your book, what is your personal story?

SPEAKER_01: 2:53

Okay. So let's go back about 15 years now. I had just weaned my fourth child, and I wasn't going to have any more children. Uh, that was something that my uh husband made clear. And I kind of experienced a sort of a grief reaction, you know, to sort of that being the end of my fertility, so to speak. And in that context, I think I was trying to fill a sort of an emptiness. I've always been a reader. That's always been, you know, my refuge. And someone recommended that I read uh the Twilight saga or series. And so I was like, okay, you know, sure, I'll give that a try. And I read it and it just transported me in a way that I it's hard for me to describe, but it just it just scratched an itch that was just super powerful. So I read the whole four-book series and I read it again and read again. And then I kind of thought, huh, I wonder if there are any more vampire romance novels out there. Turns out there's a whole lot. So I started reading them more and more. I got a Kindle. That basically turned me into a chain reader. I started staying up later and later reading. I started lying about what I was reading, you know, which the Kindle made possible because of the anonymity there. And then I started, you know, reading in kind of really, frankly, inappropriate places and times. Like we went on a family vacation and instead of going to the beach, I just stayed back and read. We went to a neighborhood paella, like an outdoor cookout. And I I literally brought a book and found a room in their house. And instead of attending the party, I read romance novels. And then sort of the, you know, the kind of clincher was I got to a point where that's all I wanted to do. I didn't really want to be in the real world. I just wanted to be in my romance novels. I started taking romance novels to work and reading in the 10 minutes between patients, and you know, instead of charting or thinking, you know, reflecting on the patient and how I might better help them. I also started reading, you know, more and more sort of frank erotica, like the sort of vanilla toast stuff that had worked for me before wasn't working. I, you know, I ended up in a whole genre of like satomasochistic stuff that I had never been interested in, but now somehow I needed that level of stimulation. And I got more and more kind of anxious and depressed without really linking the two things. So that's kind of what happened to me. I I wouldn't want to trivialize like a severe life-threatening addiction by comparing it to my little journey, but I share it because I just want to highlight that even things that we typically think of as healthy, like reading, have essentially become drugified. And also, I just think it's important, you know, that I, as like a physician and a healthcare provider and a psychiatrist who treats addiction, that even with all that knowledge about addiction, that I could still develop this, you know, mild addiction, I think is noteworthy.

SPEAKER_00: 5:57

So many of our listeners can relate to what you shared with porn. And porn has become that thing for them where consumption and overconsumption leads to unhappiness and anhedonia. I had never heard the word anhedonia. What does that mean?

SPEAKER_01: 6:17

Yeah, so anhedonia is the essentially the inability to take pleasure in anything at all. It's akin to depression, but it's it's a kind of a more extreme version of depression, where instead of there just being sort of low interest or low mood, there's absolute absence of pleasure, including in things that have historically made us feel a spark of joy. So things like, you know, let's say a mother no longer being able to take joy in her children, whereas, you know, her children were previously her pride and joy, or or anything kind of along those lines.

SPEAKER_00: 6:52

I can really resonate with that, especially with all of the digital drugs that we are immersed in every day. Why do you think that the digital drugs and our masturbation machines, as you call them, are so powerful for us?

SPEAKER_01: 7:11

They offer the illusion of human connection when the opposite is happening, when we are in fact becoming more and more isolated. You know, our brains invented digital media and social media. So they're an incredibly cognitively adherent, potent reinforcer. It's like our brains turned inside out on the world. You know, something like alcohol or cannabis is something that occurs in nature and mimics something that our brain makes. But digital media, you know, especially videos, you know, moving, moving images, is really like our brain turned inside out. There's no startup period for that to be reinforcing, that's instantly reinforcing, because of course we evolved to, you know, observe the world, to try to make sense of it through our sensory experience, and then have that inform actions that are important for our survival. So digital media and social media essentially hijacks that evolutionary machinery for motivation and reward and confuses our brains into thinking that we're engaging in something that's important for survival, you know, meaningful to our lives, when in fact it's actually the opposite. We are engaging in an activity that pulls us further and further from other people, from the things that we need to be doing, from our values, and so on.

SPEAKER_00: 8:31

What do you notice about porn specifically serving that purpose?

