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An introverts guide to increasing energy
- bluekmc82 5y agoI love these types of articles. I have joined many FB introvert groups. Seeing that there are others like me gives me a lot of comfort. I’m learning to adjust my expectations of myself more than trying to radically adjust myself.
- whilestanding 5y agoYou also may have joined yet another victim class echo chamber.
- bluekmc82 5y agoI don’t think so. I look at it like understanding any biological design. But I understand what you’re saying.
- xyzzy21 5y agoGood article. I'm E/I neutral so I've had to learn many of these for my I-half.
- amelius 5y agoParties also generally drain my energy. But I've found out something interesting. If people start playing games at a party (like card games), or if there is a discussion of a topic that really interests me, then my energy is magically replenished. Weird.
- ackbar03 5y agoThis is like me in a nutshell. If there's something to do then I can join in pretty naturally. Trying to find topics to talk about with strangers on the other hand can be quite difficult depending on my state and energy level. On some days I'm tired and just dgaf and the end result is extremely awkward interactions
- SyzygistSix 5y agoIt helps me when there is a common focus on an activity rather than just on people. Parties can be not so great; playing music with people, which is very similar, I'm totally fine with.
- musingsole 5y agoI'm the opposite. Break out a structured game in a party setting, and I'll need a nap ASAP. Let everyone amorphously mingle, and I can last for hours.
- Zircom 5y agoThis is me exactly. I hate parties, love game nights. As long as there's something everyone is doing I can participate in, I have no problem being part of the conversation, even if the subject has nothing to do with the actual game we're playing. But as soon as there's nothing to do and I just have to talk to people and that's the only thing that's going on, I can immediately feel my energy just draining away.
- dartharva 5y agoThis article feels like something straight from Buzzfeed
- rob_c 5y agoHave to agree. But hopefully without the crowd of "I now identify as this, how dare you" following on.
- wiz21c 5y agoI do hide in the bathroom (the sacred place where I'm guaranteed to be alone), I do the dishes as a meditation moment (don't talk to me). I mean, I don't believe I'm an introvert. I just happen to see I have many measurable common points with that kind of "buzzfeed" definitions of introvert. So this article feels quite accurate for me. Oh and I have plenty of people who I like to talk to. It's just that it drains me.
- anthomtb 5y agoIf you just skim the words and look at the cartoons then yeah, feels pretty Buzzfeed-ish. But if you give it a deep read there’s a lot of good advice in there. Maybe not so relevant to someone like myself, who’s 35 and well comfortable with his introverted habits. But if I’d read this article at 22 it would have been highly beneficial.
- dSebastien 5y agoI've spent many years of my life fighting against my introverted nature. I've now embraced who I am, and I respect my need to isolate & recharge. Some people (my wife included ;p) don't always get it, but I don't care. I know what I need to feel better.
- hn8788 5y agoI'm the same way. Even as a kid I never enjoyed parties with lots of people; 3-4 close friends is about the group size limit I can enjoy. I used to force myself to go to work functions because my wife would tell me I need to make more friends, but I just stopped going because it always felt like I was forcing myself to go so I'd seem "normal" to everyone else. Once I started doing what I want to do I felt much better, even though I can tell my co-workers think I'm depressed or something because I'd rather hang out at my desk working and listening to music than hanging out with 20+ people at the potluck in the conference room.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- mattlondon 5y agoIt bothers me when people just say "you are introverted" or "you are extroverted". Labelling people like this (i.e. a binary one or the other choice) is not helpful. Don't 100% match the definition for X? Then you are Y! I think in reality it is better to acknowledge that - like many things - introversion/extroversion is a broad scale with many shades of grey, and your personal position on the scale can and does change from situation to situation. You will ebb and flow over time - don't let over people tell you how to think and behave! :)
- ubercore 5y agoI agree with you, but the article explicitly covers this, and isn't making a binary argument for introversion vs extroversion.
- bloqs 5y agoIt might bother you, but extroversion and introversion are both ends of a rigorously documented personality trait, one of the Big Five. Everyone, (literally) is in one camp or another. Particularly stable people will sit around the median boundary, but will ultimately conform, even if slightly, to one camp or another.
