Why do people take risks that could kill them?
Some people feel most alive right before something goes wrong. A psychologist named Marvin Zuckerman spent decades studying why. A pioneer in personality research, he gave it a name: sensation seeking (Ersche et al. 2010). Sensation seeking is a personality trait that comes down to how much novelty, risk, and sensory intensity a person's nervous system needs just to feel something at all.
Zuckerman built a tool to measure this trait. It is called the Sensation Seeking Scale, or SSS. The scale has four parts, and together they map a person's overall sensation seeking tendencies, from mild curiosity all the way to high sensation seeking, sometimes called thrill-seeking tendencies in everyday language.
The first part is thrill and adventure seeking. This is the pull toward physical risk: skydiving, scuba diving, or a high-speed dive off a cliff with no rope. The second part is experience seeking. It is a hunger for new experiences and new sensations, even strange, unconventional, or exploratory ones that push past ordinary cultural influences.
The third part is disinhibition. It shows up as impulsive, spontaneous choices, an eagerness to experiment and gamble, made with little thought about what comes next. The fourth part is boredom susceptibility, a low tolerance for monotonous, predictable routine.
Ordinary, adventurous life can still feel too slow for a high sensation seeker. Without some new source of intense sensations, novel experiences, or exciting experiences to chase, they can feel bored and restless fast. People who score high on this scale, sometimes called HSS or high sensation-seekers in research, are not reckless by accident.
Their brains process reward differently. Many need a bigger hit of dopamine and adrenaline just to feel the same excitement someone else gets from far less (LaSpada et al. 2020). That wiring alone rarely turns someone into a thrill-seeker.
Add a frightening or unpredictable childhood, though, and this natural propensity to seek out new thrills can turn an ordinary willingness to take risks into a coping tool. Not everyone with these personality traits ends up struggling. But if you recognize a sensation-seeking personality, an old hunger for intense experiences, in yourself or in someone you love, that recognition matters.
A fast car, a roller coaster, a mountain with no rope. From the outside, sensation seeking behavior can look adventurous. From the inside, it is often an old, sensory craving, an element of risk built from sensations and experiences that started long before the risk itself.
Is there a real link between trauma and thrill-seeking behavior?
For a lot of people, the risk-taking did not start with the risk. It started years earlier, in a home that never felt steady enough to relax in. A child's nervous system can spend years bracing for the next hard thing. Later in life, that same fear can turn into a pull toward extreme experiences (Kianpoor & Bakhshani 2012).
Researchers have a term for this: dissociation. In plain terms, it means checking out of your own body and feelings when something feels like too much to sit with. It works like an emergency exit for the mind.
One study followed 920 young adults. It asked about childhood trauma, checking out mentally, and how well they could manage their emotions day to day. The people who struggled most with compulsive, hard-to-control behavior also reported far more emotional abuse and neglect growing up (Evren et al. 2019). They also reported far more episodes of checking out mentally.
Trauma did not sit quietly in the background. It actively shaped how their brains learned to cope. That is often the starting point behind someone's childhood trauma coping mechanisms, even decades later.
This does not mean every hard childhood leads to thrill-seeking. It does not mean every thrill-seeker carries old trauma, either. It means the two show up together often enough that researchers, and treatment providers, take the connection seriously.
If trauma is part of your story too, you deserve care that treats both sides of it.
Check your insurance coverage to see what confidential treatment options are available to you.
When does an adrenaline habit become an adrenaline addiction?
Kuznetsov and Nikolau did not stop at one climb. Court records describe a pattern of prior stunts, each one riskier than the last, before the Empire State Building attempt that finally got them arrested. That pattern has a name in addiction science: tolerance. It means needing more of something to get the same effect you used to get from less.
There is a theory that explains why people pick one specific way of coping over another. It is called the self-medication idea. The short version: people do not pick their coping tool at random.
They pick whatever calms the exact feeling that is hardest for them to sit with. That could be a drink, a pill, or a climb with no rope (Hall & Queener 2007).
