Introducing Presenteversion: Beyond Extroversion and Introversion
Like so many of us, I have been fascinated with the many psychological models devised to categorize our personalities and decipher the patterns which seem to govern how we operate as human beings. In particular, I have always been intrigued by the simple spectrum of introversion vs extroversion.
Recently I was discussing this concept with a friend, who asked how I defined the spectrum - what was my take on the difference between extroverts and introverts? I replied that I saw myself as technically an introvert, given that being “on” - or around people constantly - drained my batteries, while being “off” - or by myself without needing to interact with people - refilled my batteries. However, and perhaps like some of you, I added a caveat into my answer, given that I felt a doubt lingering in my mind about whether the label of “introvert” precisely fits the way that I am. In many instances, I actually do derive great amounts of energy from interacting with people and have no desire to be alone. Sometimes I even fear being left alone - or more accurately separated - after a phenomenal weekend spent with longtime friends.
One solution is to call those of us who land somewhere in-between the two poles of the spectrum either an “extroverted introvert,” or an” introverted extrovert;” a generally accepted, but redundant move.
So, not satisfied with calling myself an extroverted introvert, I began contemplating the question of introversion and extroversion from a more mindfulness-oriented vantage point. I started wondering whether there might not be some other, more integral way to think of the dynamics of our internal energies.
What if pegging the source of our internal energies to people was actually a red herring - a distraction - that kept us from some deeper truth?
Looking through the lens of mindfulness, it appeared to me as if the deeper reality might be that we actually gain energy when we can simply be ourselves in a given present moment, irrespective of the presence or absence of interactions with other people. Moreover, it appeared to me that even the way we use the term “energy” could be off-base. Perhaps adding the word “sustainable” after energy, or even choosing a different word altogether, like “peace” would be more apt to describe how our internal energies work, for reasons that will be explained later on.
What if the more accurate term to describe where we derive our energy from is not extroversion or introversion, but rather presentversion? What would that mean?
As its root implies, the idea of presentversion is not about whether or not there are or are not people around in any given moment. Instead, it anchors the source of our energy to a deeper level: to when our core essence can be freely expressed.
In other words: all of us as people can be categorized simply as presentverts, who recharge our batteries based on whether or not we can accept the present moment for what it is. This means not struggling to control or escape our present realities, and instead relaxing our resistance to both what is happening and who we are in that present moment; to be fully ourselves in the present moment.
Feeling confused? It’s okay. Reading this may feel a little like yoga for your mind: trying to continue following along, despite feeling shaky as the mental limbs you use in routine ways every single day are contorted into odd, new positions. Just keep reading and try to keep an open mind.
For the most part, we feel completely comfortable with the idea of fully being ourselves around people we know very well. These interactions can give people of all types energy. Yet when we feel down or stressed, or are around people that we don’t know well, we feel pressure to be someone different from who we natural are in that moment. Being someone different doesn’t have to mean drastically different, either. It may only be mildly so, such as telling more jokes or smiling more to cover up how we’re feeling a little out of sorts, or talking more about our big career achievements or plans to be seen as more interesting to someone we don’t know vs someone who already knows us well.
Introverts may feel stress in social situations because they naturally feel most themselves when they are able to take their time to shift from thought to thought. They may enjoy observing, taking their surroundings in, reflecting, and wondering about things more than they do talking. In the quick-witted and upbeat/humorous conversations that most western people like to have, an introvert may feel an internal, mental pressure to escape or fake the present moment mount rapidly with every second of silence or joke that lands flat.
Extroverts may feel stress when they are not around people because their minds take off in all directions at thousands of miles per hour, or else start doing laps and obsessing over things, either of which can feel overwhelming and very uncomfortable without the relieving distractions that come from people interactions. Or, when alone they may feel a rapidly mounting desire to escape the present moment due to mind-numbing boredom, the itch to be productive and get back out there, or a fear of missing out on a fun time happening somewhere they are not.
In either case the result is the same: an internal mental pressure that rapidly mounts as an introvert resists situations involving people, or an extrovert resists situations not involving people. Using a mindful reduction in this equation clarifies that it’s not the presence or absence of people that causes us stress or drains our batteries. Instead, introverts or extroverts - people in general - feel stress and a loss of energy due to their own mental resistance to their present moment; it’s a matter of presentversion.
Consider an introvert who feels pressure from their own mind to think of the right thing to say. They mentally beat themselves up for not saying the “cool” or “interesting” thing, or for not saying anything at all. Yet engage that same person in a structured, purposeful situation where they are interacting on a subject that they feel a deep passion for and they can suddenly transform into dynamic, highly energized person who can talk for hours. Once they are in a flow state, they can even talk easily with people they don’t know.