- a0zU 5y agoYes, well documented in psychology, a field whose professionals even acknowledge as a psuedoscience, if a useful one. >Particularly stable people will sit around the median boundary. Ok, so you're saying it is more than just a boolean then?
- bloqs 5y agoIt's scientifically observable and proven, far more rigourously so than the "feeling" of the original comment, (a heuristic we all use), so what are you getting at? Are you suggesting that all of psychology, its documented research and phenomena is best dismissed because you decree it a pseudoscience? This is fallacious at best.
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- mrsmee89 5y agoAs someone who typically gets their energy depleted around people, there are certain people that increase my energy. There are also times where I almost need to interact with people on a biological level. Listening to my body is the thing that weirdly, used to take up a lot of energy because I wasn’t used to/ allowed to as a child. So I was constantly making difficult real-time decisions. As an adult, I’ve learned how to listen to my body and crucially adhering to it’s signals. As someone who like to think, perhaps too much, its the best investment I’ve ever made.
- mckirk 5y agoCould you elaborate a bit on how you weren't allowed to listen to your body as a child, and what kind of difficult real-time decisions that meant you had to make? Also, how did you work on improving that as an adult?
- wpietri 5y agoNot the poster, but it's very familiar to me. I grew up in the midwest, and a friend from there says, "In the midwest we don't have bodies or feelings." As a kid, I clearly remember having an epiphany: when people asked my how I was doing, they did not actually want to know how I was doing. There were a number of appropriate answers, "fine" first among them. If you watch the first 20 seconds of "How to Speak Minnesotan", it's this dynamic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-wx11l3nr4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-wx11l3nr4 The best way to convincingly say you're fine is to not know otherwise. So by my late teens I was very good at not knowing how I was feeling. After 20 years in California, I have unlearned a lot of this. Yoga especially helped, as at least with my instructor it was basically 90 minutes of learning to pay attention to the subtle feelings in my body. Unsurprisingly, paying attention to my emotional and physical health has a lot of benefits, so I am a much happier person and would never go back.
- vinay427 5y ago> After 20 years in California, I have unlearned a lot of this. Hmm, I’m curious which part. If anything, I seem to notice even more of this tendency in much of Southern California compared to the upper Midwest where I also grew up. The opposite is probably the case in the SF area, however, and possibly the Bay Area in general.
- togaen 5y agoI thought I was an introvert for a long time. Turned out I was actually a misanthrope. Weird.
- Borrible 5y agoOh, that is interesting. I always thought I'm a misfit, but I'm plain vanilla evil. Mostly harmless, getting the skeletons out of peoples closets and putting them in their fridge or arrange them on their sofas, so to speak. Back then I thought I do it to help truth coming to light. Giving a hint to get better. But I realized, I do it to scare them and have fun watching them. ... Nah, just kidding, really. So, how did you learn about yourself being a misanthrope?
- natrys 5y agoI don't think introversion/extroversion is a useful categorisation. Because I think it boil down just to what type of people or social situation one likes/dislikes. Introverts are uncomfortable with wider spectrum of people/situations, but they still do just fine/normally amongst people they like.
- jbverschoor 5y agoI am introverted but identify as extraverted.
- jbverschoor 5y agoNot sure why I get downvoted. Maybe it's full of rainbow snowflakes.
- stnmtn 5y agoI think the joke is just old, if the joke you were going for is the "I identify as an apache helicopter" type jokes. It's just old and not interesting now, it's been 5+ years of those jokes and they don't have a bite anymore.
- jbverschoor 5y agoWell, it gets more relevant every day
- ToddWBurgess 5y agoI am an extrovert which usually makes me stand out in a group of developers. I find being tuned into the needs of how introverts function has helped get along better with my peers.
- morsch 5y agoNot so much a guide to increasing energy than a guide to draining it less (by identifying which social situations feel draining and having less of them). Not bad advice, per se, but not exactly earth shattering.
- gdsdfe 5y agoFor the nth time the Myers-Briggs test is bogus, there's no scientific evidence that it works!
- gerbilly 5y agoIntroversion may also appear on Myers-Briggs, but it also one of the 'Big Five' personality factors, one of the most robust findings in psychology.
