The Art of Manliness - October 30, 2024


Are You a Thrill Seeker or a Chill Seeker？

Topics
thrill-seeking and sensation seeking embrace
Hosted by
Brett McKay
Mentioned
Buzz Kevin Cardell Daredevils John Allen Lee Kennedy Carter Tommy Caldwell Niagara Falls B.B. King Barrett
Ouch! That Stings! Why Rejection Hurts So Much (And How to Deal With It) A Bible for Heroes — The Influential Book Read By History's Eminent Men

Episode Stats


Length

32 minutes

Words per minute

177.23

Word count

5,746

Sentence count

373

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Toxicity

4

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Dr. Kenneth Carter, a clinical psychologist and author of Inside the Minds of Thrill Seekers, Daredevils, and Adrenaline Junkies, explains how sensation seeking exists on a spectrum between chill seekers who like a safe, calm routine, and thrill seekers who enjoy chaos, risk, and novelty.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
00:00:04.180 So I'm going to start this episode out a bit differently today than others by giving you
00:00:07.540 a little quiz. It's something called the Brief Sensation Seeking Scale, which will tell you
00:00:12.600 whether you're what psychologists call a high sensation seeker or a low sensation seeker.
00:00:17.640 So I'm going to read you eight statements, and then you're going to pick a number from one to
00:00:21.260 five, where one is not at all like me, two is not like me, three is unsure or both like and not like
00:00:28.080 me, four is like me, and five is very much like me. All right, got that? Are you ready? Got your pen
00:00:33.520 and paper? All right, so here we go. Here's the first statement. I would like to explore strange
00:00:38.260 places. So remember, assign the statement a number one through five, where one is not at all like me,
00:00:43.860 and five is very much like me. So again, statement number one, I would like to explore strange places.
00:00:50.500 All right, number two, I would like to take off on a trip with no pre-planned routes or timetables.
00:00:56.180 Number three, I get restless when I spend too much time alone.
00:01:02.060 Number four, I prefer friends who are excitingly unpredictable.
00:01:07.880 Number five, I like wild parties.
00:01:11.920 Number six, I would love to have new and exciting experiences, even if they are illegal.
00:01:19.000 Number seven, I would like to try bungee jumping.
00:01:22.040 Number eight, I would like to do frightening things.
00:01:27.400 Okay, now what I want you to do is add up all those numbers together.
00:01:30.960 If you score between eight and 16, you are a low sensation seeker.
00:01:35.480 If you score between 16 and 28, you're about average for sensation seeking.
00:01:39.660 And if you scored over 28, you are a high sensation seeker.
00:01:51.500 Today on the show, I'll unpack what these categories of personality mean with Dr. Kenneth Carter,
00:01:56.320 a clinical psychologist, professor, and the author of Buzz,
00:01:59.720 Inside the Minds of Thrill Seekers, Daredevils, and Adrenaline Junkies.
00:02:04.000 Ken explains how sensation seeking exists on a spectrum between chill seekers,
00:02:07.560 who like safety and calm routine, and thrill seekers, who enjoy chaos, risk, and novelty.
00:02:13.560 He shares how there are actually four components of high sensation seeking,
00:02:16.760 and which two tend to get people in trouble.
00:02:19.260 And we talk about whether being high or low sensation seeking is a matter of nature or nurture,
00:02:23.500 how high sensation seekers fare in romantic relationships,
00:02:26.420 and what they should consider in choosing a career,
00:02:28.560 and what the world's chill seekers can learn from its thrill seekers.
00:02:32.060 After the show is over, check out our show notes at awim.is slash buzz.
00:02:37.560 All right, Ken Carter, welcome to the show.
00:02:48.020 Thank you for having me.
00:02:48.960 So you are a clinical psychologist, and you're a professor of psychology,
00:02:52.260 and you've written a book about scary, like why we like to be scared.
00:02:57.840 I thought you'd be the perfect person to talk to because it's Halloween.
00:03:01.340 It's the time of year when people are visiting haunted houses.
00:03:04.280 They're watching scary movies.
00:03:06.480 Generally, most people don't like being scared.
00:03:10.620 But in some circumstances, I think all of us, to a certain extent, like doing scary things.
