Socializing while introverted: why knowing your limits is key in life and on social media

Is it just me, or does socializing feel harder than it was pre-2020?

I spent yesterday at the 3rd annual Women's Leadership Summit here in Boston, where nearly 200 women from a mix of corporate and entrepreneurial backgrounds came together for a day of networking, inspiration, and motivation. The vibes were high, the music was bumping, and there were so many cool women to meet.

Six hours later, I'd met and had one-on-one conversations with 15 women, listened to 5 speakers, and absorbed round-the-clock audio input from loudspeakers and microphones. The event was fun, but my nervous system had reached max capacity, and I could feel a headache creeping in. I'd peopled too much. All I wanted was to hurry home to comfy clothes, a heated blanket, total control of the volume in my environment, and quiet time with my thoughts. (Okay, time to have no thoughts at all while I mindlessly finished season 10 of Friends.)

Introvert down

This is pretty much what I'd anticipated. As an introvert, I've gotten pretty good at knowing when an event like this or too many meetings in a day is going to zap my energy, and I've learned not to schedule anything, not even a phone call with my mom, until at least the next day. I just don't remember it always being this hard.

Sometimes I wonder if I'm less able to tolerate all the stimuli because I'm getting older, or if that long social pause we all took during the first year of the pandemic has a small part to play in it. When we started going back to the office, I struggled with all the extra sensory input I hadn't had to deal with when we were all on Zoom. All the extra faces I saw in the hallways, the background chatter from other people around me who were talking to co-workers or on calls of their own, the florescent lighting, the dryness of the office HVAC system. I'd come home so tired, my brain just mush. I wondered how I'd ever managed every day like this–for years!–before the pandemic.

I thought I'd rebuild my social stamina eventually, but it never did come back.

I can't absorb back-to-back calls anymore. I can't manage a full work day and then socializing with friends over dinner afterward. Sometimes I'm at a networking event where people tell me they have a second one right after, and I just stare at them in disbelief, like how do you manage to go to the next one and not be so out of gas that you've giving don't-talk-to-me vibes?

When your nervous system taps out

What I'm starting to think happened is that I spent decades pushing past my limits because I had to, because I was young enough to absorb it, but the pause we took during the pandemic gave my nervous system time to catch up and lodge a formal complaint. And when I went to jump back into the race post-pandemic, it said "Like hell we are." I was older, my hormones and my body had changed, and my nervous system was done playing extrovert.

I also think this is why I finally acknowledged that I couldn't tolerate social media anymore on a personal level, and why I knew I didn't want to build my business around it.

Speaking for myself, social media is like standing in the middle of a 16-lane highway. It's constant sensory input, most of it negative, controversial, or anxiety-inducing. It's so much time consuming everyone else's thoughts, emotions, and opinions that I lost touch with my own, and that's not healthy because most people, and especially introverts, need time to process our own thoughts and feelings. When we don't give ourselves that space, we suffer.

Social media is so normalized in our day-to-day that I hadn't spent any time asking myself if it should be normal for me; the answer is a pretty clear no.

Recognizing when social media is (and isn't) for you

When I meet other women who are running their own businesses, I sometimes hear that they love social media. And hey, if that's your jam, I'm not going to tell you to quit it. But I also hear from a lot of women who sound like me.

Their mental load is too high, and social media adds to the pile. They're overwhelmed by all of the hoops they have to jump through for scraps of visibility, they're exhausted from constantly creating content, and checking for notifications to "stay engaged" has them on never-ending alert.

They're so busy listening to what everyone else is doing, copying other people's success models, listening to every self-proclaimed social media experts tips that they've stopped listening to themselves.

This isn't the freedom or flexibility they had in mind when they started their business, but it's the only "marketing" tool they know. Too often, it's the only marketing tactic anyone's talking about.

That's something I know I can change.

If this sounds like you, I want you to know that you don't have to do something just because everyone else is doing it, especially if you don't like doing it, if you're tired of doing it, and if it's not getting you where you'd like to go. You do have options, and I'd love to help you take them.