“If all of a sudden now I have the most viewed video on Instagram or
the most liked picture, or I get the most comments from people or
they keep telling me how awesome I am and I should do more,
what’s the next thing. I think that feeds into the part of my brain
that already wants to do that sort of thrill-seeking activity. So
I think it probably acts more as a prompt and a regular trigger
that you wouldn’t always get. Because then you’d be relying on
people in your life to tell you ‘hey you should try the next big,
best, hardest thing’ and now you have complete strangers in the
numbers of thousands following you and telling you that.
“A lot of athletes in sort of amateur sports have sort of
realized that this is a way for them to build a personal brand and
get sponsorships and allows them to continually still be
a bobsledder or a luge in the three years that nobody cares about
them between the Olympics. So from that perspective I think they
see it as a necessary evil.”Agency and Taking Control of Your Life
A sense of accomplishment is not the only benefit that high sensa-
tion-seekers get from their activities. According to Matthew Barlow
and his team at Bangor University, individuals may seek out situa-
tions of chaos, stress, and danger to demonstrate or reassert their
agency and emotional control.^38 Agency is your ability to act in the
world, to make a choice and exert power to make it happen. To be
an agent means you are taking charge. Without it, we fold and let
whatever happens happen. Emotional regulation is your ability to
have control over your feelings. Without emotional regulation,
your emotions are in control of you: toddlers have very little emo-
tional regulation; actors require quite a bit. If you are frightened,
the fear does not necessarily have to be expressed or consuming.
Those with high levels of emotional regulation can suppress their
fear when they need that extra push.
While nearly all risk-taking behaviors require some emo-
tional regulation and agency, there are some that require consider-
able regulation for days, if not weeks, on end. And some risk-takers
are actually motivated by their desire to control those emotions.
Some researchers believe that there are people who sensation-seek
to practice their sense of agency and emotional regulation. They
then transfer this sense of emotional regulation and agency back to
other areas of their life. Consider what Matt said about his90 / Buzz!Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSF Library, on 11 Nov 2019 at 14:19:03, subject to the Cambridge