- sweuder 5y agoLiterally in the article as soon as Myers-Briggs was brought up: "Personality tests are full of broad generalities that should be taken with a grain of salt. Instead, personality tests should be treated as tools for self-reflection. They are indicators of tendencies, not hard and fast rules." Just a thing to help you think about yourself, not a diagnosis. Extraversion/Introversion is pretty deeply embedded in psychological theory, even if its not easily measured directly. FWIW
- tgaj 5y agoSome people feel better with simple labels, I get it. That's how our brain works. But still Myers-Briggs is only a toy and some people use it like a sophisticated tool.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- hliyan 5y agoFor over 25 years I wondered why social events drained me and what neurological phenomenon the metaphor "energy" stood for (which this article and many others like it don't seem to bother investigating). I've recently come to realize that it's the extent to which you see other human beings as a threat, which causes your brain to keep its "shields up", which can feel exhausting. After a observing myself a lot during social interactions, I've noticed that I feel drained to the extent I think the people around me can potentially judge me: I feel highly drained during extended family events, class reunions or ceremonies, but I feel perfectly fine amongst a small group of friends who have a don't-give a-sh*t attitude toward social propriety. I've also noticed that alcohol (a disinhibitor) can dramatically reduce the drain. It's also significantly reduced if I find a table with a few people I like, and get engrossed in a deep discussion and end up forgetting that I'm surrounded by other tables. Perhaps this energy we speak of is the energy the brain expends to continuously compute the requirements of the social contract in members of our species who don't have it sufficiently hardwired.
- mikevm 5y agoIt's also possible that you might have social anxiety, btw. Regarding introversion and "energy" - https://www.quietrev.com/why-introverts-and-extroverts-are-different-the-science/ https://www.quietrev.com/why-introverts-and-extroverts-are-d...
- hliyan 5y agoWould you say introversion and social anxiety are two distinct phenomena? I always viewed these as existing on the same spectrum.
- psyc 5y agoI thought the consensus was that they're distinct. In my case, I never experience any social anxiety (aside from public speaking) but I consider myself extremely introverted. I strongly prefer to be by myself doing solo activities, and never feel the need to see other people. But when I do encounter others, it's a perfectly comfortable experience and I can be as friendly and charming as anybody.
- MeinBlutIstBlau 5y agoPeople who put a label on what they are just want to identify with some group to pretend that they're special.
- jplr8922 5y agoI've read 'Personality Types' (the book where Jung define introversion and extraversion) many times by now. It is hard to understand at first, by now I am amazed about how his concepts are interpreted differently than what he intended. Introversion is a kind of filtering mechanism where your self concept (ego) overweight the importance of internal stimulis over external one (and vice versa for an extrovert). If a subject feels 'obligated' to respond to an external stimulus (such as a party) and to expend energy in that direction, that is extraversion. If you need to learn how to monitor internal stimulus such as fatigue levels or who makes you feel good, that sound like an extravert learning how to do introversion in order to manage himself. This process of learning how to get out of your usual favored way is part of what Jung called 'individuation', psychological development which starts in adulthood. When trying to understand the intro-extra spectrum, its not the behavior that matters the most, it is the cognition of the subject. Why did you stay alone last friday night? Is it because you had a hard week and you are tired (internal stimulus)? Do you avoid parties because you do not care that much about the feeling of the music (internal stimulus), and would rather to clearly hear others people stories and opinions (external stimulus)? How does the subject narrates his story?
- wpietri 5y agoI think it's better just to see the modern uses of the terms as distinct from Jung's. Term drift away from intent happens a lot. New York is now old, and St Francis of Assisi would not see much familiar in today's San Francisco.
- jplr8922 5y agoWell if my sister tells me that her last date was 'such of a introvert' I am not going to start a lecture of Jung. However if we discuss adaptation from one way of being into another, discussing the process on self transformation in the terms of the guys who described it first might be helpful. I personally think that the modern use of introversion and extraversion are very narrow, and limit the scope of personal growth.
- wpietri 5y ago
- enduser 5y agoTechnically introversion refers to people whose dominant cognitive function[1] has an “internal model” of the world, vs. extraversion where the world is the model. Introverts need down time because it takes processing time to update the internal model in response to stimuli. Extraverts don’t like being alone because when the world around them is empty “nothing is happening”. It’s not the enjoyment of company or solitude that makes us introverted or extraverted. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_Types https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_Types
- kubanczyk 5y agoThe "the world is the model" is a contradiction in terms. Please define what a "model" means in this context.
