I’m an introvert, I don’t believe it is something that is to be overcome, I believe the reason I am this way is because of my genetics, and I probably realized I was an introvert when I read the definition of the word “introvert” for the first time.

If you want to present and behave less introverted, go to place where lots of people are, and try talking to them. Don’t be afraid of being weird. Lean into it, if you can. Watch other people, and see how they behave, what you like/dislike about them. Make eye contact and say hello to complete strangers, smile, and crack jokes.

Hope that helps.

overcome what

I was born this way. I’ve had to do public speaking. Practice is the only way to feel okay with it, but doesn’t “cure” it.

The biggest thing for me was learning, remembering, and using people’s names. This may not be helpful for everyone (and that’s okay), but it helped me be a more confident person in social situations.

Growing up I was painfully shy and awkward, but I had fantastic semantic memory and always did well on tests in school (does this sound like you?). One day, after I heard someone say “I’m terrible with names, sorry if I forget yours”, I decided to heck with it! I’m going to be good with names! If I can memorize pi to however many digits, I can memorize that many names of human beings.

And it helped me :) People like it when you remember their name, and they like you more for using it. For me, unfamiliar things are scary, but knowing someone’s name makes them a familiarity. Plus, there’s a devilish part of me that delights in remembering someone’s name who clearly doesn’t remember mine. I always offer it easily, to not embarrass them. But it’s a reminder that everyone’s out here struggling to make connections just as much as I am - and I can handle it.

Ps: it’s nice if you can let the person see you learn their name. It can feel creepy for a person to know your name without you telling them. If you learn someone’s name without them telling you, all you gotta do is hit them with a “your name’s Alex, right? Got it, thanks! I’m Daniel” and then you’re covered

it’s hard to untangle introvert, shy, and social anxiety.

these are my definitions, as someone with all 3: introvert - i rest and recover by being alone. shy - meeting new people is more scary than exciting. i don’t like being the center of attention or on stage. social anxiety - i constantly worry about what people think of me. even when i’m alone, i review previous interactions for “clues”.

introversion by this definition isn’t something you need to get over. you might find that you are still refreshed and recovered after spending quality time with your most intimate friends and lovers, or you might need true alone time away from even those you love most.

you get over shy with practice. meet lots of new people, at whatever pace is stressful but not overwhelming. take public speaking courses. join a theater group.

social anxiety is where it’s actually unhealthy. i needed a therapist to tell me it’s not normal, everyone isn’t secretly, constantly, evaluating every interaction. i need medication to help quiet those thoughts. if therapist and medication are too much for you, know that most people don’t think about things that much. remind yourself as often as you need to. redirect the worry to other things - did i do the dishes? is there a way to improve efficiency at work? know that working through the shyness while struggling with social anxiety is doing it on hard mode. give yourself time.

I am still introverted for the most part, but I like to think I’ve made big strides since I was a teenager. In my personal life I’m much more open and sociable. At work I tend to be a bit more reserved and introverted, though my job requires me to conduct meetings and interact with people, so I still had to break out of my shell a bit for that. Professional office settings though are dangerous places to speak your mind, so I tend to watch my words more and just naturally don’t talk as much.

Part of what’s helped me to open up is just not taking myself seriously and trying not to be as self-conscious, just trying to be more impulsive and not giving myself enough time for doubts to surface. Sometimes you just have to act without thinking and just push against your introverted nature, it’s hard and you might look foolish in the process, but you just roll with it.

I have my limits though, social settings with alot of people and too many conversations going on tend to wear me out mentally, my brain just loses patience and wants peaceful silence that comes with solitude. Crowds of people are my kryptonite.

One thing I’ve noticed is that interacting too much with technology over the course of a day tends to make me more introverted if I’m doing something social later on in the day. Like my brain gets used to machine interaction and loses patience for people interactions. Machine interaction is much more orderly (prompt-> response), while interactions with people are more chaotic, fluid, and spontaneous.

