At various times in my life, from the outside looking in, you might have judged me an introvert or an extrovert. In my early 30s, I was very social. I was the person in my apartment block who would introduce myself to the neighbours, organise barbeques on the roof, and gather teams for the local pub quiz. I hated not having social plans on a Saturday night, and I had a big circle of friends. Cut to my early 40s, and you would have found me living a much more internal life. My favourite weekends being the ones where I had no plans and didn’t leave the house, curled up on the couch with my nose in a book.
Did my personality change over the intervening decade? Was this just ageing? I don’t think so.
What happened was I crashed. After too many years of over-exertion and over-taxing of my adrenal system, I started to develop chronic health issues. The symptoms in my body forced me to recognise that I was living out of alignment with myself. More specifically, I was living in a very dysregulated nervous system.
As I navigated the path to rebalancing my system, I came to recognise some important things about myself. I love people. My work is all about people, and my loved ones are extremely important to me, but I’m not good at regulating my nervous system in social situations. Sometimes in my youth, alcohol was a crutch to soothe social anxiety, as it is for many, but my health issues forced me to let that crutch go. I live in a sensitive nervous system that is very porous to the energies of people around me, and I often need to withdraw from social situations to regroup and restore my energy.
You might say these are the hallmarks of an introvert, and I would agree. Except that we tend to think of introversion and extroversion as fairly fixed personality traits, whereas I have come to believe that is not necessarily so.
My years in the therapy room have taught me that the people we label ‘introverts’ are the ones who can regulate their nervous system better when they are alone, and are more dysregulated around others, while those we label ‘extroverts’ tend to have the opposite pattern – being alone is more dysregulating, while being with others offers comfort and soothing. Our more dysregulated state is the one where we drain our battery fastest. It’s often the place where we are holding our breath, scanning for cues of danger, and generally pedalling harder to stay safe and avoid real or imagined threat. How we show up in our nervous system determines whether we are replenished or depleted.
As babies, we are born with little to no capacity to balance our own nervous system, and as we develop through childhood, we try to figure out what helps us to feel safe, calm and connected. For some, this comes from being around safe, calm adults with whom our internal rhythms can fall in sync. For others, this may not be available. Perhaps the caregiving figures never learned to settle themselves and so can’t offer this. In this case, we may learn to find safety and calm in other ways. We may discover it’s easier when no one is around and we can self-soothe, daydream, or disconnect. As we develop into adults, we may reach for substances to offer that safety, connection and calm.
In the therapy world, we recognise that most people did not have their needs for regulation fully met in childhood. Loosely, our experiences tend to fall into the camps of ‘too much’ or ‘not enough’ (and sometimes both). Perhaps the adults around us overwhelmed us with ‘too much’ of their own anxiety, anger, or emotional distress. Or perhaps they were not very present or available, resulting in ‘not enough’ connection or safety.
People with ‘not enough’ patterns or abandonment wounds from early childhood often struggle to feel calm and safe when they’re alone. People with the ‘too much’ patterns of intrusive or overwhelming attachment experiences often struggle to feel safe and calm around others.
We may not have been born an introvert or an extrovert, it may have been an adaptive response to our circumstances. And how we regulate our systems can change and heal. It has become a major focus of my work with clients, and it’s been a major part of my healing from autoimmune disease.
As we build our capacity to find calm and balance in the presence of others, our desire for connection, community, and relationship tends to increase.
As we build our capacity for self-regulation when alone, finding grounding and self-soothing in moments of anxiety, we can begin to open up a whole new world of the joys of solitude.
We can learn to find ease, safety, and regulation in both environments.
It’s likely that some people will always fall at the introvert or extrovert end of the spectrum, no matter what. That’s cool, the world is full of diversity. However, for many of us, we can influence our nervous system and learn to value both people time and connection, as well as solitary time. The labels of introversion and extroversion may simply be pointing towards where we have more work to do in learning to rebalance our system.
What if we started to view these tendencies we have labelled as fixed personality traits as simply adaptive responses to our early environment? We know from research on neuroplasticity that patterns can change, and that we can build new neural pathways, given the right conditions.
Labels are a useful shorthand, but they can also be self-limiting and shut us down from asking questions about how the patterns were seeded and shaped, or from seeing the potential for growth and healing.
Perhaps a more useful question is - Where is your breath deepest, your heart steady, your mind most at ease? And when do you find yourself leaving this state and shifting into vulnerability, threat, over-activation, or shut down?
I’d love to hear what you think. Do you identify strongly with the label of introversion or extroversion? Do you see this as something concrete and fixed, or something that can change? Do drop into the comments and share your thoughts, it’s always lovely to hear who is reading.
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Disclaimer - Content is intended for educational and entertainment purposes only, and is not a substitute for individualised mental health treatment or advice.
Great post, thanks Vicki. For me, the 'introvert/extrovert' continuum is much more nuanced. I have been both in my life, but it totally depends on the social situation, life circumstances, hormones, ageing, resilience/vulnerability etc. I am much happier in my own company in my eighties and really need that to give space to my expanding inner life and to savour what's happening in the now. And I need meaningful engagement with friends and groups to balance my life, widen my horizons, and get some perspective. What you said here "I live in a sensitive nervous system that is very porous to the energies of people around me, and I often need to withdraw from social situations to regroup and restore my energy." made me think that another nuance is whether or not we are 'sensitives' or 'empaths' and the need to withdraw doesn't necessarily fit in to the 'introvert' category. So, for me, as a person who experiences the world primarily somatically, its more about being able to regulate the energetic impacts on my nervous system of living in the world - its both a challenge and a gift (I wonder why I am a bodymind therapist!!). So, I prefer to think of myself as being introverted or extroverted - an adjective rather than a noun!
Very interesting. From my experience, learning about my lifelong introversion was empowering. I know some people don’t like labels, but many times they are helpful.