00:03:15.800 We like to play scary video games, whether that's Five Nights at Freddy's,
00:03:19.020 which my kids played a long time ago, riding a roller coaster,
00:03:22.620 because we want that little bit of, we want to be scared.
00:03:25.220 Why do we have a taste for scary and thrilling things?
00:03:29.180 Yeah, so different kinds of psychologists have different theories about that.
00:03:34.700 The classic one from Freud says there are ids, like love that sort of death instinct kind of thing. 1.00
00:03:42.260 And then other theories, like for example, from sensation seeking,
00:03:45.360 says that we sort of love that newness, that sort of surprise that comes along with it.
00:03:49.880 And so I'm actually in the group of people who don't like to be scared too much,
00:03:54.180 which is odd because I wrote a book about how people like doing thrilling things.
00:03:58.520 But you're right, most people do enjoy those surprises to an extent.
00:04:03.000 So it sounds like the inclination to seek out scary stuff, it resides on a spectrum.
00:04:08.480 So you're on that end where it's like, I don't really like it all that much.
00:04:12.560 No, no.
00:04:13.000 I study thrill seekers, but I'm definitely a chill seeker myself.
00:04:16.500 Are some people completely like they don't even want to watch a scary movie at all?
00:04:20.600 Like they don't want any type of thrill at all?
00:04:23.520 Yeah, I mean, even though I'm pretty low, I mean, I've met people who are even lower,
00:04:27.200 who don't like being frightened, that have sort of an aversive reaction to fear in some ways.
00:04:32.580 But I've also met people that are the opposite, where they don't even remember having any fear in them whatsoever.
00:04:39.900 I actually interviewed a woman who didn't realize that she was in danger until someone told her that she was in danger.
00:04:46.680 So yeah, definitely quite a spectrum.
00:04:48.700 Okay, so your book, Buzz, you did extensive research on the people who love scary stuff.
00:04:56.380 They're on that far end of the spectrum.
00:04:57.820 So this is interesting because you're a guy who doesn't like scary stuff, and you decide,
00:05:01.940 I'm going to figure out what's going on with these people that like to do crazy stuff,
00:05:06.140 go to really scary haunted houses, base jump, bungee jump, all that sort of thing.
00:05:10.940 And these are people who go out of their way to do thrilling and dangerous things.
00:05:16.100 And the academic term for this is high sensation seeking.
00:05:20.300 You mentioned some theories as to why most people like small scares in their life.
00:05:25.080 What are the theories as to why there are people who are especially oriented to intense thrills?
00:05:32.420 Yeah, I mean, if you think about it from an evolutionary standpoint,
00:05:34.840 we need people who, or there's a benefit to people who can tolerate that chaos in life.
00:05:41.860 Because if you're in a dangerous situation, you want someone that's going to be calm to sort of help you out of that.
00:05:48.620 And so, yeah, there are definitely some evolutionary benefits to having some members of our population
00:05:53.820 who are high sensation seekers who can tolerate that chaos.
00:05:57.860 There's also some evolutionary benefits to having some chill seekers, right,
00:06:00.800 to prevent us from going in those directions.
00:06:02.720 So you need a little bit of both in society.
00:06:05.400 When psychologists try to explain this, is thrill-seeking, is it a personality type?
00:06:10.540 Like, I think everyone who's listening to this show have probably heard of like the big five personality traits.
00:06:15.420 Extroversion, neuroticism, conscientiousness, openness to new stuff.
00:06:20.480 Is thrill-seeking like an amalgamation of those different big five personality traits, or is it something separate?
00:06:27.100 It's a little bit different.
00:06:28.200 I mean, I think because, you know, so when I'm teaching about personality theories or research personality theories,
00:06:33.500 I think of those things like grand theories that try to explain a bunch of different things in their personality.
00:06:40.340 And the big five is sort of one of those grand theories.
00:06:43.020 Freud is a grand theory.
00:06:44.540 I call sensation-seeking kind of a mini-theory because it sort of does one thing pretty well,
00:06:49.840 but it doesn't really explain other aspects of our personality.
00:06:54.100 So, you know, there are just like a couple of different components of it.
00:06:58.000 And if you're using it to explain like why people might choose to do different things,
00:07:02.140 it works really well for that.
00:07:03.500 It's like a single-use tool.
00:07:05.520 So what are the components of high-sensation-seeking personalities?
00:07:09.320 Yeah.
00:07:09.960 So we call them thrill-seekers, but there's really four different kinds of components.
