At the very least, say introverts and extroverts who are in love, life is surely interesting.
“Trust me, we’ve had our challenges,” said Lariza Ozuna, 39, a self-professed introvert engaged to extroverted Andrew Carlson, 32. “But we’ve also had our triumphs.” For starters, Ozuna is learning why her fiancé would prefer a trip to Las Vegas over her preference—a weekend at a cabin “up north.”
Continue reading “Introverts and Extroverts”
Field Guide to the Loner: The Real Insiders
Loners are pitied in our up-with-people culture. But the introvert reaps secret joy from the solitary life.
By Elizabeth Svoboda, Psychology Today
Miina Matsuoka lives by herself in New York City. She owns two cats and routinely screens her calls. But, before you jump to conclusions, note that she is comfortable hobnobbing in any of five languages for her job as business manager at an international lighting-design firm. She just strongly prefers not to socialize—opting instead for long baths, DVDs, and immersion in her art projects. She does have good, close friends, and goes dancing about once a month, but afterward feels a strong need to “hide and recoup.” In our society, where extroverts make up three-quarters of the population, loners (except Henry David Thoreau) are pegged as creepy or pathetic. But soloists like Matsuoka can function just fine in the world—they simply prefer traveling through their own interior universe.
Loners often hear from well-meaning peers that they need to be more social, but the implication that they’re merely black-and-white opposites of their bubbly peers misses the point. Introverts aren’t just less sociable than extroverts; they also engage with the world in fundamentally different ways.
The mob thinks we are maladjusted. Of course we are adjusted just fine, not to their frequency. They take it personally. They take offense. Feel hurt. Get angry. They do not blame owls for coming out at night, yet they blame us for being as we are. Because it involves them, or at least they believe it does, they assemble the troops and call us names. Crazy. Cold. Stuck-up. Standoffish. Aloof. Afraid. Lacking in social skills. Bizarre. Unable to connect. Incapable of love. Freaks. Geeks. Sad. Lonely. Selfish. Secretive. Ungrateful. Unfriendly. Serial killers.
The mob wants friends along when doing errands, working out at the gym, at the movies. The mob depends on advice. Eating alone in decent restaurants horrifies the mob, saddens the mob, embarrasses the mob. The mob wants friends. The mob needs to be loved. It lives to be loved. Or hated, with that conjoined fervor with which mobs face their enemies. Both love and hate are all about engagement. About being linked with humanity generally, as a policy. Loners have nothing against love but are more careful about it. Sometimes just one fantastic someone is enough.
As a minority, we puzzle over nonloners, their strange values. Why do they require constant affirmation, validation, company, support? Are they babies or what? What bothers them about being alone? What are they so afraid of? Why can’t they be more like us? Loners live among the mob, so the mob mistakes us for its own, presuming and assuming. When the mob gets too close, the truth is revealed. Running or walking away, chased or free, any which way, we tell the mob in effect I don’t need you. Hell hath no fury like a majority scorned.
Continue reading “One is (Not) the Loneliest Number”
The little country mouse looked at the trap, and he looked at the cheese, and he looked at the little city mouse. “If you’ll excuse me,” he said, “I think I will go home. I’d rather have barley and grain to eat and eat it in peace and comfort, than have brown sugar and dried prunes and cheese and be frightened to death all the time!”
The Country Mouse and the City Mouse
****
Jung believed that objects fascinate extroverts. It is through objects that extroverts are able to define themselves and, therefore, interact with their surroundings. They take delight in themselves and people and are “open, sociable and jovial, or at least friendly and approachable…on good terms with everybody, or quarrel with everybody, but always relate to them in some way, and in turn (are) affected by them.”
Extroverts can adjust easily to existing conditions. They like to be “the life of the party” or “in the spotlight.” They feel the most at ease when they are surrounded by a group of “enthusiastic” people and, in many cases, they are able to lure large amounts of people toward them. They possess a “need to join in and ‘get with it’ and the capacity to endure bustle and noise of every kind, and actually find them enjoyable.”
Introverts, on the other hand, define themselves through personal revelations. They look inside themselves (instead of to others) to circumscribe the type of individual they are. They are usually more serene and appear more distant than extroverts. “Their emotions, passions, and powerful impulses lie dormant under the surface of their equanimity. They try to hold their ground against outside influences by giving them low value, by letting in only flashes and snippets of what is happening, or by staying aloof from them altogether.”
They define not only their individuality based on their own personal revelations, but their decision-making as well is constructed within themselves. They seldom look to others for answers of how to live or who to be. According to Jung, “crowds, majority views, public opinion, popular enthusiasm never convince him of anything but merely make him creep still deeper into his shell.” *
I hate repeating myself. This is one of the main reasons that I write. If I already wrote about something, I am unlikely to be interested in writing about it again. It’s done. If you were shouting over me when I was talking, you miss it—and that’s it. If I was telling you to watch out for the car and you were too busy doing an extroverted dance, when the car slams into you I don’t say “Thank God!”—I say, “Bless Darwin for giving me the tools to understand.”
Continue reading “Understanding Introverts”
Everybody knows that I love Americans. I love their enthusiasm, I love their accents and I love…well, loads of things about them. But not everyone in England shares my taste for befriending people from the good old US of A. You see, Americans have a very off-putting problem…they’re just too bloody loud.
Continue reading “The Cure for Being American”
I’m an introvert.
If you’re an introvert too, you may have wondered what it’s like to be an extrovert. Well, I can tell you. When I was young, I briefly took a medication that, as a side effect, turned me into an extrovert.
Continue reading “Inversion”
“The introverted brain has a higher level of internal activity and thinking than the extroverted brain. It is dominated by the long, slow pathway of another neurotransmitter called acetylcholine. Introverts require a limited range of not too much or too little dopamine, another brain chemical, and a good level of acetylcholine to keep a calm feeling instituted. Acetylcholine serves as a trigger to the brain to conserve energy and stimulates good thinking and feeling.
“Laney explains that the extroverted brain just doesn’t have as much internal activity going on. So, it scans the external world for stimulation to fuel the shorter, quicker dopamine pathway. ‘The signals from the brain travel to the Full-Throttle (sympathetic nervous) system that controls certain body functions and influences how outies behave,’ she says.
“But, an extrovert needs its sidekick, adrenaline, to help cook up more dopamine in the brain, Laney says. Like plants to sunlight, their energy comes from the places they go; the people they see. ‘Leave an extrovert alone for two minutes and he will be calling someone on his cell phone.’”
