#1708 - Anna Lembke

Anna Lembke (0:04)

The Joe Rogan Experience.

Joe Rogan (0:14)

Thanks for doing this, appreciate it.

Anna Lembke (0:15)

I'm happy to be here.

Joe Rogan (0:16)

I'm very excited to talk to you about this. This is a very interesting subject. I have had problems with addiction my whole life.

Particularly, like, I had a really bad video game addiction at one point in time, and I had to quit cold turkey. It was like an eight-hour-a-day addiction.

Anna Lembke (0:33)

And when was that?

Joe Rogan (0:35)

Twenty years ago, somewhere around then. A little more than twenty years ago.

Anna Lembke (0:41)

So you were in your thirties?

Joe Rogan (0:42)

Yeah.

Anna Lembke (0:43)

And how did you realize that you were addicted?

Joe Rogan (0:47)

Oh, I knew.

Anna Lembke (0:50)

You knew from the very beginning?

Joe Rogan (0:51)

Well, it was very fun. I was playing this online video game called Quake. And what it is, is you play online and, you know, you are in this 3D environment. And you hear like sounds in 3D and the graphics are amazing and you're running around shooting at people and they're shooting at you and it's really exciting. It's very thrilling, but it's not real life.

And it'll eat your whole life away.

Anna Lembke (1:18)

Yeah.

So I'm curious, how did you, I mean, did you know from the very beginning that you were addicted or was there a... So at what point, like how long into it did you say, gee, this is a problem, I should change this behavior?

Joe Rogan (1:32)

Well, when I would go to bed in the morning, because I would come home from like a comedy show and I would literally play all night long.

And then I would realize it was like 8 o'clock in the morning and the sun was up and I was just going to bed. I was like, this is terrible for you. Like, what am I doing? I'm like basically working a night shift.

And I was also realizing that I was tired a lot because I was just like really wrecking my system by doing that, by staying. And also, the game is so exciting, you're like, you know, you're redlining. And then you get out of there and you're like, you feel cracked out.

Anna Lembke (2:15)

Yeah.

So usually, you know, as we become addicted to something, we don't see it until there's some sort of threshold where maybe we have a bad consequence or someone else makes a comment or just something happens so that we start to look at our behavior in a different way. So I guess I'm wondering with your video game addiction, what was it for you? Like sort of do you remember what the tipping point was where you said, I have to stop doing this?

Joe Rogan (2:41)

Well, I do a lot of self auditing. I think I was pretty aware that I was screwing up. I wasn't focusing enough on my career, like my stand up. I wasn't focusing enough on other aspects of my life.

I was just way too into it.

And I was realizing also the reward, I have a problem, I'm an obsessive person. Like I get into things, the things that I like, I just think about them all the time. It's not balanced. Because I have this obsession with getting really good, like whatever I get into. It becomes like too much of my life.

I was watching this documentary recently about my late friend Anthony Bourdain. And in the documentary, they were talking about how he used to be addicted to heroin. And then later on, it actually became a healthy thing, became jujitsu. But it was like this addiction where he talked about it constantly. And all the people that were working with him were laughing about how like he never stopped talking about it. He was just addicted to it. And so he was getting good at it. He was healthy, his body was getting very healthy.

But it was the same sort of function in the mind. That's what I want to talk to you about. What is that?

Anna Lembke (4:10)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

So I mean, it's a great question. It's something that people used to call the addictive personality. We don't really call it that anymore. We just use the idea of the disease model.

So we say that somebody has the disease of addiction.

It's a chronic relapsing and remitting problem. People come to it with different degrees of vulnerability.

And the risk for it can essentially be summarized as nature, nurture, and neighborhood.

And just to briefly describe that, if you have a biological parent or grandparent with addiction, you are at increased risk compared to the general population of getting addicted yourself. If you have a co-occurring mental illness, you are at increased risk of getting addicted. If you have certain character traits, like you're more impulsive, you have a hard time putting a break between the idea to do something and actually doing it, or you're at increased risk for addiction. So that's kind of all in the sort of nature risk category. There's also the nurture piece of it. So if you grow up in an environment where you experience a whole lot of trauma, you are at increased risk for becoming addicted. If you grow up in an environment where your caretakers model using drugs and alcohol or other addictive substances or behaviors as a coping strategy, you are at increased risk of becoming addicted, or even if they just implicitly condone it.