00:07:14.140 The first two tell me a little bit about the kinds of things you might choose to do.
00:07:19.600 And the last two tell me how much trouble you might get yourself into with your sensation-seeking.
00:07:25.720 So, and it's a pretty quick test.
00:07:27.520 There's like eight questions that you can, you know,
00:07:30.360 to take to sort of figure out where on the scale you might be.
00:07:33.880 So the first one is called thrill and adventure-seeking.
00:07:37.160 These are people who like, you know, sort of physical thrills.
00:07:40.880 It could be bungee jumping, base diving, you know,
00:07:44.660 those things that we normally think of with thrill-seekers.
00:07:47.300 The second one is really sensations of the mind and of the senses.
00:07:51.900 These are people who might like be drawn to interesting people
00:07:55.460 or maybe drawn to interesting foods or even sort of adventure travel.
00:08:00.580 So it's not the danger that beckons them.
00:08:02.680 It's sort of the curiosity of what happens in their mind.
00:08:06.240 The last two, like I mentioned before,
00:08:07.860 tells you how much trouble you might get yourself into.
00:08:10.460 One of them is called disinhibition.
00:08:12.620 These are people who, if you score really low on this,
00:08:16.400 you sort of look before you leap and sort of think things through.
00:08:20.100 If you score high, you just leap.
00:08:22.060 You just sort of put yourself in it and figure it out later.
00:08:25.140 And the last one's called boredom susceptibility,
00:08:28.160 is how easy you get bored and how irritated you get when you get bored.
00:08:32.920 And so you can have different kinds of high sensation-seekers
00:08:36.540 because you might be a high sensation-seeker but don't like dangerous stuff.
00:08:41.220 But you, you know, you love cultures.
00:08:43.900 You love trying different foods.
00:08:45.820 You take a big bite of an unusual food no matter what.
00:08:49.180 And the kinds of ways that you sort of are in the world
00:08:52.160 are going to be pieces of those different four components.
00:08:55.220 Okay, so let's recap here.
00:08:56.860 So there's four components of high sensation-seeking.
00:08:59.740 The first is the desire for physical thrills.
00:09:03.700 These are high-stimulus activities like skydiving and mountain climbing.
00:09:07.900 The second is a desire for mental sensations and sensations of the senses.
00:09:12.600 So this is seeking less risky experiences like travel, art, music.
00:09:19.380 The third is disinhibition.
00:09:21.300 So it's just being more impulsive.
00:09:22.920 And fourth is a susceptibility to boredom.
00:09:25.900 So it's a dislike of repetition and a desire for new external stimuli.
00:09:31.100 And someone could have different constellations of these traits.
00:09:34.140 Like you could be high on thrill and adventure-seeking
00:09:37.100 where you love doing dangerous stuff, but you're low on disinhibition.
00:09:41.480 You're disciplined, you're conscientious.
00:09:43.620 And actually, a lot of the people you highlight that do dangerous stuff,
00:09:47.000 they're like that because they're doing stuff that can get you killed.
00:09:50.360 So they have to be in control.
00:09:51.920 Yes, yes.
00:09:52.540 Like ice climbers, for example.
00:09:54.600 You know, I interviewed one of the very first people to climb up Niagara Falls frozen.
00:09:59.180 It's a lot of focus and concentration to tell what kind of ice it might be holding you or not.
00:10:05.920 So you don't really want to be a high disinhibited, you know, ice climber, right?
00:10:11.280 Because you need that discipline to be able to do that pretty well.
00:10:15.080 And going back to this idea that this thrill-seeking is a mini theory of personality,
00:10:19.000 I can see situations where you can look at someone who, on the big five personality,
00:10:25.040 it looks like they should be a thrill-seeker.
00:10:27.080 They're extroverted.
00:10:28.180 They're not very conscientious, et cetera.
00:10:30.820 But they're actually, they don't like doing dangerous stuff, you know, things like that.
00:10:35.820 So I really, I thought that was really interesting that you have to look at thrill-seeking as almost kind of like a little bit of separate personality.
00:10:42.440 You can't just look at someone's overall grand personality and peg them as a thrill-seeker.
00:10:48.060 Yeah.
00:10:48.480 In fact, one of the biggest, like, you know, easiest to imagine that thrill-seekers are these extroverted sort of wild people who will do whatever.
