My guest for this episode is the mega bestselling author of Dopamine Nation and her name is Dr Anna Lembke. She’s an American psychiatrist and Chief of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic at Stanford University. She is a specialist in the opioid epidemic in the United States. Here we talk about the relationship between anxiety, pleasure and pain. The pleasure pain balance and the way in which we move toward pleasure to solve anxiety and it works short term, but for many of the things we do to – such as picking up our phone to scroll – we only create more anxiety longterm. we talk about medication, addiction – and not just addiction to drugs or alcohol. We talk about our intolerance of boredom, the importance of what she calls ‘pro social shame’ and her go-to self binding strategies.