SPEAKER_01: 8:36

Well, what's so interesting to me about working with um sex and pornography addicted people over many years now is like how it's not even really about sex. It's just so much more about self-soothing, numbing, uncomfortable feelings, avoidant coping. And it turns out to be an incredibly powerful vehicle for doing that because we're doing it with our own bodies, right? Like as one of my patients said, you know, the his bar is in the brain, right? The combination of self-stimulation, you know, auto-stimulation of our bodies and fantasy augmented by these potent visual images, it's just very powerful, very convenient, you know, leading to that flood of neurotransmitters, which is sort of this wonderful soup of not, you know, not just like like a stimulant or an opioid, but all of it, like, you know, the sort of this symphony of neuromodulators and hormones and neurotransmitters that just is super reinforcing, especially for certain individuals. And, you know, remember, we're social creatures. Like we are wired to connect. It's deeply embedded within our DNA. It's what keeps us alive, allowing us to protect ourselves from enemies, steward scarce resources, find mates. And, you know, pornography and sex addiction more broadly is really uh hijacking that specific pursuit and turning it into something that that harms us rather than helps us.

SPEAKER_00: 10:12

And as you talked about meeting survival needs, I'm thinking about sex as a as a survival of the species.

SPEAKER_01: 10:20

Absolutely. Our libido is key for you know keeping us alive. And yet, you know, the the paradox again is that the more we spend auto-stimulating with pornography, and I consider you know romance novels, erotica to be a socially sanctioned form of uh pornography for women, primarily for women, but not exclusively. You know, the more that we use that vehicle or that medium to meet our sexual, emotional, psychological needs, the less we turn to the people in our lives to meet that, those needs, and the more we erode those relationships, including our sexual relationships. So typically people like myself, you know, who who engage in autoerotic stimulation and pornography, they don't want sex with their partners, right? Because the kind of controlled microtitration of their own bodies that they can get with pornography is just seems better, right? When we're in our addiction. It isn't obviously better in the long run, but it's because we can control it and auto-titrate it that that it's so appealing.

SPEAKER_00: 11:30

Yeah. Especially in a season of grief or emptiness, you know, or or where needs that used to be met are all of a sudden really overwhelming, or we're just alone.

SPEAKER_01: 11:46

Yeah, yeah, so true. And thanks for kind of bringing it back to where I started. Because I I actually didn't make that connection between kind of the grief of a no more childbearing for me until a much later when I was sort of thought, like, why then? Because I'd always, you know, there the the novels had always existed out there, but I didn't really discover them until, yeah, a time of grief and longing and some stress between me and my husband, you know, around my like kind of wanting more children and him saying, no, really, four is enough, which is perfectly reasonable. You know, four really is good. Four is fine. Yeah, right. And he's a great husband and a great father, and he's really my better half. I've learned to listen to him. But still, there was sort of this absence and a longing, and you know, whether it's that comes at at a time of a breakup from a relationship or actual mourning the death or loss of a loved one. It's the self-soothing piece, you know, that draws us in, but it's so isolating, you know, if we overdo it.

SPEAKER_00: 12:47

Yeah. You've also mentioned how we can become addicted to pain. And I wonder if that might be part of it for some porn users.

SPEAKER_01: 12:59

Interesting. So typically with intoxicants like pornography, you know, the reason that they're reinforcing is because they release a lot of dopamine all at once in the reward pathway. You get a spike of dopamine, which, you know, combined with other chemicals, you know, leads to pleasure, euphoria, or at least a release of depression, anxiety, andhedonia, what have you. But what's key to note is that over time the brain adapts to that increased dopamine release and actually downregulates dopamine transmission so that we're getting less and less dopamine with ongoing exposure. And eventually we can end up in this chronic dopamine deficit state where we don't get any pleasure at all from our drug of choice, but we still feel compelled to repeat the behavior just to feel normal and bring our mood back to baseline. And it's that's sometimes referred to as dysphoria-driven relapse. But I think that's really important to understand that what initially actually is effective, you know, in relieving psychological and or physical pain ultimately isn't effective, stops working, and then can turn on us and do the opposite and and make that pain worse. And that that's then like a grief reaction around that, right? Like, hey, my drug's not even working anymore, right? But now I can't even stop it.

SPEAKER_00: 14:25

It's so heartbreaking.

SPEAKER_01: 14:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 14:27

You have not only described these problems, but also charted a path out. And I think it's probably the longest acronym I've ever seen. Not very useful at the end of the day. Dopamine. D-O-P-A-M-I-N-E.

SPEAKER_01: 14:46

That's it.

SPEAKER_00: 14:47

I don't know if we can go through all of those, but one that stood out to me was abstinence.

