HoldsUp

Anna Lembke

Stanford University School of Medicine

Anna Lembke is a Professor of Psychiatry at the Stanford University School of Medicine and chief of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic. Her work centers on addiction medicine, psychiatry, and dopamine-related behaviors, and she is the author of 'Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence'. Her published research focuses on substance use disorders, examining treatments for opioid and alcohol dependence, associated cardiovascular risks, and the use of machine learning and social media data to monitor addiction trends.

40 claims checked on air: 3 context 1 contradicted 2 overstated 29 supported 5 unverified 3 flagged

What they said on air - flagged

0:11:41overstatedmoderateDopamine Expert: Doing This Once A Day Fixes Your Dopamine!

Addiction leads to disconnection or severing of large neuronal pathways between deep limbic structures (like the nucleus accumbens and ventral tegmental area) and the prefrontal cortex.

"What we're finding is that there's actually a disconnect. So there are large neuronal circuits and pathways between those deep limbic structures and the prefrontal cortex that literally get severed or disconnected when people become addicted." (said at 0:11:41)

Substance use disorders and addiction are widely documented to involve altered functional connectivity and reduced white matter microstructural integrity within frontostriatal and corticolimbic circuits connecting the prefrontal cortex to deep structures such as the nucleus accumbens. However, claiming that these neuronal pathways "literally get severed" exaggerates the nature of these neurobiological changes. The pathways remain anatomically present; addiction is characterized by changes in synaptic plasticity, functional coupling, and microstructural metrics (such as reduced fractional anisotropy on diffusion tensor imaging), rather than literal physical transection or severing of nerve tracts.

1:02:04overstatedvery lowDopamine Expert: Doing This Once A Day Fixes Your Dopamine!

Human studies demonstrate that dopamine levels gradually rise during the latter half of exercise and remain elevated for hours afterwards before returning to baseline without entering a dopamine deficit state.

"And there are studies in humans showing that when humans expose themselves to exercise, for example, dopamine levels gradually rise over the latter half of the exercise, and then when the exercise stops, dopamine levels will remain elevated for hours afterwards before going back down to the baseline level position without ever going into that dopamine deficit state." (said at 1:02:04)

While human neuroimaging studies using positron emission tomography (PET) with tracers like [11C]raclopride demonstrate that acute exercise stimulates endogenous dopamine release in the human brain, they do not show the continuous kinetic profile described by the speaker. PET provides static snapshots of receptor binding displacement across discrete scan conditions rather than continuous dynamic tracking across the phases of an exercise session. The specific temporal kinetics claimed—gradual elevation during the latter half of exertion and sustained elevation for hours post-exercise without entering a deficit state—derive from invasive intracerebral microdialysis studies in rodents, not in humans.

1:57:15contradictedlowDopamine Expert: Doing This Once A Day Fixes Your Dopamine!

Women are substantially more vulnerable to love addiction or pathological relationship dependency than men.

"Women, however, are much more vulnerable to love addiction, which is also real, right? The pathological, compulsive falling in love with partners and then getting into these relationships that are really dramatic and not healthy" (said at 1:57:15)

The claim that women are substantially or "much more vulnerable" to love addiction compared to men is not supported by psychiatric and empirical literature. "Love addiction" is not an officially recognized diagnosis in the DSM-5 or ICD-11, and systematic reviews highlight an absence of standardized epidemiological data. Furthermore, recent empirical studies evaluating psychological vulnerability models (such as impulsivity, psychological distress, and emotion dysregulation) for love addiction show structural invariance across genders, and meta-analytic evidence indicates that associations with key drivers like anxious attachment are not uniquely higher in women (and can be stronger in male-predominant samples).

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