00:10:58.180 But what I've realized is sometimes it's the really quiet ones, those introverted high sensation seekers are going to do, you know, a lot of those things.
00:11:07.820 And you wouldn't have expected because you're sort of looking for an extrovert.
00:11:11.740 But a lot of high sensation seekers are introverts as well.
00:11:15.900 Yeah.
00:11:15.940 We had a guy on the podcast, Tommy Caldwell, who was one of those free climbers who scaled El Capitan in Yosemite.
00:11:24.280 And, you know, this guy, you know, high on thrill-seeking, but he also seemed pretty introverted.
00:11:29.780 Yeah.
00:11:30.200 Yeah.
00:11:30.560 This is the thing I love about psychology is like it helps you to understand like what might be going on inside someone's mind.
00:11:36.000 And sort of, you know, put aside some of those assumptions you might have about different personality types.
00:11:41.840 Is thrill-seeking or high sensation-seeking, is it a matter of nature or nurture or is it both?
00:11:47.840 It's a little bit of both.
00:11:48.980 Some of the research suggests that maybe like 60% or so may be biological because there are some chemicals that are involved in sensation-seeking that are a little bit different than in high sensation-seekers than average and low sensation-seekers.
00:12:05.240 But we know that environment can have a big impact on that as well.
00:12:09.780 To the biology, how is the physiology in a high sensation-seeker different from someone of lower average sensation-seeking?
00:12:17.360 Yeah.
00:12:17.840 Yeah.
00:12:18.640 So there's a lot of different differences, but the ones I usually talk about to help people think through, because there are some chemicals that people are usually aware of, focus on cortisol and dopamine.
00:12:30.740 So cortisol, as you probably know, is that sort of stress hormone.
00:12:34.200 It helps organize our body for, you know, for that fight, flee, or freeze response when there's lots of chaos or dangerous things.
00:12:43.760 So if you, you know, are surprised or scared, your heart rate will go up, your muscles rev up for those kinds of things.
00:12:52.340 What we find is that high sensation-seekers don't tend to produce as much cortisol in those chaotic moments.
00:13:00.800 They're actually pretty chill and calm during those things that would normally cause people a cortisol response.
00:13:08.480 But their dopamine levels tend to be a little bit higher.
00:13:11.780 So dopamine is a neurotransmitter that most people have heard of that's associated with pleasure.
00:13:17.440 And so when high sensation-seekers are confronted with these chaotic experiences, they feel a lot of pleasure, but not that much stress.
00:13:26.120 And so it's a very interesting combination of chemicals that sort of leads them to feeling the way they do.
00:13:33.520 Their body is just telling them that it's not a dangerous thing.
00:13:37.040 Low sensation-seekers like me, I produce lots of cortisol all the time, so I'm going to feel freely stressed out, but not that much pleasure in those chaotic experiences that high sensation-seekers are really going to be sort of vibing in.
00:13:52.020 All right, so yeah, the high sensation-seekers, whenever they encounter a dangerous, maybe different situation, their response is, go towards it.
00:13:59.900 Low sensation-seekers are like, no, go away.
00:14:02.360 Yeah, yeah, yeah, because we're trying to avoid those things that might be dangerous.
00:14:07.360 But if your body is not telling you it's dangerous, then it doesn't feel dangerous.
00:14:10.940 Well, this is the Art of Manliness podcast.
00:14:12.700 Does testosterone play a role in sensation-seeking?
00:14:15.860 It does.
00:14:16.960 So testosterone levels tend to peak in early adolescence, which is around the same time that you'd expect to see lots of sensation-seeking.
00:14:25.500 And so as people get older, their testosterone levels start to fall.
00:14:29.600 We do see some changes in sensation-seeking as people get older.
00:14:34.280 Yeah, and this connection between testosterone and sensation-seeking is also why you see more men who are high sensation-seeking seekers than women, at least in three of the four sensation-seeking categories.
00:14:47.680 The women actually outscore men in the experience-seeking category, which I think is interesting.
00:14:53.160 But yeah, everyone has testosterone, so everyone also gets that decrease as you get older.
00:14:57.540 And you highlighted people in your book where when they were young, maybe young adults, they did crazy stuff, travel without a plan, eat weird food, jump off of bridges.
00:15:10.140 But when they got married or had kids, they started scaling that back a lot.