Consider an extrovert who feels pressure from their own mind to constantly busy themselves, lest they not make the most of every ounce of life, while in their mind’s eye everyone else is out there doing just that. When that same person finds themselves highly stressed during a tough day or rough period in life, they may secretly desire alone time to decompress, reflect, or even just to catch up on sleep. Yet, their mind maintains resistance to this desire for a break and tries to convince them that if they take some time to be alone, they will fall even deeper into mental trouble, because they believe that being around people is the only place they belong or “feel alive.” It may even be that they are not only annoyed by, but afraid of aloneness and their own thoughts.
The energy that comes to us as presentvert comes from letting go of mental resistance and being fully ourselves in the present moment. This energy is sustainable, stable, enduring, and flexible. It may also be thought of as peace. When we fully accept any given present moment, which happens when we do not create mental resistance to who we are in that moment, then it doesn’t matter whether we are around people or not. Wherever we are and whatever we’re doing, we can tap into sustainable energy. We’re operating from a place of mental peace. We’ve become a presentvert.
We begin to feel re-energized when we aren’t mentally beating ourselves up now while obsessing about the past or future, when our mental resistance slackens, or when we’re genuinely excited to be fully ourselves. We feel re-energized when we talk about a topic we love, because at that moment we are engrossed in our knowledge and are excited, curious, and passionate about that topic. We feel re-energized when we don’t resist the fact that we simply have nothing to say in another moment. It becomes peaceful when there is no mental pressure fighting our desire to sit silently in a park, or to speak less and enjoy the dynamics in our group of close friends more. We can feel at peace when we can accept that sometimes we are tired and just want to watch a movie or take a quiet walk, whether with or with someone else.
We all need to stop doing and simply “be” sometimes, no matter how much we think we don’t.
Running on sustainable energy as a presentvert requires accepting and allowing ourselves to “be” not only in the times when we’re tired, stressed or anxious, but also when other negative emotions or thoughts arise such as sadness, fear, anger, confusion, despair, or jealousy. Even positive emotions can create mental resistance and eventually drain our batteries if we try to keep those around forever, unchanged (this will be explored in another post, but you can also check out works by Pema Chodron or the Buddhist concept of saṃsāra).
When we truly let go of resistance, either as negative situations rise or as positive situations wane, this is paradoxically when we make the switch to presentversion and start running on sustainable energy and peace. If you do not feel peace in a given moment, then you are still holding onto some form of mental resistance and preventing yourself from being at peace. That’s really how it works. You may only think it is frustrating or confusing because the mind is all about creating resistance and finds this unintelligible, because it means letting go of the mind’s resistance.
The vast majority of people who read this will likely find themselves barraged by thoughts or judgments and dragged away into more and more thoughts, rather than continuing to read and take in each word. Their minds may be saying something like:
“Oh yeah? Well I can think of this one time when I didn’t feel energized or peaceful like he said, so therefore he’s wrong.”
Or, “I’m as extroverted as they come and I never, ever feel like being alone. I work my problems out through people interactions, and every single time I’m not interacting with people I feel less energy.”
Or, “Ha! I caught you, moron! Reflecting IS technically your mind thinking about the past, so technically you’re wrong and I don’t have to listen to any of your nonsense.”
Or “Being sad or angry or anything negative is awful and toxic! How can being negative ever give you energy or peace? Why would I ever want to willingly let myself be negative? I need to protect myself from negativity and I get energy by finding ways to NOT be negative.”
If this is happening to you then before reading further, try to realize what is happening. Try to realize that your mind, via these or other thoughts is attempting to pull you away from the present moment, wherein you are reading an article that caught your interest, and re-build its resistance to that interested part of you, because the mind purports to already know all there is to know about what’s best for you. This is the very mental mental resistance that drains your energy. Consider also that if you are having a significant negative reaction and are trying to poke as many holes in what I’m saying as you possibly can, then some small part of you may have recognized a grain of truth in this. Otherwise, you probably wouldn’t react at all, as if I were speaking a foreign language. The mind - or rather the ego - fights the present moment because living fully in the present is when your true inner essence exists, not your ego.
