Thrill: Embracing the Creative Paradox of Sensitivity and Sensation Seeking (Second Edition) is Dr. Tracy Cooper’s research-based look at people who combine two traits rarely studied together: sensation seeking, the drive toward novelty, risk, and intensity, and high sensitivity, the deep processing and emotional attunement tied to a finely tuned nervous system. Roughly thirty percent of the population carries both traits, and for creative thinkers, that combination often produces both a heightened intake of ideas and original solutions, perspectives, and strategies.

This second edition is built on an original study Cooper conducted specifically for this book, adding a new framework to better understand how creativity manifests in Sensitive Sensation Seekers. The result is an evidence-based picture of how sensation seeking and high sensitivity interact in creative thinking across multiple life domains.

What’s New in This Edition

• Original research findings from Sensitive Sensation Seekers ground the book’s core framework.
• A closer look at how bursts of stimulation and stretches of withdrawal shape creative thinking, from first spark to finished idea.
• A direct challenge to standard creativity advice, and what works for this paradoxical temperament instead.
• Real-life examples spanning risk, career change, parenting, relationships, and navigating conflict.
• Practical tools for structuring work, relationships, and recovery around a nervous system built for both intensity and depth.

Who This Book Is For
Creativity here means something wider than artistic expression, it’s the capacity to generate new solutions, see connections others miss, and approach ordinary problems in original ways. Anyone who’s noticed they think differently under pressure, who needs novelty to stay engaged but solitude to process it, will find their experience acknowledged here in plain terms. Dr. Cooper doesn’t treat either trait as a problem to manage. The argument running through the book is that the tension between craving stimulation and needing solitude is what can generate original creative thinking, and that understanding the mechanism behind that tension allows you to realize your fuller creative self.

Available in paperback, hardback, and ebook, on Amazon , LULU, Draft2Digital, and other fine book sellers.

If Thrill’s second edition gave you the framework, Everyday Creators gives you the proof: real HSS/HSP stories of fear, failure, reinvention, and the creativity in between.

Thrill: Everyday Creators is the applied companion to Thrill, second edition, the book that explored how creativity manifests in Sensitive Sensation Seekers. Everyday Creators shows what that tension actually looks like when it’s lived out, day after day, by real people.

This is a collection of honest, unpolished stories from people navigating that same internal pull: a publisher who built an entire company around a 4am ritual because no existing structure ever fit his wiring. A woman who has moved more than thirty times, engineering every detail of her home and schedule around a nervous system that runs on overdrive. A man who walked away from a marriage and a country to stop suppressing who he was. A former police officer rebuilding his life after C-PTSD. A corporate executive who failed twice in business before finding his real calling. A skateboarder who has spent forty years using one sport to regulate a mind that won’t sit still.

None of these are polished success stories. They are real accounts of fear, perfectionism, burnout, reinvention, and the everyday, often invisible creativity it takes to build a life around being both deeply sensitive and hungry for intensity.
These stories are proof that this kind of creativity, born from traits that can feel contradictory, can be built into a life that works. Read them together, or read this one first. Either way, you’ll likely recognize yourself somewhere in these pages.

Available in paperback, hardback, and ebook, on Amazon, LuLu, Draft2Digital, and other fine book sellers.

Have you struggled to find a career that truly fits who you are as a highly sensitive person? You’re not alone. In Thrive, Dr. Tracy Cooper presents important new research findings and real-world narratives from HSPs representing many career paths and life stages. This book empowers you to understand how HSPs experience the modern workplace, recognize your unique strengths, and discover emerging opportunities that honor your depth of processing and empathy. Based on and extending the pioneering research of Dr. Elaine Aron, Thrive is the essential guide for the highly sensitive person who is ready to move beyond survival — and truly thrive.

Available in paperback, ebook, and audiobook on Amazon and IngramSpark .

Do you love roller coasters yet prefer safe thrills? Crave new and novel experiences yet need to think things through? Are you deeply empathic, highly creative, and experience a rich inner life — while also getting restless when things are too routine? You may be a high sensation seeking highly sensitive person. In this groundbreaking book, Dr. Tracy Cooper — himself an HSS/HSP — presents new research findings that illuminate how sensation seeking and high sensitivity coexist in about 30% of the HSP population. Thrill is the only book dedicated to understanding this unique dual trait combination, offering insights into creativity, non-conformity, and the pursuit of an “optimal level of stimulation” that honors both sides of who you are.

Available in paperback, ebook, and audiobook on Amazon.

Do you experience intense emotions, a deep and rich inner life, and sometimes need to withdraw to recharge in quiet? You may be a highly sensitive man. In Empowering the Sensitive Male Soul, Dr. Tracy Cooper — author of Thrive and Thrill — draws on original research, years of one-on-one consulting with highly sensitive men, and his own experience as an HSS/HSP man to explore what it truly means to be sensitive and male. Addressing topics like anger, perceptions, career, creativity, relationships, and parenting, this book does not take the position that masculinity is toxic. Rather, it invites men to rise as quiet leaders, patient healers, and curious creators in a world that sorely needs them. Whether you are a sensitive man or love one, this book is about finding your voice through the cultural confusion and expressing it in ways that move us closer to wholeness.

Available in paperback, ebook, and audiobook on Amazon and IngramSpark .