Dopamine Addiction

This is a book about a brain that lies to you, written by a man whose brain has lied to him

approximately four hundred thousand times. Most of those lies were delivered through a

small glowing rectangle, and most of them began with the words you have a new

notification.

I want to say a few things up front. I am not a neuroscientist. I am not a psychiatrist. I am a

man who, at thirty-eight, realized he had been holding his phone in the shower for several

years, and decided this might warrant some investigation. The investigation took longer

than I expected. It is still going.

Where I cite scientific research in this book , and I cite a lot of it, because the science here is

genuinely thrilling once you stop being scared of it and I have tried to be careful. Where I

describe my own experience, I have tried to be honest. The two are not always the same

kind of careful.

The protocol at the end of this book, which I call the WANT/LIKE Audit, is something I built

for myself out of the research I read while trying to stop checking Facebook in elevators. It

is not a clinical treatment. It is a way of paying attention. If you are struggling with a

clinical-grade addiction and drugs, alcohol, gambling, anything that is destroying your

relationships or your bank account or your safety : please go see a real doctor. The phone in

your hand can wait. Probably.

Everything in this book about my own life is true, except where I have changed names or

compressed timelines for the sake of not embarrassing my friends, my mother, or my high-

school chemistry teacher. He knows what he did.