Dopamine Expert Warns We Are ‘Entertaining Ourselves to Death'

Eight days into 2026, as millions are trying to tackle their soon-to-be-ignored New Year’s resolutions, Anna Lembke, the chief of the Stanford Addiction Clinic, is offering some guidance. In a new episode of Steven Bartlett’s Diary of a CEO podcast, she discusses how modern addictions form and how people can break those habits.

Bartlett, an entrepreneur, investor, and author, launched the series in 2017 to invite leaders and experts to “teach [him] everything.” He has since amassed a following of roughly 50 million monthly listeners, and his show was just named Spotify’s top business and tech podcast of 2025.

In the nearly two-hour-long episode, Lembke warned that with technology comes a new wave of addiction. While natural rewards like eating and sleeping release dopamine, addictive drugs mimic that process, triggering our brains to release dopamine in levels higher than is natural.

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