00:15:16.480 And I've noticed that in my own life, I'm 40, I'll be 42 here soon.
00:15:20.580 When I was younger, I was up for, I'm not a super high sensation seeker, but when I was younger, I would do crazy stuff.
00:15:28.740 But now I look back like, I'm like, why did I do that? 0.97
00:15:31.300 I was really dumb. 0.80
00:15:32.060 If I was given that opportunity again, I'd be like, no, I'm going to pass on that. 0.97
00:15:36.220 Yeah, yeah.
00:15:37.060 And part of that's environmental and part of it's biological.
00:15:40.540 Biological change, the changes in those hormones like testosterone or another chemical called MAO tends to decrease in people that's associated with sensation-seeking.
00:15:50.540 But I also talked a little bit about things I called anchors in your life, things that sort of anchor you in.
00:15:55.200 Because the older you get, the more you have to lose, right?
00:15:58.380 And so thinking about how other people might be impacted with those choices makes a big difference as well.
00:16:05.460 Right.
00:16:05.620 So maybe a guy is very cavalier about climbing dangerous mountains in his youth.
00:16:10.540 But when he gets married and has kids, he starts having second thoughts about that pursuit.
00:16:15.300 So we talked about nature.
00:16:17.060 Let's talk about nurture a little bit.
00:16:18.620 What does the research say about the way someone's upbringing as a child can nudge them towards high sensation-seeking?
00:16:26.420 Yeah, a couple things.
00:16:27.720 And it's hard to sort of figure out sometimes because there might be lots of influences on that.
00:16:33.740 Some of the research suggested that people that grew up with either spirituality or some religious background had some impact on their disinhibition.
00:16:42.920 There's also some research that suggested that high sensation-seekers said that they had more controlling parents.
00:16:49.760 But it's very possible that parents might have seen controlling because they were wanting to do high sensation-seeking things.
00:16:55.720 And so hard to figure out what those environmental influences could be because there's so many influences on a person's life.
00:17:02.900 One that I thought was interesting is if someone grew up in a home with a lot of kids, that might nudge them towards high sensation-seeking because they grew up in a household that was pretty chaotic.
00:17:15.600 Yeah.
00:17:16.140 And so that tolerance of chaos can create that as well.
00:17:19.420 Yeah.
00:17:20.660 We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.
00:17:25.540 And now back to the show.
00:17:27.020 So in addition to kind of exploring why some people are more prone to being high sensation-seekers or low sensation-seekers, you also looked at like, well, how does this affect the rest of their lives?
00:17:38.580 So some of these high sensation-seekers like to eat weird food.
00:17:41.500 They like to do crazy, dangerous stuff.
00:17:43.200 But how does it affect other facets of their life, like work, relationships?
00:17:46.880 So let's talk about relationships.
00:17:48.600 How do high sensation-seekers approach their friendships and romantic lives?
00:17:53.560 Probably in the same way they approach other aspects where they can tolerate that chaos.
00:17:59.820 They are taking their sort of whole selves into those relationships.
00:18:04.140 One of the things that sort of surprised me in the research was, and it probably shouldn't have, but that because we all think that other people see the world like we do, right?
00:18:12.600 And so a high sensation-seeker thinks that other people aren't as frightened of things that might be frightening.
00:18:18.900 And so they can sometimes have trouble with other people in terms of them being frightened by the things they do or not being able to tolerate the chaos in certain ways.
00:18:30.560 And so that can be a struggle with some high sensation-seekers who have friends or relationships with individuals who may be average and low sensation-seekers.
00:18:41.540 But for the most part, they're sort of drawn to either high or low sensation-seekers fairly equally.
00:18:47.340 Do they like more, I don't know how I say this, drama in a relationship?
00:18:52.100 Does that drama give them like that high sensation that they need?
00:18:55.140 Yeah.
00:18:55.620 And that's sort of one of the things that drew me to this research to begin with because I was originally going to write a book about people that I called chaos junkies, people who seem to sort of crave chaotic experiences.
00:19:06.360 And so we know that high sensation-seekers, you know, they have that really wonderful balance of dopamine and cortisol when they're in chaotic situations.
00:19:18.760 And so sometimes high sensation-seekers won't back down from chaotic situations because they're fine in that space, right?
00:19:26.560 And so they may create that drama because that's the space they tend to operate the best in.
