How Introverts Can Stay Social Without Draining Themselves

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]I know. I know. It's like 7 o'clock on a rainy Monday morning and I'm dressed for my volunteer work to go and walk the rescue dogs and there's some music in the background. I think it might be the BeeGees or maybe that Samantha song.

[00:00:16]Anyway, it's some kind of disco music in the background and the lighting's not great and I look like my grandmother would say like death eating on a cracker. Have you ever heard that southern phrase, death eating on a cracker? I mean, I love it cuz that would be pretty ugly. Anyway, I know the conditions aren't perfect, but there was such a strong and unexpected reaction to my last video that I wanted to film a response pretty fast. I've put out some videos that I knew would be controversial. Uh, when I did my No Man, no problem and the follow-ups about how I'm against late life marriage. I knew that would hit a hot button. um it hit more of a hot button than I thought it would, but I knew that it might that some men might say when I was saying that I was anti-marriage, that I was anti-men. I knew that that would uh be upsetting to some women and that kind of stuff. And then I also got a strong response to the piece I did about taking the cognitive test. Um I know that that's a scary thing for a lot of people. I wasn't surprised there was a real strong reaction to that one, but I've got to say I was floored when what I considered like a borderline boring vanilla video about how we need to have more social interaction upset a lot of people and that the introverts rose up with amazing solidarity I might say for introverts go team um to tell me that I was uh full of on this one and I just completely missed the mark. And so I did want to do a response because here's the irony. I'm an introvert, too.

[00:01:49]I love time alone. I am pro-s solitude.

[00:01:52]I It's It's so ironic that I'm being criticized like I'm telling people to go out and become a wild social butterfly.

[00:02:01]But what I think I was actually saying was something different. All right. So, I'd like a chance to kind of clarify today and to clarify kind of for my own sake, too, because I think I dropped the ball and how I presented certain things in that video. As we age, I think we we tend to naturally uh withdraw from the world. And that has been accelerated by the fact that five or six years ago there was a massive world event called CO which actually turned into the greatest unplanned study probably in the history of human behavior in a sense millions of people are involved billions. I mean I guess the whole world was involved to some degree and you know they consider a study with a thousand people in it a big study. So suddenly everybody in the world like it or not is a subject in an isolation study and we've learned a lot years down the road about the kind of downstream effects of being alone a lot and um you know it's taken a while for some of them to come out. The most obvious effects of CO were obvious immediately, but it's taken maybe years for this it to really shake out that I think it permanently changed to some degree our personalities. It permanently changed in a lot of ways the way society operates in terms of, you know, people don't go into work as much anymore. There's Zoom calls. More things have gone to automation. But it's also, and this is surprising, changed our brains. So there have been studies on to what degree isolation actually changes your brain in the prefrontal cortex. The neurons web differently and fire differently. Uh the hippocampus actually shrinks sometimes in isolation that there can be real effects to being alone all the time. now. And I've linked oh in the in the uh description below, I've linked um a psychiatrist who's who's I think speaks very persuasively to the effect that isolation can have on us and ways we can counteract it. Now that said, what I regret about the video is not that I said social interactions an important thing. The evidence is pretty overwhelming on that and it is an important thing. I think what I regretted is that a I didn't make it clear enough that I too am team introvert. I was basically talking to myself, but also that I'm not talking about a lot of social interaction. Um, many people wrote in and told me, and I was glad to hear it, that they love their hobbies, they love their books, they love their home, they've got their pets, they've got their rituals, and they are happy in that. And I'm with you on that, sister or occasional brother.

[00:04:45]I'm the same way and I think that's great. The degree to which they defended that introversion was a little bit of a surprise and I think that's what we want to challenge today with the question, okay, if you're not a natural social person, how much social interaction do you have to have to keep yourself healthy and in the game and in what what what manifestation does it need to take?

[00:05:10]So, let's kind of talk about some of that today. I mean, first of all, the amount of social interaction is a spectrum. It's a wide spectrum. What might seem like going out all the time to me might seem like a boring day to you or it might seem like way too much to somebody else. So, let's accept that this is a spectrum of behavior and everybody's idea of what a lot of alone time versus a lot of social time looks like, that balance is going to look different to everyone. So, all I'm saying or suggesting or hoping that you'll be open to considering is maybe nudging yourself out of your personal place on the spectrum just a few degrees. Secondly, it's not like it's got to be some mad social world. Um, the reality is three to seven good friends.

[00:05:55]If you've got three to seven good friends, people you talk to on a regular basis that you can really share what's going on in your life, that's enough.

[00:06:03]That's more than enough. If you're among the blessed of the earth, frankly, uh you've got a lot of backup. So, it's not like you have to go to like Times Square on New Year's Eve. That's not what anybody's suggesting. If you're more the I want one conversation with one friend over coffee, then go to a party, that's great. It works just as well. I'd argue it works better. But there's also another kind of social interaction other than the really serious one-on-one conversations that we've lost totally.

[00:06:35]And I want to at least give a passing nod to that. And I think it does go back to co or maybe the way that uh technology was changing our society.