- dgreensp 5y agoThe definitions given in the article are the ones I would give; see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraversion_and_introversion#Extraversion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraversion_and_introversion#... I'm not familiar with the theory that only introverts have an "internal model" that needs updating. I would think we all run on models at various levels of cognition (given that the brain doesn't contain any actual "external world" in it, only models), which we update both in real-time and in later processing (such as while sleeping).
- avindroth 5y agoEveryone is introverted in a different way, and actually the best thing is let yourself be introverted for a while and let your mind figure out what’s going on. Note by my estimation this can take 12-24 months, which may be time you do not have. But oftentimes 12-24 months to sort out your psychological limits (permanently) is pretty cheap.
- dahart 5y ago> Being an introvert means, in broad terms, that you spend energy when you are with other people and you need alone time to recharge your energy. […] Be intentional about who you give your energy to This in a way clarifies for me why I don’t like the word “introvert”. I have always wanted to be intentional about who I give my energy to, and being in groups can undermine that intention in proportion to group size. Introversion tends to imply that someone is inside their head, concerned with self, and prefers no interaction to some. For me, the difference isn’t internal vs external, it’s more about small vs large, or maybe intimate conversation vs public conversation. I actually seek and crave interaction, though, even though the word “introvert” fits me better than “extrovert” most of the time. I just prefer personal interaction over groups. I want one on one discussions, I want a deeper interaction than what happens at parties, I want to find people with crossover interests or people interested in making things. Or even if it’s making small-talk, I would rather engage a single person than several. Maybe I’m overwhelmed with group dynamics; people at parties can be complicated trying to impress each other, and it makes giving and getting attention difficult and prone to superficial demonstrations. Is this why I prefer individual sports over team sports?
- rammy1234 5y agoConstant judgement I experience in a social interaction is a big drain but I learning to overcome by ignoring this fact and focus on interesting aspects of theirs. You can’t build on weakness you see.
- artificialLimbs 5y ago>> "Listen to your body and learn your limits" This was the most important lesson one for me, while it was applicable. The 'Listen to your body' part, anyway. I used to get drained around others, especially big crowds. I was always watching others, and 'becoming' them by putting all my attention outside myself. I heard of the technique of maintaining attention/focus inside the body. So I picked the belly, which turns out to work very well because there is so much sensation in that area for me. I began to focus on my belly as much as possible when I was out in public. Eventually you can begin to rapidly focus attention between yourself and others, say if you need to converse or pay attention to whatever external thing. This enabled me to become 'bored' when out in public, instead of the formerly usual mild state of panic/anxiety. It was completely life changing. Doing this made the other bullet points entirely secondary for me.
- sewzastep 5y ago> I heard of the technique of maintaining attention/focus inside the body meditation helped me a ton with social anxiety too. It allowed me to be OK with not knowing the right things to say.
- artificialLimbs 5y agoI had been meditating (zazen) for about 10 years prior to beginning this practice.
- AshleyJanssen 5y agoHey! Author here. I was pleasantly surprised to see this posted! I registered an account to say thanks for sharing. If anyone has any questions or wants to chat further, feel free to hit me up. :)
- jefc1111 5y agoThe graphic for "What introverts do to recharge at parties" really resonates with me. I'm going to expand on that by mentioning that one of the reasons I wanted to have children was as an accessory at social events (especially weddings - the most terrifying of all). It has worked out really well, thankfully. Especially at weddings.
- cortesoft 5y agoThis is all great.... except I have kids. I dont get to choose to have alone time. I can't tell my two year old that I just need an hour to relax.
- rsyring 5y agoAn option: play the Q-tip game. Get any safe small object that fits in your hand. Show it to your kid and tell them the game is to get the object from your hand. Then lay down, put your hand under your body, relax, and say "go." Rollover every little bit and let them "get it" from you every 5 mins or so. Kids usually love this, there is low energy physical engagement from you, but mostly you can just rest and enjoy the fun they are having. Can get hours of "rest" out of this with a two year old.