00:19:32.840 Yeah.
00:19:33.020 I mean, talking about going back to the physiological response that high sensation-seekers have compared to low sensation-seekers,
00:19:40.960 I imagine that someone with low sensation-seeking personality, whenever they encounter a social conflict, like the cortisol is just pumping through their body.
00:19:50.460 They don't get any dopamine out of it, like this is unpleasant.
00:19:53.940 And so they just want to avoid any conflict whatsoever. 0.66
00:19:58.820 Whereas the high sensation-seeker, whenever there's a conflict in the relationship, it could just be over like just dumb stuff.
00:20:03.700 The cortisol is not pumping through their body, so they don't see a problem with the argument or the disagreement.
00:20:10.540 It's like, oh, this is just normal and it's fine and everything's okay.
00:20:14.400 Whereas the low sensation-seeker would be like, this is awful.
00:20:17.380 The relationship's terrible.
00:20:18.640 We're in a bad place.
00:20:19.660 So I imagine that could happen.
00:20:22.240 Yeah, which is really like the thing that sort of drew me into psychology anyway.
00:20:26.920 When you have one situation, you see two people responding really differently to it.
00:20:32.160 You have this study that I talked about in the book where it was a really interesting study where they had high and low sensation-seekers
00:20:38.660 and they had to pick, they were given sort of a profile of different people that they might have a conversation with.
00:20:45.920 And they could choose whether or not they wanted to pick a conversation that would create conflict as they talked or one that wouldn't.
00:20:52.880 And the low sensation-seekers, just like you sort of described, picked sort of low-conflict conversations.
00:20:58.980 The high sensation-seekers pick the things where they thought they might have an argument because that's the space where they operate best in, which reminds me of certain people that I know.
00:21:08.820 It's like, why would you talk about that when you know that they don't like talking about it?
00:21:13.120 It's because it creates that chaos, that sort of that perfect combination for some high sensation-seekers.
00:21:18.300 Yeah, the high sensation-seekers, the guy at Thanksgiving dinner is like, hey, tell me who you voted for.
00:21:24.120 Right.
00:21:24.720 Like, oh, okay.
00:21:25.400 Everyone else is going, no.
00:21:27.520 And for them, they're happy to approach it because they aren't feeling the same, you know, that cortisol that other people might in those situations.
00:21:36.660 They're just full of dopamine.
00:21:37.820 Yeah, and then I'm curious, are high sensation-seekers and low sensation-seekers able to be romantically partnered?
00:21:46.300 They can, yeah.
00:21:47.680 So high sensation-seekers really are sort of focused on that relationship piece.
00:21:52.040 They're drawn equally to high and low sensation-seekers for romantic relationships.
00:21:56.520 The piece they have to sort of watch out for is that empathy around the things that might cause that low sensation-seeker some stress.
00:22:04.640 So what I recommend that people do is they take this sensation-seeking survey and they can sort of find out where there might be some ways where they can come together.
00:22:13.960 The one couple I've worked with, for example, they found out that they both have high levels of experience-seeking.
00:22:21.320 So they might do some adventure travel together, even though the high sensation-seeker might also be high in thrill and adventure.
00:22:27.860 They're not going to take their partner with them bungee dumping, but they might do some fun food adventures, for example, or travel to unusual places together.
00:22:38.180 Oh, I thought it was interesting in the relationship section, we talk about the six styles of love from this guy, John Allen Lee, and he developed this in the 1970s.
00:22:45.880 And so the six different types, there's agape, they come from Greek types of love.
00:22:49.660 Agape, eros, storge, pragma, mania, and ludos.
00:22:54.060 And so ludos is game-playing love.
00:22:57.620 So this is people who are drawn to the hunt for love, the chase, that's what they like.
00:23:02.760 And research shows that high sensation-seekers are more drawn to that ludic type of love.
00:23:10.100 Yeah.
00:23:10.620 And I mean, and I know, like, as a clinical psychologist, that it takes different kinds of skills to find someone than it is to sort of maintain a relationship.
00:23:21.300 So I wondered whether or not high sensation-seekers may be better at sort of the beginnings of relationships and may struggle sometimes with the middle of relationships.
00:23:31.340 Because for some people that I interviewed, that part just gets, like, dull to them.