[00:06:42]Anyway, but think about it. When our mother's generation went out to shop, they were interacting constantly. They would go into the bank, they knew the banker, they'd go in the grocery store, they go in the dry cleaningers. There was a sense of a community web and actually talking albeit yes on a very casual transient basis with a wide variety of people but even that does something really good for your brain to just be in a sense of community greeting facial recognition remembering people's names having your own name that's gone that's down the drain think about how we do that now uh we bank online we pay all of our bills I can't remember the last time I've been inside a physical bank.

[00:07:24]It's been years. We might go to the grocery store, but the odds are we check ourselves out. Um, a lot of even meetings have switched to an online format. So, the casual or people are working from home more. The casual interactions that we took for granted certainly a generation ago, but even I would argue six or seven years ago, they're gone. And that has affected us too. And the problem is not Well, here's the problem in a nutshell.

[00:07:56]The problem is that solitude can begin to feel so good that you crave more and more and more of it.

[00:08:05]And it could be hard to distinguish between these two situations. The first one's healthy, the second one's not. The first one is, you know, I just don't think this social event is going to feed me. I don't need it. I've got my plans tonight. Rather be on my own, like my home. That can be a very healthy impulse. That can easily edge over though into the second category which is sort of like I've forgotten how to go out and be with people I don't know. I can no longer do that. That is a synapse in my brain that no longer fires. That's a muscle in my spirit that has atrophied. That I think can be dangerous. So I would challenge you to sometimes when you're comfortable in your solitude think you know that really would be kind of fun. I want to try that one and urge yourself a little out of that comfort zone. The good news too that there's there's some kind of really cool here's some ideas. I'll read you some ideas. Here are some things that even a died in the wool come and get my introversion out of my cold dead hands people can do. Reading actually is a type of interaction. You're interacting with the characters. And some of you pointed this out in your comments. My son plays on this thing called chess.com where he plays online chess games, which admittedly is online gaming, which is normally not something I'd recommend as a social thing, but he's actually playing chess with people all over the world. At any given time, he's got four or five games going with somebody in Singapore, you know, South America, whatever. Um, anything artistic, an artistic hobby kind of fires the same part of your brain as social interactions. Um even like learning something again is interacting with the world perhaps not interacting with an individual person but it's interacting with historical characters or artist or whatever you're learning about learning a new language all that can all that can help too exercising or working out in groups. I'm a big proponent of this.

[00:10:03]I've got my gym buddies. I know a handful of their first names. I don't know I don't think any of their last names or that much about them but I see them on a regular basis. We greet each other. It's kind of back to that community town square thing that I think we've lost. I think the gym is now probably the closest thing we've got to a town square. Another thing to do is just simply to go to places where there are people. If you're walking, like I like to go I live in Charlotte where they have the incredible whitewater center, huge walking trails. Sometimes when I'm walking the rescue dogs, I like to go there and I'm not walking with anyone or talking to them, but I see other people. I'm in a community setting. So things like actually going out to a movie, um a concert, a museum, if you really don't want to interact with the people, you don't have to, but even being around other people reminds us of something that maybe we don't always like to remember, which is that we are inherently a social tribe who, God help us, rose to the top of the food chain mostly because we have opposable thumbs and we have groups of people. We live in a tribal way. Um, I would also maybe challenge you to come up with something that marks a seasonal change, which I think is really healthy. And you can do that in a group, too. I mean, for me, fall, I want to go to a football game. It might be a high school football game. I guess it goes back to my my youth. Uh, there are certainly spring festivals that are super fun. There are, you know, Fourth of July events. There are certainly holiday concerts around Christmas and New Year's. So I would think part of living in community is also an acknowledgment of the collective change of seasons which affects us all.

[00:11:45]So I would say you know if you can go to a cookout or a hayride or strawberry picking or you know some sort of caroling thing or whatever floats your boat that this is kind of a twofer. You get social interaction. You get an acknowledgement of time passing in the seasons too. And then there's this concept of skin hunger. I'm a ballroom dancer. So I think one of the reasons to be completely honest with you that I'm fine without having a male sexual partner in my life is because I'm touched by men all the time because I ballroom dance. So the skin hunger, the feeling of being in a man's arms, I get that. That's not for everybody. I understand. But, you know, you can certainly get a massage. You can certainly, you know, pick up your grandchild and cuddle them. We've got to also remember that, you know, the primal parts of our brains, we're wired to touch and to be touched. So, don't forget that in the equation either. And please, please, please, I I'm I'm not saying we all have to be social butterflies flitting from event to event. I would rather be shot with a gun than have to live like that. And I know that most of you don't want to live like that, too. I believe in solitude. It brings us many deep gifts, but people can bring us gifts, too. So, let's not solidify on one end of the spectrum or another. People who are afraid to be alone, I think are incredibly sad. But people who have forgotten how to not be alone, I think can also get sad in a different sort of way. So let's try and become the kind of people who are flexible enough that we can choose our solitude or choose our social interaction based on the occasion, how we feel that day and what really nourishes our soul. Talk to you soon.

[00:13:33]Bye.