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Comment by anonu | Hacker News Reader

Something I've noticed:

introvert != no social skills

I don't think being introverted and lacking social skills equate to each other, as the article alludes to.

Agreed. My understanding of introversion is that it takes energy to socialize and an introverted person gains energy with more time alone for things like introspection. That can be independent of social skills and degree of enjoyment from socializing.

Extroverts find socializing energizing. And can find alone time draining.

Of course most people aren't fully in one or the other and some circumstances may change things.

Shyness is more the classification for social wariness which might be coupled with a perception or skills deficit in addition to the negative beliefs or feelings around socializing.

I'm definitely more on the introvert end of things. But after a long time of solitude I get a hankering for socialization and feel energized by interacting with friends and family, up to a certain duration. And then a while after that I can feel overwhelmed or drained and then need to find alone time for myself to recharge.

>Extroverts find socializing energizing. And can find alone time draining.

This sounds insane to me. I'm an introversion solipsist.

Socialization is inherently more demanding. Whole parts of the brain must light up -- reading faces and tone and filtering thoughts and modulating your speech and delivery and listening to others' speech. By physics alone, in the same way that a computer processing some data necessarily consumes more power than a computer doing nothing, socialization must burn more brain calories than not socializing.

After I've socialized a lot, I'm dead tired (and maybe more stressed).

I find hanging out and having a good chat with a close friend always energises me while a chat with anyone else drains me. I think the key difference is that I don’t need to worry about how my close friends will think. I know that they will accept whatever I say, so my brain isn’t using as much energy as talking to strangers. Besides, I think things like feeling heard/affirmed goes a long way in feeling energised, so I don’t think it’s strictly physics here.

You can’t be intuitive/perceptive and think logically in parallel - that’s the main thing that’s hard. The former is feeling an emotion. The latter will inhibit the emotion. This is actually sort of a technique in cognitive behavioral therapy for dealing with anxiety.

I think the thing is probably that, for extroverts, socializing is demanding too, but it's also rewarding. Mentally, they get more back out of it than they put into it.

Strenuous exercise is exhausting too, but some people love working out so much they do it for hours a day, every day. Others dread going to the gym. That's the difference between extraversion and introversion.

That's true, but... social skills = practice, and introvert = -practice.

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