Adventure Thrills are Addictive

Behavioral addictions may have social as well as endocrine components, and may include antisocial activities such as crime and gambling, relatively neutral activities such as videogames and internet use, and positive addictions such as sport and exercise (Lichtenstein et al., 2014). Here I argue that participants in many forms of adventure recreation also experience particularly powerful behavioral addictions. This leads them to devote continually increasing proportions of time and resources to carrying out their preferred activities at higher and higher levels of skill, with higher and higher physical risk. High-risk high-skill adventure recreation has been analyzed previously from the perspectives of commercial tourism products (Buckley, 2007); participant emotions and personalities (Faullant et al., but not specifically for high-risk adventure activities. Here, therefore, I test the behaviors of adventure participants against medical, mental-health and sports-science criteria for behavioral The criteria used for this test are derived principally from those used by Marks (1990), Brown (1997) and Lichtenstein et al. (2014). According to Marks (1990), the basic symptom of behavioral addiction is a growing psychological pressure for that behavior, which disappears when the addictive behavior is completed, and then returns subsequently. Marks (1990) proposed five testable criteria, namely: increasing preoccupation prior to addictive behavior; strong emotional reward from addictive behavior; withdrawal pains if deprived of addictive behavior; diminishing returns, requiring increasingly extreme addictive behavior; and prioritization of addictive behavior over other obligations and expenditures. Brown (1997) proposed a similar and approximately corresponding set, namely: salience, conflicts, mood modification, tolerance, withdrawal symptoms, and loss of control. These were the set used most recently by Lichtenstein et al. (2014) in testing for exercise addiction. The two sets differ slightly in degree of specificity and time periods considered. Thus salience refers to the position of an activity in the overall lifestyle of the participant, whereas preoccupation refers to increasing attention immediately prior to undertaking the activity. Prioritization is a general term, whereas conflicts and loss of control refer to specific outcomes from that prioritization. Emotional reward is one specific category of mood modification. In applying these criteria to adventure recreation, both sets are therefore considered jointly, as below. The adventure activities used for this test are: surfing, sailboarding, kiteboarding, hang-gliding, helicopter snowboarding, and whitewater rafting and kayaking (Buckley, 2007, 2012). At the highest skill levels, these activities also involve high physical risk. There are many other adventure activities, including motorized activities, which are not included …