Professor of psychiatry and addiction medicine Anna Lembke writes about how an imbalance between pain and pleasure leads to addiction and what helps to overcome it. We are the generation of “conductors”. In these fast-paced times, we are constantly bombarded with high-dopamine, high-impact stimuli. From texting to social media, from food to drugs, from gambling to shopping, we have become addicted to fleeting and distracting pleasures that make us sick. Today, in developed countries, scarcity has given way to abundance and satiation. They are full of food, shopping, sex, all kinds of medicines, there is Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and other virtual joys, which are becoming more and more numerous. The smartphone is becoming another type of addiction, and a completely legal one at that. The emergence of addiction is associated with the release of dopamine; it is in this hormone that addictive potential is measured. The more dopamine a person receives during some pleasant experience, the more likely addiction is to occur. The book radically changes our understanding of mental illness, pleasure, pain, reward and stress.