00:23:37.180 One woman I talked to said that she not only jumps out of perfectly good airplanes, but she jumps out of perfectly good relationships because she sort of gets bored. 1.00
00:23:46.420 And that's part of that, that can be part of that sensation-seeking personality for some people.
00:23:51.620 Yeah, it reminds me of that B.B. King song, The Thrill Is Gone.
00:23:54.080 That's what the high sensation-seeker might say.
00:23:56.960 Right, right.
00:23:57.980 And so finding ways of maintaining that or even being aware that that could be an issue can really help some people.
00:24:06.700 And that's one of the things I love about doing stuff like this, where writing a book for everyday people, hopefully some people will see themselves in that description and maybe, you know, try to navigate that a little bit better.
00:24:19.120 Let's talk about the work that high sensation-seekers are drawn to.
00:24:21.860 What kind of jobs do they like to do? 0.67
00:24:23.560 You know, I think about sensation-seeking as a part of a person's personality.
00:24:27.980 Some people employ that in their work and not just in their, like, you know, out-of-work time.
00:24:33.860 So you can see that in first responders, for example, people in the military.
00:24:39.560 I interviewed an emergency room physician and a nurse.
00:24:43.720 You know, anywhere where you expect to find chaos, you want people who can handle that chaos in a way that is sort of elegant.
00:24:51.760 But sometimes they find themselves out of those kinds of jobs and that can be tough for them because they use that part of their personality in their jobs.
00:25:00.960 Okay, so if you're a high sensation-seeker and you just constantly feel bored at work, maybe one suggestion there is to find a job that offers more sensation.
00:25:10.180 Right, right.
00:25:10.840 Or find some recreational activity that can account for that, for sure.
00:25:15.120 And going back to this idea that there's not just one type of high sensation-seeker.
00:25:19.560 You can be someone who likes to look for excitement, thrill, et cetera, but is low on disinhibition, like you're disciplined.
00:25:28.180 So, like, you talk to a lot of, like, military special forces guys who love the thrill of jumping out of an airplane or being shot at.
00:25:36.260 But they were incredibly, incredibly disciplined.
00:25:39.260 Yes. And so those are people that probably had low levels of disinhibition and probably and hopefully low levels of border and susceptibility as well.
00:25:49.420 So they could use that, you know, thrill and adventure-seeking or experience-seeking in their careers in the military.
00:25:56.640 Yeah. Let's talk about, I'm curious about this. You've done some research on this a little bit.
00:26:00.600 Is high sensation-seeking associated with any, let's say, personality pathologies like sociopathy or psychopathy?
00:26:07.900 It can. You know, and what I don't want to suggest is that people that are high sensation-seekers have some kind of psychological disorder.
00:26:17.260 But when you look at certain kinds of psychological disorders, there are high sensation-seekers may be sort of overrepresented in certain categories.
00:26:25.900 You can see them overrepresented in antisocial personality disorder, a little bit overrepresented in addictive disorders, whether or not they're behavioral addictions or even, like, different kinds of chemical addictions as well.
00:26:40.780 Do you have any advice for high sensation-seekers who are listening right now on how to use their unique personality trait to flourish in life and make the world a better place?
00:26:50.100 Yeah. I think that the key is to make sure that you have that disinhibition and boredom susceptibility sort of under control, but also to think about that sort of empathy piece in terms of how other people might experience that high sensation-seeking.
00:27:06.320 You know, if you're in a car and, you know, changing lanes and going back and forth, you're probably really chill, but your passenger may be really freaked out and you might not realize it.
00:27:18.300 So it's important to sort of stop and think and to be able to see how other people might experience those things that you might be doing to make sure those relationships are going well.
00:27:27.600 Any advice for parents who've got kids who's like, this kid might be a high sensation-seeker and they're just pulling their hair out because they're just driving them crazy?
00:27:36.320 Yeah. And, you know, I've gotten a lot of emails from Barrett asking for that kind of advice.
00:27:41.400 To me, finding some things that their kids might do so they can do that high sensation-seeking in a healthy way.
00:27:48.260 One thing I really try to emphasize is that these things that you see high sensation-seeking people do, it's not just what they do, it's sort of who they are as a person.
00:27:58.260 We can find that when people aren't allowed to express that, it can really impact them because they don't have access to that thing that brings them awe.
00:28:07.000 So maybe enroll them in activities where they can do those high sensation-seeking kinds of things, whether or not it's, you know, that emotional high sensation-seeking in terms of that experience-seeking.