SPEAKER_01: 14:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 14:53

And when I was growing up, abstinence education was all about cutting off any kind of sexual activity to avoid either like the wrath of God or a sexually transmitted disease or something. So I think that word abstinence kind of has a negative connotation for some of us, maybe who grew up in purity culture, but the way you frame it is a dopamine fast of like counterintuitively removing things that are pleasurable, things that are stimulating, things that we've depended on and taking the leap of faith to jump off of this thing I've been I've been using to regulate myself and and to go without it for like a month or a couple months. Am I getting that right?

SPEAKER_01: 15:44

Yeah, absolutely. So I think I'm reading between the lines, I'm getting what piece about this was helpful to you. Typically, when we think about denying ourselves something that we think of as pleasurable, or you know, abstaining from something that we think as helpful or pleasurable, it feels like we're removing something positive and kind of punishing ourselves. But what I try to communicate is the reframe that we're actually doing something really positive for ourselves. Because when we get in the addiction vortex, those addictive behaviors and the changes that they manifest, you know, in our brains actually is what is making us anhedonic, you know, unable to experience pleasure, not only in the addictive behavior, but in anything at all. Whereas if we can abstain for long enough for our brains to get the message that we're no longer getting this fire hose of dopamine from this exogenous substance or behavior, our brains will go, oh, okay, I need to start and make more dopamine. I need to upregulate my postsynaptic dopamine receptors. I need to get things going again in my brain's dopamine factory so that, you know, we can get back to baseline because we always have kind of a baseline level of dopamine firing. And so I think that reframe is critical because our whole culture is infused with this notion that if I'm not comfortable 24-7 and not like if I'm not euphoric, basically something's wrong with my life or my job or my spouse or my brain, I'm ill. But in fact, we were wired for suffering. We are wired for friction. And, you know, a certain degree of friction is good for us. And if we overdo the pleasure stuff, which is really easy to do now in our drug-ified world, our brains actually are don't know what to do with all of that and end up in this dopamine deficit state, which is really akin to a clinical depression. So by abstaining for four weeks, which is the average amount of time it takes for people to start to feel better, what we're doing is something really positive for ourselves, because you know, it'll improve our mood, our anxiety, our sleep. We'll get outs outside of that vortex of craving, we'll be able to get our frontal lobes online and see true cause and effect and all those good things. Now, not everybody feels better after a month of abstinence, but I am amazed by how many patients, no matter the chronicity, severity, or type of drug that they're using, with a month of abstinence from their addictive behaviors, really do note marked improvement in social, emotional, and psychological well-being. You know, that's what compelled me to write the book because it's it's just remarkable. I do not get that kind of signal with any antidepressant or mood stabilizer or anxiolytic that I prescribe. Even psychotherapy doesn't work that well that quickly, but a month of abstinence, it's it's really impressive how people kind of come out of you know serious doldrums and feel better.

SPEAKER_00: 18:46

This is about getting my life back. Not about giving up what I love.

SPEAKER_01: 18:53

Exactly.

SPEAKER_00: 18:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 18:54

Exactly. Now, a a huge warning that you know has to come with an experiment of fasting or abstinence is that we will feel worse before we feel better. And if people don't know that going into it, they're not gonna make it because they're gonna think, well, I can't live like this. This is worse than I felt before. But the reason is because we're in that dopamine deficit state. We take away our drug of choice. It takes a while for our brain to realize that it needs to start upregulating dopamine transmission. Um, it doesn't happen right away. And in the meantime, our brain is like gonna make us feel miserable to get us to reach for more of our drug. But if we can make it to about 14 days, really, people definitely, the majority of people note, okay, I'm actually, I feel like I'm feeling a little bit better. I'm not constantly craving. The craving actually gets better, you know, stuff like that. And when I gave up romance novels, I was just amazed at the extent of the withdrawal that I experienced. Because I I didn't really think, I thought, well, I'll give it up, but I really didn't think I was addicted or, you know, had any kind of physiologic dependency. I was at the time at exactly because our brains are kind of like little alarm clocks when it comes to our drug of choice. We're fine until we get to that moment when we would normally use. And then it's like ding ding ding ding, you need to use right now. And when I got to the evening, you know, kind of going to bed, sleep time, and like I didn't read a remote cell. I mean, my brain was just going nuts. And I was up, you know, in the first two weeks, I was up really late, terrible restlessness, insomnia. I was, I was impressed at how hard it was.

