It’s hard to imagine that anyone gets involved with sub-
stances intending to get hooked, much less to have the substances
slowly destroy their lives. Lots of bad ideas start out with elements
of good ideas. Sometimes people smoke, drink, or try drugs to solve
problems like boredom or psychological or physical pain. These
kinds of feelings can be overwhelming and unbearable. Doing
something that eliminates unwanted feeling can be tempting, but
it often comes with a price. Long-term addiction can create pro-
blems with friends, family, work, and physical or financial health.
Some people experience a downward spiral that’s difficult to
escape or reverse.
Explaining what might motivate a person to use drugs is
complicated, involving complex social, psychological, and envir-
onmental factors that many experts and volumes of books have
addressed. A full review of this research is beyond the scope of
this chapter, but it is relevant to give a glimpse into the relation-
ship between sensation-seeking and substance use and abuse.
Sensation-seekers, as you know by now, are more likely to be
drawn to unusual experiences and much less likely to be fearful
of risks. In their examination of substance use and sensation-
seeking, Bernard Segal and his colleagues found that sensation-
seeking was associated with substance use.^18 It would seem that,
in some cases, HSSs’ quest for the buzz goes beyond BASE jump-
ing and cliff diving. On average, the higher someone’s sensation-
seeking score, the more substances they’re likely to have tried.^19
Sensation-seeking scores are lowest for those who’ve never tried
any substance, a bit higher for those who’ve used only alcohol,
and highest for those who have tried illegal or multiple sub-
stances. What’s more, Andrea Kopstein and her team surveyed
some 1,100 eighth graders and over 1,200 eleventh graders and
discovered that those who score high in disinhibition are three
times more likely to smoke and six times more likely to have
tried marijuana than those whoscore low in disinhibition.^20
Though being a sensation-seeker is linked to trying sub-
stances, it doesn’t appear to predict the type of substance
a person might use. Sensation-seeking seems to be more related
to the number of substances a person has tried rather than what
they tried. As Zuckerman points out “sensation-seekers like to get
high and they like to get low.”^21 It’s not that they set out to get
addicted – obviously. No one does. Rather, it’s that their need to145 / The Dark Side of High Sensation-SeekingDownloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSF Library, on 11 Nov 2019 at 14:20:10, subject to the Cambridge