Another thing that can help, is having some other activity going on that you’re there for, boardgaming and ttrpgs are my go-tos. It doesn’t become about “socializing”, but the social aspect just develops alongside that other activity. Boardgaming is great because it changes that chaotic, organic social situation and gives it a bit more structure. In games, people take turns, there’s established “rules” for both how the game is played and how you talk and interact with the other players, it’s much easier for me to grasp.

Why are you an introvert?

Tough to say. I’ve always been comfortable in my own company, and I’ve always been a bit socially anxious. I didn’t consciously choose to be an introvert, I just turned out that way. Studies done with twins separated at birth have shown that at least a significant portion of our personality develops based on our genetics. Despite being raised by different families in different environments, many such twins develop exceptionally similar personality traits. I imagine much of my introversion was set the day I was conceived. It’s just part of who I am.

When did you realize you were an introvert?

I feel like I’ve always sort of known that I was introverted, but I didn’t realize just how much until a few years ago. The company I was working for at the time had a retreat for my department, and one of the exercises we did was a personality inventory. Some of it was junk science (e.g. Myers-Briggs) but one of the tests was based on the Big Five personality traits, sometimes called the OCEAN model of personality:

• Openness to new experience
• Conscientiousness
• Extroversion
• Agreeableness
• Neuroticism

On the Extroversion scale I got the lowest possible score on the test. I am the most introverted a person can be! At least according to that particular test. When we were sharing and discussing the results, all of my teammates were surprised. One said, “But you don’t seem shy!” Well yeah, because introversion isn’t shyness (though the two do tend to be correlated).

Being a hardcore introvert means that when given a totally free choice between spending time by myself and spending time with others, I would invariably choose to spend time by myself. In actual practice there are lots of times where I don’t have completely free choices, and decades of life experience have given me sufficient coping strategies for those times.

If you overcame it how did or why did you? Any advice for people trying to be less of an introvert?

I don’t think I could stop being introverted, any more than I could stop being blue-eyed. I don’t see my introversion as a problem to be fixed. When I go to a social event, I know that there’s a limited amount of time I will be able to spend there because social situations are absolutely draining for me. I interact with people, I try to stay engaged, I usually manage to have fun and the end of the night I’m usually glad I went, but it’s still fucking exhausting. My understanding is that this is typical for introverts, whereas extroverts tend to gain energy in social situations.

When I was younger I definitely had some social anxiety, and that I did address in my second year of university. My first year was very socially isolated, I felt very inhibited from talking to people so of course I made few friends. I had roommates that I got on with well enough, but we didn’t have a lot of common interests and I tended to keep to myself too much. Because of course I did, I’m a hardcore introvert. In that first year I wanted to make more friends and not be so isolated and get included in more of the fun things going on around me, but I wasn’t doing anything to get the outcome I wanted.

In second year I decided that I was being too much of a wuss so I forced myself to strike up conversations with anyone who was doing anything that was interesting to me. Some of those conversations were… painful. Eventually though, I saw some folks playing a collectible card game and I asked them about it. That led to me hanging with them, eventually they became friends and through them I met wife, who I’ve been with for 26 years now. Those outcomes only happened because I made the conscious choice to do some things that made me feel uncomfortable, in service of a larger goal.

Any advice for people trying to be less of an introvert?

I guess my advice for someone like me, an introvert with social anxiety, would be this:

• Separate your introversion from your social anxiety. The first is likely a fundamental part of who you are, the second is a reflex reaction to social circumstances. You likely can’t change your core personality, but you can change reflex reactions to social situations.
• For social anxiety, try some Cognitive Behavioral Therapy on yourself. Think about your anxiety. Realize that’s irrational, a reflex response somewhere in your hindbrain that’s being incorrectly applied to your current situation. Put yourself in situations that trigger the reflex, allow yourself to feel it, and observe that feeling as it diminishes over time. Start with small interactions. Make a phone call you’ve been putting off, go to a restaurant and make a little chitchat with the server. Build up from there to more complex / involved / prolonged situations. Join a club, or volunteer. Think about who “your people” would be, and where you would find those people. Then put in the work.
• If you’ve got more severe social anxiety you may want to work with a professional. I studied Psychology in university, at least partly because I felt like an alien in social situations and Psychology gave me a useful framework for understanding the people around me. I only have a Bachelors degree, which qualifies me to diagnose and treat absolutely nobody for absolutely nothing. I’m sharing what worked for me, but that may not be what works for you. A professional who specializes in social anxiety would have a much more extensive range of techniques to try. If you go to a professional and they don’t help, don’t give up. Try a different professional, or a different approach. It may take a while to find what works for you.