SPEAKER_00: 20:26

I can relate to that. This is an intense experience, and our brain is trying to reset that balance.

SPEAKER_01: 20:35

Exactly.

SPEAKER_00: 20:36

I'm imagining that some listeners might be thinking, well, I've been trying to give up porn for that long. It's just not working. And I would be really curious to hear your thoughts on the strategy of getting a special device like a dumb phone instead of a smartphone, in order to try to create that space between porn and normal everyday life.

SPEAKER_01: 21:02

Yeah. So that's what I call a self-binding strategy. And self-binding is super important. Way too many people try to, number one, go it alone. And number two, rely on willpower alone. And the truth of the matter is that willpower is not an infinite resource. We wake up in the morning with more willpower than we'll have in the rest of the day. But by the end of the day, if we're tired and stressed and having to like constantly resist our cravings, that willpower runs out. And as soon as it does, we're using again. So what we need to do is create both literal and metacognitive barriers between ourselves and our drug of choice so that we can press the pause button between desire and consumption. Self-binding strategies come in many different forms. There's physical self-binding where we actually create a physical space between ourselves and our drug, like deleting the apps, right? Or getting a dumb phone where we can't have 24-7 mobile access to the internet, or getting rid of, you know, the phone entirely and relying more on, you know, I don't know, our our laptops and, you know, all kinds of ways we can do that. I even had a patient who actually locked up all his devices in a in like a bank vault, so he couldn't access them for a month. That that's what he had to do. Now, for most folks, it's not that extreme. And we can combine it with other self-binding strategies. You know, another really important self-binding strategies is what I call meaning, which is basically thinking about our values and goals and trying to live in accordance with those. And so every time we think about our behaviors, is this in accordance with my values and goals? Not in a punitive, shaming, self-judging way, but in a compassionate, self-forgiving, forward-looking way. You know, how do I want to live my life? Other people are a huge source of self-binding. We we massively co-regulate with other people. We can, you know, use those relationships in a positive way to help us not use our drug of choice. So I've seen a lot of folks with pornography actually give a loved one an ability to monitor, you know, what they're doing. I forget the name of the various apps, but you know, in the right kind of relationship where both voluntarily and willingly engage in that kind of monitoring, that can be super helpful. Or really 12-step groups and other mutual help groups like sex and pornography addicts anonymous, sex a holics anonymous, sex addicts anonymous. There are a lot of different flavors, but those can be transformational, those groups, because then we're not doing it alone. We're, you know, we're co-regulating with other people. And then finally, we do have medications. Now, there is no FDA-approved medication specifically for sex and pornography addiction, but sometimes we use the SSRIs, which are antidepressants that have as a side effect, they decrease libido. That can be very helpful for folks with sex and pornography addiction. Sometimes we use naltrexone, which is an opioid receptor blocker, FDA approved for alcohol addiction and opioid addiction, but I've seen it be very helpful in some individuals with sex and pornography addiction. There are even studies looking at the GLP1s like Ozempic to help people with sex and pornography addiction. Ozempic works, most likely works by decreasing the amount of dopamine that's released in the nucleus accumbens, the reward pathway in response to appetitive foods. So, you know, who knows? It may do something similar in in other contexts, and it's being actively studied in those contexts. You know, lots of different ideas. But the main thing is to not try to just go it alone, but to reach out, get help, get together with other people struggling with the same thing. Your podcast is, you know, a great, a great example of sort of people helping other people with the same problem.

SPEAKER_00: 24:39

Yeah. And in our community, I see men connecting with each other almost every day through what you call pro-social shame.

SPEAKER_01: 24:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 24:51

What is pro-social shame?

SPEAKER_01: 24:53

Okay, so shame is, you know, a gut punch of an emotion where we realize that we have transgressed social norms, often accompanied by the fear of abandonment, which is terrifying. The idea that we would be shunned, kicked out of the tribe, you know, left alone to die, whether metaphorically or or literally. So shame is probably one of the oldest emotions. And it's fundamentally a pro-social emotion, meaning that we need to feel shame in order to be able to live together in communities and to make a civilization. If we didn't feel shame for transgressing, you know, group norms, it would never work, right? And though those norms, you know, will change to some extent across cultures and time periods. But, you know, really, in essence, they're sort of like the same big picture group norms, like let's be kind, let's not cheat, lie, steal, you know, let's not kill each other. So shame's important. It has to be there. But what can happen in addiction is that we're so overwhelmed by our shame, and it becomes such a tolerable emotion in and of itself that it actually perpetuates and drives the addiction. And then we're dealing with destructive shame, toxic shame, malignant shame, where it's actually perpetuating the problem. And that's not good. So we've got to get out of that loop of toxic shame and into the loop of prosocial shame. And one of the main ways to do that is actually to open up to another human being and tell the truth. But it's got to be somebody who we trust and who we know understands and who gives us like a to-do list for how to not do that behavior anymore. So it can't just be like, I'm gonna tell you about this and then I move on and keep doing it. It's really connected to this idea that I'm gonna tell you this. That's gonna welcome me into this group, which is defined by forgiving this behavior and providing a pathway for recovery. And that's essentially what you know, mutual recovery, mutual help is the 12 steps of sexualics anonymous is it's a roadmap for post-shame recovery.