00:28:18.940 Or maybe it's, you know, a certain kind of gym that really emphasizes rock climbing or adventure sports.
00:28:25.020 Helping them find a way to do that that's sort of safe and respectful of other people is everything.
00:28:31.100 All right. So give them an outlet is basically what you're saying.
00:28:34.120 And what about us, I would consider myself today on the lower end of sensation-seeking, is there anything we can learn from high sensation-seekers?
00:28:44.460 I feel like there are.
00:28:45.760 I mean, I feel like, you know, one of the things I feel like I learned from talking to high sensation-seekers are a couple things that I really try to employ in my life a lot more.
00:28:55.400 Part of it is sort of trusting yourself.
00:28:56.900 You know, I think a lot of low sensation-seekers were trying to avoid risk at all costs.
00:29:02.600 But the thing I found from a lot of high sensation-seekers is that they trust themselves and that things work out better than they think they're going to.
00:29:11.100 They did this really interesting study that I always love talking about whenever I have a chance, where they had people sort of think about, like, you know, what things were they worried about at the moment.
00:29:21.360 And then they came back to them a couple of weeks later to say, hey, did those things that you were worried about actually happen?
00:29:27.460 And if they did happen, how did you handle it?
00:29:30.360 And what they discovered was about 80% of the things that people worry about on a daily basis never happen.
00:29:37.380 But as a low sensation-seeker, I feel like I sort of arrange my life so I have a plan A, a plan B, a plan C for everything.
00:29:44.000 High sensation-seekers trust themselves and they sort of put themselves into situations and they figure it out.
00:29:49.720 And I feel like that's really a lesson I feel like I've learned from them.
00:29:53.540 Have you done any, like, crazy things since you've done this book?
00:29:57.000 I think the book was probably the craziest thing I've done.
00:29:59.780 But those physical things, I just don't have the hardware to run that sort of program.
00:30:05.200 I get too overwhelmed, too much, not enough dopamine, way too much cortisol.
00:30:10.060 But I feel like I have tried more unusual foods because I feel like the worst that can happen is I just don't like it.
00:30:16.020 And so one thing I tell a lot of low sensation-seekers is sort of embrace your own version of awe.
00:30:22.340 That awe for a high sensation-seeker is going to be bungee jumping and base diving.
00:30:27.420 That may not be your awe.
00:30:29.560 And so the things that I find full of awe are going to be kind of dull for high sensation-seekers.
00:30:34.120 But I feel like I'm going to find my dopamine in my own ways.
00:30:37.860 Yeah, I love that.
00:30:38.720 So you have here, yeah, feel your own type of awe.
00:30:42.000 Try new things.
00:30:42.880 So if someone gives you, hey, let's go do this new thing instead of being like, ah, no, I don't want to do that.
00:30:48.780 Yeah, just go ahead and do it.
00:30:49.880 You probably won't regret it.
00:30:52.200 Right, right.
00:30:53.260 Well, Ken, this has been a great conversation.
00:30:55.000 Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
00:30:57.360 I'm at drkencarter.com on social media, but also on my website as well.
00:31:01.740 So you can check out my book, which is Buzz, Inside the Minds of Thrill Seekers, Daredevils, and Adrenaline Junkies, anywhere you find books online.
00:31:09.620 Fantastic.
00:31:10.040 Well, Ken Carter, thanks for your time.
00:31:11.040 It's been a pleasure.
00:31:11.440 Thanks so much.
00:31:12.880 My guest today was Dr. Ken Carter.
00:31:16.760 He's the author of the book, Buzz.
00:31:18.300 It's available on Amazon.com.
00:31:20.100 Check out our show notes at aom.is slash buzz, where you can find links to resources.
00:31:23.880 We delve deeper into this topic, including a more comprehensive test for determining where you are on the sensation-seeking scale.
00:31:30.300 Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast.
00:31:41.120 Make sure to check out our website at artofmanless.com, where you can find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles that we've written over the years about pretty much anything you think of.
00:31:49.480 And if you haven't done so already, I'd appreciate it if you take one minute to give us a review on a podcast or Spotify.
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00:32:00.560 As always, thank you for the continued support.
00:32:02.540 Until next time, it's Brett McKay.
00:32:04.100 Remind you to not listen to the AOM podcast, but put what you've heard into action.
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