Nowadays we are more and more exposed to external environmental stimuli and increased performance demands. This particularly affects those individuals who are more sensitive to such stimuli than average, like people high on the trait “sensory processing sensitivity (SPS). While these people generally have a benefit by being flexible and creative, they are also more susceptible to overstimulation. Drug use can serve as a dysfunctional way to deal with overstimulation. Our proposal will employ existing longitudinal human cohort studies and an environmentally-controlled animal study to delineate for the first time which social environmental factors increase drug use and which ones contribute to the recovery from drug use, in high SPS subjects. The identification of associated biomarkers will provide a mechanistic account for the ‘causing’ and ‘curing’ potential of social environmental factors in high SPS individuals.