It’s Not Just You—Most Introverts Get Overstimulated Easily

Lots of introverts get overstimulated in situations that would barely faze the typical extrovert. So if you think you’re the only one feeling overcooked, think again.

I figured it was just me.

I didn’t really want to do the Bunny Hop with a bunch of fellow 18-year-olds I’d met—if you can call it that—only seconds before.

I didn’t want to sing silly songs or participate in ridiculous icebreakers.

I didn’t want to go to the freshman dance with its blinding strobe lights and deafening music.

And I didn’t want to take part in the booze-soaked off-campus parties that were most definitely not college-sponsored or college-sanctioned.

It was the fall of 1985, almost 35 years ago now, yet this time of year I still remember it vividly: college orientation week, an experience I’d just as soon forget.

Myth: Exhilaration—Reality: Exhaustion

As Harvard University sophomore Eva Shang put it in her insightful article a few years ago entitled “To the Introverts of the Class of 2018″:

“If a modern Dante were to write The Inferno for introverts, specifically, he would probably paint a picture of something similar to opening week of college.”

The impossibly enthusiastic but well-meaning orientation leaders at my school, God bless them, were trying so hard. So hard. So hard to make us newbies, in our red new-student T-shirts with our red new-student folders, feel comfortable and welcomed, like part of a community.

But mostly I felt exhausted and overwhelmed, like I’d been beamed to the planet Chaos and there was no escape from the group activities, or the group itself for that matter. No time to think, to breathe, to just simply be in this strange new environment, away from my family and the familiarity of home.

It was all too much, way over the top.

And so the events that had been designed to make me feel like I belonged instead made me feel like an outsider.

I figured it had to be me.

Clearly something was wrong with me, and I was the only one thinking what I was thinking and feeling what I was feeling. Everyone else was having the time of their life, or so it seemed.

But I was mistaken.

As I’ve learned in the years since college, nothing was—or is—wrong with me.

I was, and am, simply an introvert, with tendencies and preferences that are different from—but not inferior to—those of extroverts.

Moreover, I now know that I wasn’t alone all those many years ago.

Because many, if not most, introverts get overstimulated quickly and easily in life.

When Introverts Get Overstimulated, Our Batteries Drain—Quickly

Somewhere between a quarter and one half of us identify as introverts. So I wasn’t the only one struggling with stimulation overload. And I wasn’t the only one who would have preferred to engage in my own types of activities, and to build friendships my own way as the college years went on.

It turns out that the same would still be true if I were headed off to college today.

Here’s how College of William and Mary student Ethan Brown described his orientation experience in a Flat Hat student newspaper article entitled “Orientation Undermines New Student Adjustment“:

“By the first day of classes, I felt like I never wanted to talk to anyone again—I felt so depleted, and so emotionally exhausted, that I couldn’t imagine how I’d handle four years of being constantly ‘on.'”

Emerson College student Julia Tannenbaum shared similar feelings in a (now deleted) blog post she titled “Surviving Orientation”):

“[N]othing—not my single room, not my nightly phone vent sessions with my parents, not even The Great British Baking Show—could replenish the energy orientation had sucked out of me, like a vacuum cleaner sucking up the crumbs of a delicious homemade muffin (I really miss my mom’s cooking). It was so draining that at times, I worried I wouldn’t make it to the actual start of school.”

So it wasn’t just me.

And if you’re an introvert yourself, it wasn’t—or isn’t—just you, either.

Respect Your Introverted Ways

If I’d had access to articles like Shang’s and Brown’s and Tannenbaum’s three-plus decades ago, I would have understood myself a lot sooner than I ultimately did. I would have been spared a lot of confusion, and pain, if I’d had the chance to read sage advice like Shang’s:

“Don’t push it. There will be plenty of opportunities to make friends at any point in time—plenty of opportunities more suited to forming genuine connections than those initial weeks of mass introductions. Furthermore, don’t feel pressured to be social the same way everyone else is, especially if it isn’t your scene. You will not miss out on life or on college simply by taking a much-needed break.”

Shang’s advice applies to you, me, all of us who tend toward introversion. And it goes far beyond the college campus.

You’ll only “miss out on life,” as she puts it, if you try to be someone you’re not—instead of understanding and embracing yourself as the introvert you really are.