“I crave it. I have to do it. If I don’t do it every so often, I go
nuts. Again, it’s that anticipation – getting out there and being in
that environment – it’s pretty crazy.”
As you know by now, being calm and even intensely
focused in circumstances where most of us would crumble and
panic is a hallmark of the high sensation-seeking person. In fact,
there is likely a physiological component to this reaction as
I described inChapter 2. Here is my guess about what is likely
going on within Jason. Cortisol and the other corticosteroids
naturally released in stressful situations are probably available
in smaller amounts than they would be in low sensation-seekers
like me. This allows for the hyper-focused Zen-like state he
refers to in a situation that would be utterly overwhelming for
most. After all, the stress response can be a good thing in that it
shuts down peripheral activities in the body and leads to
a heightened awareness and greater attention to the present
moment. In addition, Jason probably gets a big boost of dopa-
mine when he does these dives, which makes the experience
rewarding for him. That’s probably why he can’t go for long
without doing a black water dive before he starts to feel like
he’s “going nuts.” This is probably also why he craves the experi-
ence. We all crave activities we know will be rewarding, and we
know that cravings (even extreme forms like addiction) are con-
nected to the dopamine response. So his behavioral approach
system is hard at work, while his fight or flight response is in an
optimal state of arousal. It’s pretty clear that this magical com-
bination – balanced stress and increased reward – provides the
neurochemical environment necessary to make black water div-
ing a crave-worthy experience for him, whereas it would feel
like a chaotic murky hell to someone like me.
There’s no question that Jason is particularly extreme, but
what we see here is what I heard over and over again in talking to
high sensation-seekers: a deep desire to do something out of the
ordinary, a Zen-like sense of balance in the face of amazing circum-
stances, and the desire, theneed, to repeat this over and over again.
It’s not a set of behaviors and choices that a low sensation-seeker
can easily relate to, but for the high sensation-seeker it is a delicious
and absolutely essential feature of their lives, even their working
lives.
One of the things I began wondering about along this jour-
ney was the working lives of high sensation-seekers. After all, I have116 / Buzz!Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSF Library, on 11 Nov 2019 at 14:18:48, subject to the Cambridge