I guess this describes me a bit. One piece of advice I can offer is to think of your social skills as a muscle that needs exercise. You wouldn’t go to the gym and start trying to lift 500 lbs at least I hope not. Best to start small and work your way up. Start in situations where you feel comfortable. Make brief small talk with a cashier or waitress. Keep it short and don’t feel the need to say anything earth shattering. Old people are sometimes lonely and will appreciate longer conversation. Like any muscle if you quit exercising it, it will get weak again.

I can circumstantially pretend to be outgoing and enjoyable for short interactions with strangers or people with little impact on my life. Phone calls and virtual work meetings for 1 hr or less are OK, but you bet your ass I’m walking away from my desk immediately afterwards to decompress.

The kicker is I question whether I’m actually introverted. I’ve always had an incredibly difficult time making friends, even as a kid. The isolation is absolutely soul crushing sometimes. I crave and thrive on very close friendships… Even 1-2 is enough, which in our society is conducive to dating – and I eventually met an extroverted ray of sunshine who I’m still with. I still don’t feel like I belong around her friends, though, all these years later. Social anxiety is a bitch.

A strange observation: I’ve found myself far more comfortable with people from a certain region, about 3 hrs from where I grew up, but had no exposure to as a child. Interactions with them tend to be relatively effortless and enjoyable (is this what extroversion is like?).

In summary, I very much despise the way I am, but most people are on a significantly different social wavelength than I. The energy required to match those foreign wavelengths is measured in gigawatts… except for my wife and a few prior long term girlfriends.

I plan on someday experimenting with psilocybin as a therapeutic tool to better understand and potentially (partially?) mitigate some of my social puzzle and trauma believed to be a source of “introversion”.

Perhaps this resonates with you or someone else reading this.

I don’t think you quite understand how great it is to not have to be around other people all the time. The biggest problem are the people who think they need to include you in everything.

There is a big difference between introversion and actually unhealthy social anxiety, which is I think often a conditioned response to experiences with low-empathy extroverts.

My best advice is if you are panicking, that’s a problem and you would likely benefit from therapy, if you just get tired after an hour or so of a party, leave. Take as much or as little social interaction as you want, and don’t feel like you owe anyone your presence. If people ask why? Just tell them the truth. Reasonable folk will understand, unreasonable folk aren’t worth going to parties with.

If your problem is public speaking, sorry. Only options on that front are practice (maybe with a coach) or to not do that. If it’s any help, people who actually enjoy doing that are in a minority, even among extroverts. Even (I think) among politicians.

As other folks have mentioned here, there’s a difference between introversion and socially shy/anxiety which tends to get lumped into introversion by a lot of people these days.

In terms of actual introversion (where being in social situations can be more exhausting, and the opposite for self/solo activities), that is definitely still me. I (personally) don’t see it as something I need to overcome.

However, regarding social anxiety, I would say that I’ve overcome it for the most part (every now and then I still have some aversion to being in unplanned social interactions with unknown people). How did I do so? Well, for some reason I ended up picking up a job at a call center doing internet technical support (yeah I was the person insisting that you restart your router even when you claimed to have already done so - unless you’d actually done so right before calling in). When I started that job, I was so afraid every time that phone would ring.

The most difficult part for me was the intermissions in conversations, such as when I’d have to wait on the person on the other end to restart their router - our QA team calls this “dead air” and you’re supposed to strike conversation to quash it (otherwise they’d take points off your call’s grade for it) which forced me to get better at just having short casual conversations with people. Most call centers have a policy regarding this, so if you call in somewhere and they start asking you about the weather, this is why.

