If It’s Worth Doing: Addictions
Sensation-Seeking and Substance Use
Maybe you’ve heard of the term “addictive personality.” People
with addictive personalities tend to get locked into a pattern
where they overdo nearly everything, throwing moderation to the
wind. For them, anything worth doing is certainly worth overdoing.
While many people like playing video games for a while, people
with addictive personalities will play for ten hours in a row. When
they discover a new TV show, they’ll binge-watch five seasons in
one weekend. They easily fall into things that feel good, like gam-
bling, sex, and sometimes drugs.^17
Some people with addictive personalities don’t limit them-
selves to overdoing just one thing – for them, an addiction to one
thing is linked to an addiction with another. Psychologists refer to
this as “cross addiction.” People addicted to alcohol, for example,
have cross addictions to cigarette smoking, overeating, and gam-
bling more often than people who never abuse alcohol. Sensation-
seekers may be more likely to be drawn into addictive substances
and even into addictive behaviors.
Devin, a 32-year-old man living in south Florida, knows
something about sensation-seeking and addiction. He’s a resident
manager in an addiction treatment facility, a sensation-seeker, and
a recovering addict. He’s known he was a thrill-seeker for decades.
“I could probably go back to being like six or seven years old
and reading. I can’t think of the book exactly, but it was one of those
‘choose your own adventure’ style books. The kind where ‘if you
want to go here, go to page 84; if you want this to happen, go to page
78.’ I remember actually having my heart race as I’m reading those
books in anticipation of what was going to happen.” Devin’s thrill-
seeking went beyond reading.
“Even when I was a kid playing sports, skateboarding, rid-
ing bikes, I always tried to do something more extreme than the
person next to me. People like me just don’t find the same satisfac-
tion in normal things that other people do. It has to be more.”
As Devin got older, he sought different sensations including
loud music, roller coasters, and driving as fast as he could. He began
using marijuana aroundage 12. Later, he added alcohol, then cocaine
and opiates like heroin. “It was a natural progression. For me, it was
almost like I knew what the end result was going to be, but I didn’t
care about the consequences. It just didn’t matter in that moment.”144 / Buzz!Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSF Library, on 11 Nov 2019 at 14:20:10, subject to the Cambridge