SPEAKER_00: 27:07

Yeah. I find that if I'm feeling shame about something, big or small, if I share it with a friend or a safe group and I'm radically honest, it creates deeper connection.

SPEAKER_01: 27:22

Totally.

SPEAKER_00: 27:23

Those are the closest friendships I have.

SPEAKER_01: 27:25

Absolutely. Those are our real safe spaces, right? Where we know we're loved, you know, warts and all, warts and all so important. And the other really interesting thing that I learned from my own many patients, my own experience, that we really hide hide from our shame. We're ashamed of our shame. So we it doesn't always manifest as shame. And what I learned from one patient uh in particular was that shame can often masquerade as resentment, which I think is so interesting. You know, that we can end up like being angry and resentful at people who we associate with our shame instead of just really tapping into our shame.

SPEAKER_00: 28:05

I can see that happening in a couple relationship quite easily.

SPEAKER_01: 28:11

Yeah, for sure.

SPEAKER_00: 28:12

So I hear you saying that shame is not necessarily bad. What matters is what we do with it, and hopefully we use it to be radically honest and connect.

SPEAKER_01: 28:23

Yeah, I mean, shame feels bad, like it feels horrible, but it's important information. We can't ignore our shame. When we when we feel shame, we need to say, oh, okay, what you know, what's happening, what's going on there? And instead of you know engaging in avoidant coping by doing our behaviors and running away from it, we have to really enter into it.

SPEAKER_00: 28:45

So if I avoid shame, it's probably gonna drive me back to addiction somehow.

SPEAKER_01: 28:48

Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_00: 28:50

You've worked with so many patients and helped so many people. What's one of your favorite stories that reminds you why you do this work?

SPEAKER_01: 28:59

Gosh, there are so many. I guess one that comes to mind right now is a Stanford student who uh was struggling with an alcohol use disorder, who got into recovery from her alcohol use disorder and engaged in, you know, the recovery community at Stanford and just really embraced recovery and herself ended, ended up helping so many people. And it was just a joy to see that. And she just like lived in this state of gratitude, which I had really admired. She was just so grateful for her own recovery, so so humbled by it, such as such a good person. But what was the one of the most memorable and interesting things was that when it came time for her to you know leave Stanford and move on, she and I had our last appointment together. And as usual, she expressed a ton of gratitude. And I was like, I'm just witness to your journey, you know. But she was so sweet. She said, You know, you helped me so much. And then she said to me, and one thing I never told you, but which I you know learned. About from your book or realized from your book was that I actually had a pornography, have had a pornography addiction that started when she was very young, like five or six years old. She was living in a house with a bunch of older siblings. So there was early exposure. And it was just a moment for me because I thought, wow, I've been treating this person for four years, and we've talked about a lot of things. And yet it wasn't until you know her the term termination visit that she finally was able to talk about her pornography addiction, which just speaks to how shameful it can be for people, even people dealing with other types of addictions. Somehow bringing up that pornography addiction just like is just so hard. And I I get it.

unknown: 30:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 30:51

For me, one of the most powerful concepts you teach, and one of the hardest ones for me to communicate is the idea of the pleasure-pain balance, like a seesaw.

