Author of Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence
Chief of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic

I'm an addiction psychiatrist. When I use the word addiction, I'm really talking about having crossed the line from basically healthy use with an occasional slip to somebody who's really caught in the vortex of compulsive overconsumption with consequences and typically needing help from others. It's one of the main points of my book Dopamine Nation that we are living in this addictogenic world where almost all human behaviors and substances have become drugified in one way, right? Social media has drugified human connection. Our food has been drugified by the addition of salt, fat, sugar. Reading is drugified, the way that these genre novels fill this sort of gaping hole of compulsive consumption among their readership, people always wanting more. The Netflix binges, where you get the next episode automatically fills unless you do something to stop it. You know, these are all little ways in which our lives have been engineered to keep us clicking and swiping and eating and smoking and drinking to the detriment of the globe. I mean, 70% of global deaths are due to diseases caused by modifiable risk factors, and the top three are smoking, inactivity, and overeating or diet. So we're literally titillating ourselves to death.