During the past four weeks, how often have you had bodily aches or pains? Never; seldom; sometimes; often; or very often?”—they found that Americans reported more pain than any other country.

Dopamine consumption is not just a way to fill the hours not spent working. It has also become a reason why people are not participating in the workforce.

Researchers interviewed nearly 150,000 people in twenty-six countries to determine the prevalence of generalized anxiety disorder, defined as excessive and uncontrollable worry that adversely affected their life. They found that richer countries had higher rates of anxiety than poor ones. The authors wrote, “The disorder is significantly more

Global deaths from addiction have risen in all age groups between 1990 and 2017, with more than half the deaths occurring in people younger than fifty years of age.

Our dopamine economy, or what historian David Courtwright has called “limbic capitalism,” is driving this change, aided by transformational technology that has increased not just access but also drug numbers, variety, and potency.

It turns out that willpower is not an infinite human resource. It’s more like exercising a muscle, and it can get tired the more we use it.

But I worry that we have both oversanitized and overpathologized childhood, raising our children in the equivalent of a padded cell, with no way to injure themselves but also no means to ready themselves for the world.

Dopamine The main functional cells of the brain are called neurons. They communicate with each other at synapses via electrical signals and neurotransmitters. Neurotransmitters are like baseballs. The pitcher is the presynaptic neuron. The catcher is the postsynaptic neuron. The space between pitcher and catcher is the synaptic cleft. Just as the

The paradox is that hedonism, the pursuit of pleasure for its own sake, leads to anhedonia, which is the inability to enjoy pleasure of any kind.