Common adrenaline addiction symptoms follow a similar shape. Watch for a need for bigger risks just to feel something. Watch for restlessness during quiet, ordinary stretches of life. Watch for using risk itself, an addiction to adrenaline, to escape a feeling with nowhere else to go.
Childhood trauma can leave a real, physical mark on the body's stress system. That mark can last well into adulthood. It can shape how a person responds to fear and reward for years afterward (Alfonso 2021).
That is not a character flaw. It is biology, working exactly the way it learned to survive. So when Kuznetsov says climbing is "essential" to him, that word is doing real work. It is need language, the kind you would hear from someone explaining why they cannot imagine a day without a drink.
Treatment built around the person behind the pattern exists for exactly this reason. Talk to our admissions team about a plan addressing what is actually driving the risk-taking, the adrenaline addiction, or the substance use underneath. Our guide to overcoming substance and behavioral addictions breaks down the brain science behind this in more detail.
What do their own words reveal that the headlines didn't?
Kuznetsov has said a few things publicly that are worth sitting with. They deserve more than a headline. "The higher I went, the easier it was to breathe," he once said, describing a difficult home life. Thin air usually makes breathing harder, not easier, which tells you the real danger he was escaping was never in the sky.
He has also defended the climbing this way: "We're not terrorists, not suicidal, not hurting anyone... this expanded state of mind, it's essential for me." Notice the shape of that sentence. He lists everything he is not before he says what he needs.
That pattern shows up in research on people who choose extreme sports on purpose. One study of BASE jumpers found that most did not describe their sport as a thrill for its own sake. Instead, they described it in terms of identity and control, something core to who they are, not just something they enjoy on weekends (Allman et al. 2009).
Researchers who study risk-taking on purpose call this "edgework." It is the idea that people use high-stakes moments to manage big emotion, or to grab back a sense of control they never had (Anderson 2006). In plain terms, it is a way of turning fear into something you can steer, instead of something that just happens to you.
None of this is a diagnosis of two people neither of us has ever met. But the pattern is a familiar one, and it shows up in far more places than a headline about a skyscraper.
Understanding where a pattern comes from is the first step toward changing it. Verify your insurance benefits to find out how treatment could work for you or someone you love.
If risk-taking is a coping mechanism, what does healthier coping actually look like?
If risk-taking has become one of your trauma coping mechanisms, here is good news: this pattern responds to treatment. It responds even better when both sides get treated together, not one after the other.
For a long time, the common practice was to treat the addiction first. Any underlying trauma waited until later, once things had settled down. Research has since shown that approach can leave people stuck.
In one clinical trial, people who received therapy for trauma and substance use at the same time saw real drops in trauma symptoms. Their substance use did not get worse in the process (Mills et al. 2012).
A separate trial compared three approaches to treating trauma and substance use together. People in the integrated program, the one treating both conditions side by side, showed cleaner drug tests. They also showed stronger follow-through with treatment than people in standard, single-focus care (McGovern et al. 2015).
This is the whole idea behind dual diagnosis treatment. Your trauma, your anxiety, or your need for intensity gets treated in the same room, by the same team, as whatever substance or behavior became the coping tool. Both get treated together, at the same time.
At Wish Recovery, that looks like a small, twelve-client setting where care can actually stay personal. It includes our dual diagnosis program alongside therapies like CBT, DBT, and EMDR, plus holistic options like yoga, acupuncture, and sound therapy, all under one roof from detox through outpatient care. Building genuinely healthy coping mechanisms for trauma takes more than willpower. It takes a team.
You don't have to already have the words for this
Recovery means giving that need for intensity somewhere safer to go, one that does not cost you everything else. If any of this sounds like you or someone you love, our team at Wish Recovery is here, privately and without judgment, whenever you are ready to talk.
You do not have to figure out the next step alone tonight. Contact Wish Recovery for a confidential, judgment-free conversation about what care could look like for you. If alcohol is part of what you are managing right now, our guide to alcohol detox symptoms walks through what to expect.