SPEAKER_01: 31:06

Can you explain how that works? Sure. So this is a metaphor for kind of how we process pleasure and fit and pain. It's informed by the neuroscience, but also by the clinical science and clinical observation. And basically, it comes from science showing that pain and pleasure are co-located in the brain, right? So imagine that in your reward pathway, there's something like a teeter-totter in a kid's playground. When we experience pleasure, it tips to one side, pain, it tips to the other. And that's obviously an oversimplification because we can experience pleasure and pain at the same time, like when we're eating spicy food. But in general, pleasure and pain do work through this what's called an opponent process mechanism. And to understand what happens in addiction, you have to understand that there are certain rules governing this pleasure and pain balance. And the first and most important one is that the balance wants to remain level, or what scientists call homeostasis. So what is homeostasis? Homeostasis is a discrete number of states that an organism must remain within in order to maintain survival. Temperature is a great example. Like we can get hotter and we can get colder, but if we get too cold for too long or too hot for too long, we're gonna die. And the same thing is true with our pleasure-pain processing, right? So we can experience pleasure, but too much pleasure stretches our brains too far, too much pain stretches our brains too far. So one of the rules, again, the main rule governing this balance is that we, with any deviation from neutrality, our brains are going to work very hard to return back to a level balance, back to homeostasis. And the way that our brains do that is by tilting an equal and opposite amount to whatever the initial stimulus is. So when we do something pleasurable, that releases dopamine in the reward pathway, tilts our brain to the side of pleasure, but then the brain adapts by downregulating dopamine transmission. I imagine that as these gremlins hopping on the pain side of the balance to bring them level again. But the gremlins don't get off as soon as the balance is level. They stay on until we're tilted and equal and opposite amount to the side of pain. That is the hangover, the calm down, or just that moment of craving, you know, wanting to do it one more time, even though we told ourselves this would be the end. Now, if we wait long enough without repeating that behavior, those gremlins hop off and homeostasis is restored and the craving goes away. But with repeated exposure to our drug of choice over days to weeks to months to years, what happens is that dopamine spike gets less and less. That deflection to the pleasure side gets weaker and shorter in duration, but the gremlins multiply until we have so many gremlins on the pain side of the balance that they fill this whole room. Now we've entered into addicted brain. We've changed our joy set point, right? And now we need to do our behavior not to like get relief from anxiety or to feel pleasure, but just to level the balance and feel normal. And that is the state that we're in, you know, when we're in an addiction.

SPEAKER_00: 34:21

That was mind-blowing for me. That it's not primarily about trying to be happy, but trying to get back to homeostasis.

SPEAKER_01: 34:28

Right, exactly.

SPEAKER_00: 34:30

I wonder if that's one of the reasons why having a great day can be such a trigger.

SPEAKER_01: 34:35

Ah, love it. We typically think of people relapsing when they're under a lot of stress, but that's not true for everybody. For some people, stress is actually a way to keep them on the straight and narrow. It's like, okay, you know, I'm in survival mode. I can't use it, I gotta be on it. You know, they're like adrenalized, and the adrenaline actually helps them engage in healthier behaviors. And that's really interesting because those are the very same people that when things are going well in their life, that's when they're vulnerable to relapse. Because it's like, oh, everything is going well, you know, I can relax, I can let my guard down, you know, let's let's lower the bridge over the moat, it's all good. And that's when they're, you know, they're vulnerable to relapse. So we really have to figure out like which of those categories we're in. And I know for me, I'm a like, okay, when there's stress, I am less likely to engage in my addictive behaviors. But when things are going well and I kind of relax, that's when I'm really vulnerable.

SPEAKER_00: 35:37

Yeah, I resonate with that too, and so many others do. In order to really understand our own addiction system and to make progress toward freedom, I would highly recommend not just the book Dopamine Nation, but also the workbook. It's really well done.

SPEAKER_01: 35:55

Thank you.

SPEAKER_00: 35:56

If you all would like to get a copy of the book andor the workbook, go down to the links in the show notes. You can also find Dr. Lumke's website to connect with her. Anna, what is your favorite thing about freedom?

SPEAKER_01: 36:10

I think freedom gives us the ability to choose well. It's not just that we have the freedom to choose, it's that we have the freedom to choose well.

SPEAKER_00: 36:21

In other words, it's not just freedom from something, it's freedom for something.

SPEAKER_01: 36:27

Yeah. And it's freedom for the kinds of values that we know, you know, at the bottom of our hearts are consistent with a flourishing life and with the, you know, the improvement, not just of ourselves, but of of like humankind more broadly. Awesome.

SPEAKER_00: 36:47

Well, thank you so much for being with us and for being part of making our world more like that.

SPEAKER_01: 36:54

Thank you.

SPEAKER_00: 36:56

So, for anyone who's listening, thank you so much, even just for taking the risk to engage with this. And I hope you have people who can witness you on your journey. That's a big part of why Husband Material exists. And always remember you are God's beloved son, and you, he is well pleased.