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Dr. Anna Lembke: Understanding & Treating Addiction (Huberman Lab #33)

Aug 2021 🇺🇸 Huberman Lab

In this August 2021 episode of the Huberman Lab podcast, Stanford neuroscientist Andrew Huberman interviews addiction psychiatrist Anna Lembke about the neuroscience of addiction and how it applies to everyday behaviors. Lembke explains a shared pleasure-pain framework in the brain and argues that social media platforms are engineered — through variable rewards, infinite scroll, and metrics like likes — to trigger a reward-seeking response associated with substance use. The conversation extends this framing to video games, pornography, and online shopping as behaviors that can follow addiction-like patterns of tolerance and craving. Lembke also discusses practical strategies, such as periods of abstinence, for resetting an overstimulated reward system. TechKids Foundation cites this long-form conversation as an accessible explanation of the addiction-medicine model researchers and clinicians apply to compulsive technology use.

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CITATION

Huberman, Andrew, host. "Dr. Anna Lembke: Understanding & Treating Addiction." Huberman Lab, episode 33, 16 Aug. 2021.

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