The Examined Life

Leaning into Pain with Anna Lembke

• Kenneth Primrose

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Comfort is easy; appetite is sacred. We trace a surprising path to steadier happiness by leaning, gently but deliberately, into friction. Drawing on psychiatrist Anna Lembke’s insight that our modern environment is addictogenic, we look at how endless convenience and constant dopamine nudges can flatten mood, fog attention, and leave us restless. Then we put the theory to the test with a cold North Sea dip—short, sharp, and strangely joyful on the other side.

Across the conversation, we unpack why the human nervous system needs stress in measured doses. Think hormesis: brief, voluntary challenges like hard exercise, short fasts from alcohol or sugar, or cold exposure that nudge the brain into balance and rebuild resilience. A greenhouse tree grows fast but topples without wind; without resistance, we also lose inner structure. By choosing small hardships, we earn the afterglow—a calmer baseline, cleaner focus, and a renewed appetite for simple pleasures.

We also explore practical ways to invite healthy stress without going extreme. Start with one constraint you can keep this week, and notice the shift: food tastes better, sleep deepens, and mornings feel less rushed. The aim isn’t suffering for its own sake; it’s recalibrating reward so that life’s ordinary moments become vivid again. If abundance has dulled your edge, a little voluntary discomfort can turn the volume back down on noise and up on meaning.

If this resonates, follow along for more short reflections, share the episode with a friend who needs a reset, and join our Substack community for deeper dives. Subscribe, leave a review, and tell us: what small hardship will you choose this week?

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SPEAKER_00:

So, for most of human existence, we have lived in a world of scarcity and ever-present danger. And our reflexive, innate, evolutionary wiring to reflexively approach pleasure and avoid pain is what has allowed us to survive over the millennia. But through scientific and technological innovation in all aspects of life, we have really transformed the world from a place of scarcity to a place of overwhelming abundance. And in this world, we need to now orient differently on how we approach pleasure and pain. And mainly, I believe that we need to embrace a new kind of asceticism and to actively invite the friction of pain and suffering into our lives as a way to just generally be physiologically healthier, but also to strive for the kind of contentment and serenity that I think all humans are wired to want and to strive for. This is a unique time where we have to think differently about our orientation to pleasure and pain. And specifically, we have to go against our biology. We have to kind of actively and intentionally oppose millions of years of evolution if we want to survive, frankly.

SPEAKER_01:

Hello, and this is the first in a new series of short podcasts I'm going to be doing between seasons. What you just heard there was the voice of Anna Lemke, the psychiatrist and author of the fantastic book Dopamine Nation. I interviewed her last year and we spoke about our relationship with pain and pleasure. We're going to take that one thought that I want to sound by you heard and explore it a little bit in the next three or four minutes. Anna describes the modern world as addictogenic. From fast food and chocolate to porn and doom scrolling, we are breadcrumbed with dopamine everywhere we go. And this, she says, has the pattern of addiction. Many of us haven't noticed this, but we are more irritable and sleep-deprived and restless. The withdrawal symptoms that come with any kind of addiction are with many of us much of the time. Anna's counterintuitive wisdom here is to go against our biological wiring. Some measure of pain or friction is essential. As Anna says, if we want to survive, this is not just a rule for us humans, it's something we see across nature. A number of years ago, some botanists discovered that trees growing up in greenhouses couldn't support their own weight when they got to a certain height. This initially baffled the botanists because they had plenty light and nutrients and so on. What they didn't have, however, was the resistance of wind, which was needed to develop the internal wood strength to allow them to support their own weight. This is a beautiful metaphor, I think, of us as humans. We need friction, we need resistance. If we're constantly just getting pleasure, then we never really develop. There are ways to introduce healthy stress back into our life. Hard exercise, fasts from alcohol or certain types of food, a kind of hedonic reset. Or if you want to join the current craze, then immersing yourself in cold water. This is what I did last weekend with a few friends. We went to the North Sea. Here's an audio from that adventure. Here we are. North Sea, 29th of November. Yusuf, how much are you wanting to go in that sea? Three out of ten. Ow, how much are you wanting to go in the sea? Yeah, three out of ten sounds good. I'm probably at least minus three out of ten. I really don't want to go in the sea at the moment. We're gonna go in the sea anyway.

SPEAKER_02:

The thing that's driving me is the shame of regret. If I just bailed out now, like I'd be like, oh, well, that was a bit of a waste of the day. So now it's like, well, we're here. We just gotta do it.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, let's test the theory of leaning into pain and having an enduring dopamine payoff afterwards. I'm not regretting our Saturday morning choices.

SPEAKER_02:

Let's go.

SPEAKER_01:

Right, I'm Right, Yusuf, what's the payoff?

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, I I feel a moral payoff. At least I've ticked the box, I've done the thing.

SPEAKER_01:

Kenny was in for like three, four minutes and I was in for I guess two hours? Three hours? It's a long time. I I guess he's gonna feel it more than we do.

SPEAKER_02:

He's got a big smile on his face. I mean, that's the other thing. Looking at the energy from us now compared to before. Now we feel like we've certainly earned the coffee and the breakfast. Whereas otherwise, sleeping in on a Saturday morning and just rolling into a breakfast, you feels unearned, and there's some something not as maybe that's the puritanical side of me.

SPEAKER_01:

There's something also in I've heard that going into Cold War and doing deliberately really hard things is good in life generally because it reminds you you can deal with hard things that are inevitably gonna hit you by voluntarily going into it.

SPEAKER_02:

It's a time of wisdom after a fight. The volume on life is turned down.

SPEAKER_01:

Choice. So that's Anal MK in practice, leaning in to pain in order to get some kind of dopamine payoff afterwards. Thanks, dude.

SPEAKER_02:

Thank you, Kenny, for having us out.

SPEAKER_01:

So that was my own small dose of intentional discomfort. Nothing heroic, just enough to remind me that I'm alive. Annal MK's point isn't that we should suffer for its own sake. But that little voluntary hardship clears the fog, sharpens attention, resets our reward system in the brain, and builds the kind of inner strength that we can get comfort and resilience from. Maybe there's a version of that for you this week. Something simple, slightly uncomfortable, and entirely doable. I'm reminded of a short essay by the English writer Laurie Lee, where he writes about appetite and he finishes with these lines. Too much of anything, too much music, entertainment, happy snacks, time spent with one friend creates a kind of impotence of living by which we can no longer hear or taste or see or love or remember. Life is short and precious, and appetite is one of its guardians, and loss of appetite is a sort of death. So if we are to enjoy this short life, we should respect the divinity of appetite and keep it eager and not too much blunted. It is a long time now since I knew that acute pleasure of putting parched lips to a cup of cold water. The springs are still there to be enjoyed. All one needs is the original thirst. Thank you for listening to this short episode of the Examined Life. I hope you found it useful. Feel free to share it, send it on to someone else who might enjoy it. And if you're enjoying these shorter reflections, there are more on their way. If you have enjoyed, then do please sign up to this Examined Life on Substack. Be part of the community there. You can obviously listen to the whole podcast with Ann L MK wherever you get your podcast. Until then, stay curious, embrace the pain, and have a good week.