John K
Donor
- MBTI
- INFJ
- Enneagram
- 5W4 549
The meaning of words gets very smeared out doesn't it? Colloquially, introversion has come to be associated with social inadequacy in societies where extroverts have the high ground and make the rules of engagement. It's quite complicated to disentangle. What I find in myself is that I build up nervous energy and stability when I'm on my own, or with people very close to me. I can sustain this almost indefinitely and it's when I'm most relaxed. When I'm with people, it drains me of energy - the rate at which it gets used up depends on how close the people I'm with are similar to myself in type and in outlook. Extroverted folks tend to be the other way round - they lose energy when alone, and gain energy from wide-ranging company. Now this is a simplification - we need to use our physical muscles to stay healthy even though we lose energy that way, and we need to rest in order for our muscles to recover after we exert ourselves. Our social needs are like this whether we are introverted or extroverted people - we cannot be isolated without getting into trouble, but nor can we be continually in company without time out for rest, but the balance is different between extroverts and introverts.
What I see in myself is that in social situations I bring other people inside myself to relate to them and this inevitably means I am trying to integrate them with who I am - but of course many people are nothing like me, so this is very energy draining. It's not a matter of choice, this is just the way I work. When people relate to each other 'out there' they are more likely to take what they find as they find it and that needs less energy.
Of course I relate to the whole external world in the same kind of way - I bring it inside. That doesn't demand energy in the same kind of way, but it makes it seem less immediate, less 'real' to me than I gather it seems to others. But then the issue of introvert v extrovert gets tangled up with the MBTI functions. For example as someone with dominant introverted intuition, I have inferior extroverted sensing. That means that I'm a little removed from reality, and I can go around in a dream sometimes. It also means that I can become dizzy with too much sensory input pretty quickly - a noisy bar, a long distance drive, searching for an elusive jigsaw piece or scanning books in a library - a noisy office, a difficult meeting, dealing with a long list of urgent business emails before I retired. In fact I suspect that for introverted intuitives, inferior sensing has as much to do with their social attitude as being an introvert, because we become overwhelmed by the sensory input of the social context as much as by the social demands.
A good way to tell if you are predominantly introverted is if you need to spend a large part of your time alone, or with people very close to you, and really like doing so. If you prefer to spend the majority of your time amongst plenty of other people and find being alone stresses you, then you are more likely extroverted.