It also helped me get over my extreme aversion to conflicts in a conversation, as sometimes you just have to tell the other person “No” - of course, in a tactful and respectful manner. I still try to avoid conflict to the best of my abilities (because I don’t see that as a bad trait), however I’ll now be the first person to speak up if I feel like someone else is being wronged.

I worked there for five years, until I’d finally had it with management and got out of there. I wouldn’t advise someone to pickup a job at a call center (they’re awful jobs - mostly because of how management is at those places), but I will say that the “diving straight into the deep end” part of it is what helped me with the worst of my social anxiety issues.

A big part of my current job still is technical customer support, though I don’t take calls, its all ticket based - and while I think that does still help prevent the worst of the social anxiety from creeping back up, I think the act of physically speaking to people with my voice is what helped the most.

*Why are you an introvert?

If I knew the answer to that, I’d end up with a Nobel Prize. Formation of that kind of thing isn’t exactly a well defined and understood thing. It’s an accepted theory of personality, but it isn’t like you can peg it to specific sections of the brain, and it doesn’t seem to be a learned aspect of self.

*When did you realize you were an introvert?

About three seconds into seeing the definition of it. It was “oh, so that’s the word for how I am.”

*If you overcame it how did or why did you?

It isn’t anything to overcome. It’s no more or less a problem than anything else, particularly since introversion and extraversion aren’t a pure binary. They’re simply the far ends of a continuum.

Mind you, the principle itself does have detractors, and the model falls apart often enough to merit debate as to how accurate it is.

Now, social anxiety, that’s something to overcome, and despite being introverted, I only experienced that briefly during jr high. Mainly because the school I went to was a fucking zoo full of rabid hyenas. Later on, in high school, I was known for “doing voices” while reading aloud in English class, for various plays and novels. No bullshit, I got applause in class when doing “My Fair Lady”, reading the part of Henry Higgins. Yeah, this was AP, so we were all into literature, but still.

In college, I took a public speaking course to improve my skills there. I’m reckoned to be a very effective presenter, and have taught small groups in my field of work.

My threshold where social interactions become dreadful is at the point where it becomes a crowd rather than a group. It’s as much about physical proximity with people that aren’t intimates as it is numbers though. Five strangers on an elevator is worse than fifty in a field, if you get my vibe. Among friends, my personal space shrinks gladly. Same with some family (though not all).

*Any advice for people trying to be less of an introvert?

Don’t. Intro and extraversion aren’t something that needs to change. What you do is learn what your limits and boundaries are so that you can enforce them.

What is useful is figuring out ways to interact in social settings when you don’t have choice, the same as when extraverts have to find ways of coping when social interactions are scarce, like late night security work (I had a partner that was full-on extraverted to an extreme lol). It won’t be too difficult unless you’re at the extreme end of things, because the various aspects of the continuum aren’t exclusive. You can be introverted emotionally, where you just don’t share your feelings, but be fine dancing and chatting at parties, then struggle with a deep conversation after the party.

Find who you are by challenging your limits. Then, you can plan accordingly in the future.

An introvert is someone for whom social situations are draining and solo activities are invigorating.

I’m introverted, not shy, and have plenty of friends and do lots of social activities, I just need a day or so in between them. If I’m tired from a long day of work, I’m going to recharge at home, not out with coworkers or friends.

There is nothing to overcome. I work with all my different traits, and introversion is no different. I take the recharge time that I need, and I don’t feel bad about declining invitations to things… but I’m also not a recluse, and I hang out with friends at least a once or twice per week.

I find that most people who have a problem with their introversion aren’t introverted at all, they usually have social anxiety. If you think that’s the case, nobody here is qualified to help you, and many comments on social media about anxiety are just completely incorrect - you should talk to a therapist.

Introvertedness is not something to overcome. It’s what we call people who aren’t obnoxious.