Disclaimer: This article is intended for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical, psychological, or psychiatric advice, diagnosis, or treatment. If you or someone you love is struggling with substance use or a mental health condition, please consult a qualified healthcare provider or reach out to a treatment professional directly.
Frequently asked questions
Is adrenaline addiction real?
It is not an official clinical diagnosis. But the reward-and-tolerance cycle behind compulsive risk-taking looks a lot like the one behind substance use disorder. That is why treatment providers often use the same dual diagnosis approach to treat it (Hall & Queener 2007).
What is sensation seeking?
Sensation seeking is a measurable personality trait. It describes how much novelty, risk, or intensity someone needs just to feel something at all. Psychologist Marvin Zuckerman identified it as its own predictor of substance use risk, separate from simple impulsiveness (Ersche et al. 2010).
What are unhealthy trauma coping mechanisms?
A coping mechanism turns unhealthy when it has to keep escalating to work, or when it starts hurting your safety and relationships. Research links this pattern to childhood trauma working through dissociation and trouble managing emotion (Evren et al. 2019).
References
Alfonso, C. A. (2021). An overview of the psychodynamics of addiction. Psychodynamic Psychiatry, 49(3), 363–369. https://doi.org/10.1521/pdps.2021.49.3.363
Allman, T. L., Mittelstaedt, R. D., Martin, B., & Goldenberg, M. (2009). Exploring the motivations of BASE jumpers: Extreme sport enthusiasts. Journal of Sport & Tourism, 14(4), 229–247. https://doi.org/10.1080/14775080903453740
Anderson, L. (2006). Edgework. Symbolic Interaction, 29(4), 577–583. https://doi.org/10.1525/si.2006.29.4.577
Ersche, K. D., Turton, A. J., Pradhan, S., Bullmore, E. T., & Robbins, T. W. (2010). Drug addiction endophenotypes: Impulsive versus sensation-seeking personality traits. Biological Psychiatry, 68(8), 770–773. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2010.06.015
Evren, C., Evren, B., Dalbudak, E., Topcu, M., Kutlu, N., & Elhai, J. D. (2019). Severity of dissociative experiences and emotion dysregulation mediate the relationship between childhood trauma and Internet addiction symptom severity among young adults. Düşünen Adam: The Journal of Psychiatry and Neurological Sciences, 32(4), 334–344. https://doi.org/10.14744/DAJPNS.2019.00048
Hall, D. H., & Queener, J. E. (2007). Self-medication hypothesis of substance use: Testing Khantzian's updated theory. Journal of Psychoactive Drugs, 39(2), 151–158. https://doi.org/10.1080/02791072.2007.10399873
Kianpoor, M., & Bakhshani, N. M. (2012). Trauma, dissociation, and high-risk behaviors. International Journal of High-Risk Behaviors and Addiction, 1(1), 7–11. https://doi.org/10.5812/ijhrba.4624
LaSpada, N., Delker, E., East, P., Blanco, E., Delva, J., Burrows, R., Lozoff, B., & Gahagan, S. (2020). Risk taking, sensation seeking and personality as related to changes in substance use from adolescence to young adulthood. Journal of Adolescence, 82, 23–31. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.adolescence.2020.04.011
Mills, K. L., Teesson, M., Back, S. E., Brady, K. T., Baker, A. L., Hopwood, S., Sannibale, C., Barrett, E. L., Merz, S., Rosenfeld, J., & Ewer, P. L. (2012). Integrated exposure-based therapy for co-occurring posttraumatic stress disorder and substance dependence: A randomized controlled trial. JAMA, 308(7), 690–699. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2012.9071
McGovern, M. P., Lambert-Harris, C., Xie, H., Meier, A., McLeman, B., & Saunders, E. (2015). A randomized controlled trial of treatments for co-occurring substance use disorders and post-traumatic stress disorder. Addiction, 110(7), 1194–1204. https://doi.org/10.1111/add.12943
July 06, 2026
