How I Became An Introvert — Maybe

Anyone who has known me throughout my life would tell you that I am the furthest thing in the world from an introvert. Far from it.

I have, at times, reveled in the attention of others — whether on stage in plays, as a high school and recreational athlete, in the many blogs I’ve written and the fairly robust social media life I’ve had, even to the point of cracking jokes (at appropriate times) in work meetings and doing things like reading announcements in church as a kid. I like talking and I like being around people.

So, imagine my surprise when I took a personality type test recently (within the last couple of months) and it told me I was an introvert.

Yeah, I wasn’t ready for that. All my life, I’d identified myself as being outgoing and fun. No offense to introverts, but until recently my attitude has been that they just weren’t confident enough in themselves. I’ll get to that in a minute.

So… I went forth with this new knowledge about myself and started to work on some reasons that this could be. I read up more on what being an introvert really meant, as my existing pop psychology definition was possibly wrong.

What I discovered (and probably already knew internally, but just didn’t think about it as much) was this:

Being an introvert or extrovert has nothing to do with how outgoing you are. But, it has everything to do with where you get your energy. Extroverts take energy from the attention of others. Introverts recharge their own energy during times when they’re alone.

And armed with this knowledge, I began to ponder: what is it that makes someone an introvert or extrovert? And I came up with some not-necessarily-divergent theories about this:

1. Extroversion/Introversion isn’t all or nothing.

As I have mentioned in other places — my son is autistic. He’s 16 now, so I’ve had a lot of time to think about and read about autism and what it really means. The key thing is that if you know an autistic person, you know one autistic person.

Autism is a spectrum. It’s not a scale, not a measurement that can be indicated by a point on a line from left to right. Some kids are completely withdrawn, some are very much in the world. Some have sensory issues with food flavors and textures, some can’t handle loud, sudden sounds. Some can’t deal with busy-ness going on around them. Some can’t talk at all, and some have no internal monologue and say everything they’re thinking.

Thinking about autism in this way for as long as I have been at this point, I’ve started thinking about other mental qualities and whether there’s a spectrum for them, as well. I’m pretty sure there is. Sexuality, for example. There’s outright gay or straight, there’s bisexuality, there’s pansexuality, there are gender identity extremes, and probably a bunch of other that I’m not aware of or simply not remembering. That’s clearly not a left-to-right scale, either.

So perhaps the term “ambivert” is really a thing. Having characteristics of both extro- and introversion makes the most sense, as not everyone is all introvert or all extrovert. Maybe I’ve been a little further along the spectrum toward introversion all along, right?

2. Extroversion and Introversion levels can change based on time and environment

So, if it’s possible to have characteristics of both, how do they change? With time and environment.

The time thing just makes sense. Things don’t usually just change in an instant — it takes time to build something or to tear it down. Even in situations we feel like things all changed in an instant have history behind them. The asteroid that killed the dinosaurs didn’t materialize out of nowhere, it flew billions of miles before hitting the earth.

So what could change me from being an extroverted person to a more introverted one? Well, the obvious one is the recent pandemic.

We weren’t able to be around each other as much. Those of us who thrived on interaction weren’t able to practice that as much. We literally got out of practice interacting with people socially.

Another example of being more isolated (and less able to feed off others’ energy) comes from being in a special needs household. Having a son on the autism spectrum means saying no to things that wouldn’t have been an issue before. We used to be season ticket holders for the Columbus Crew Major League Soccer team, for example. We rarely missed a game. But when you have a child who couldn’t handle the noise and crowd of a sporting event like that, you have to give it up, and we did.

Ergo, in a world where we were told that we had to avoid face to face interaction with other people, or had to curtail it because of our son’s situation, we’ve had to come up with other ways to recharge ourselves internally.

(Here’s the change in environment.)

Some people do this via massive social media adoption — feeding off the curated feelings of others. Others make the effort to create physically-distanced activities where they could still be around other people but lessening the possibility of viral infection or sensory overload. In the example of the pandemic, some ignored the physical-distancing mandates outright. And some developed ways to calm themselves and regain strength internally via meditation, reading, breathing exercises, prayer, and more.

I started with the social media adoption angle for a while. That didn’t work for me very well. As someone who fed off the energy of others, I found social media to be a mostly negative place (well, until I found Medium, natch) and was turning myself into a crotchety old man. “You kids, get off my lawn!” and all that.

So I found myself turning to meditation and breathing exercises. I’ll probably talk about this more, but I’ve been doing the Wim Hof Method for a few years now. While the ice baths and cold showers are what people think of when you mention Wim and his practices, another big part of that method is the breathing component. I redoubled that effort as the pandemic hit — making this a key part of my morning routine to the point where I feel worse on days I don’t do it. And yes, I take the cold showers daily as often as I can, too.

Using this method over time, I’ve felt myself grow calmer and more internally-strengthened. I am much more able to simply sit back and watch other people interact — and be perfectly comfortable with that.

That may be due to the chemical rushes that come from deep breathing and cold exposure, or it may be due to my personal intention to get something out of it. Whatever it is (and there’s plenty of science that indicates the former, including a Nobel Prize in Physiology), it made a change in me.

So now I’m more of an introvert. I guess I sort of made myself that way, through a combination of changes to my life. I’m still comfortable in social situations, and can get some energy from them (especially if they’re positive ones). But I can also simply sit and breathe, do some exercises, or take a cold shower and get back energy as well.

It’s a good place to be. And maybe as things loosen up, socially, I’ll wander back over to the extrovert side of things again. It’s interesting to know that we can change.

I think the most important take-away from all this experience, though, is that it’s important to not force ourselves to identify too much with one word like “introvert” or “extrovert.” My experience shows that these can change over time — holding on to one or the other may be keeping us in a place we don’t necessarily want to be. I like the experience of being able to try out different ways of living — I hope I never stop changing.