If we feel negativity, such as sadness, then when we don’t mentally try to stop being sad is how we can fully be ourselves in that present. Peace comes from this noble act of surrender. We can feel peaceful at that moment because we aren’t rejecting a part of ourselves - our sadness. If we can allow ourselves to be sad in that moment, then eventually the sadness, as with all thoughts or emotions that are not held onto, will dissipate and we can continue being ourselves in the next moment. The sadness only begins to drain our batteries when our mind latches onto resisting it and so mires us in the past, convincing us that nobody wants to be around us because we’re sad so we shouldn’t be sad, or that what happened to make us sad demands that now we should be sad all the time, even when joy visits us in a walk in the park at sunset or an amazing concert. Our resistance to sadness also drains our batteries when we try to outrun the sadness from our past by sprinting towards the future. There is no sustainable energy, no peace, to be gained by clinging to mental resistance and sprinting away from negativity. All this mental sprinting will eventually wear us down. Each time we look back over our shoulder, there will be negativity jogging steadily along after us. It may take days, months, or even years for the negativity to catch up, but eventually we will collapse from the exhaustion of trying to maintain our constant mental resistance. At this point we may be shocked that the peace we thought we had all along the way was not sustainable peace energy, but rather a series of distracted, manic energy such as material goods, working, or relationships; deep down in our inner presentverted essence, we sense the truth that we clung to these positive things in order to distract us from the negativity we were running from.
So what does it mean to accept the parts of ourselves that are negative in a given moment?
When we are sad for example, we may fall to the ground and sob, or we may cry silent tears. We may feel lethargic. We may feel sick. We may feel anger come on the heels of our sadness. In that moment when we feel sad, our knee-jerk reaction is to run away from our sadness; to deny that it’s a part of us. Again, denying the sadness that lives at that moment within us is where our minds start sprinting and building resistance. Our minds may want to react by feeling bitter and portraying ourselves as victims who should never have actually been made sad in the first place but are sad because we were subjected to unfair circumstances, such as losing a parent early in life. Our minds may want us to try to carry on like normal and pretend that we aren’t sad by holding back tears or avoiding taking time off from work, faking a cheerful affect and working harder. Our minds may tell us to drink a coffee or beer or smoke a joint to try to reject the sad part of us by changing our state of mind. Any and all of these actions is what really drains our energy, because our energy is consumed by denying who we are - sad - and trying to become something else - not sad, or happy. Just imagine, or feel it next time, how much energy is consumed by the constant, destructive civil wars you are fighting constantly, in your head. Does that sound like a sane life? Wouldn’t you want to choose to be a presentvert and learn to turn that sadness into sustainable, peace energy?
So introverts: the next time you feel stressed because you are in a social setting and think it’s because you’re introverted, remember that this isn’t the full story. Ask yourself whether you’re stressed because in that moment you aren’t engaged on a topic that is relevant for you, or some other, deeper reason. If you don’t know what to say, then be silent for a bit and don’t beat yourself up over it. You can also admit that you don’t know what to say. The other person may even laugh with you (not at you) and helpfully suggest some new topic. Don’t resist who you are and allow the energy to flow into empowering who you are. Maybe you prefer to go find some online friends or a job that lets you work from home if in-person interactions are too much for you. Directing your energy towards being bitter and judging yourself as an introverted social failure will only make you more stressed and resistant. As a presentvert, you can direct that released energy into rearranging your life around who you truly are so that you can be at peace, if not happy.
And extroverts: the next time you feel stressed because you need a small break from people to look inward, ask yourself whether you’re stressed because your mind is resisting your body’s need for space. Do take a small break to look inward, and while doing so ponder why you have been resisting that break, and whether you actually can sense the stress dissipating at all. Don’t beat yourself up or think that your friends will desert you if you take a night, or even longer off from the social circuit. You can even admit to your friends that you’re struggling with something, and try to work it out with them, rather than hiding it and trying to tough it out as the always cheerful extrovert image that your mind sees. Your friends may acknowledge their own challenges and empathize with you, or they may even give you some deep feedback that they weren’t ready to give, or you weren’t ready to accept before. Let yourself mix in some quiet walks in nature, yoga, or meditation to reflect on why you’re feeling down. You may uncover some gems of insights if you can relax into the initial mental discomfort and just allow your thoughts to come and go, and allow yourself to be whatever you are in that moment.
Whenever you feel negativity, try to just be with the part of you that your mind is resisting, rather than running away. Listen to it. Relax into it. Accept it. Be fully yourself in that present moment, and once you have come to this place, you can then do what feels right from a place of power. Even if that’s feeling negative for a little longer, or finding some quiet space, this could be the best thing for you. If you can relax into that negativity and accept that it’s there and doesn’t need to be immediately thrown out the door, it will eventually dissipate. While it may be uncomfortable at first, the more you practice fully accepting and being yourself - all parts of yourself - in the present, the more the flywheel will turn and the more sustainable action and peace you will create for yourself, and the easier everything will become.
If you’re intrigued to explore this concept of living fully in the present and presentversion more, check out Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now and Pema Chodron’s When Things Fall Apart, and stay tuned for more musings.