What’s the difference between introversion and social anxiety?
I scored ENFJ on the Quistic personality test but that doesn’t seem right. I know I’m more introverted.
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penelope@penelopetrunk.com
Sometimes people feel like they don’t want to talk with people because it’s too much effort, or it always goes poorly, or it’s hard to find people who are interesting.
These are not signs of being an introvert. Rather these are signs of social anxiety. Based on your email and test results it looks to me like you are an extrovert who has some anxiety toward social situations.
Penelope
I’ve never met an ENFJ who doesn’t think of themselves as somewhat introverted. For some reason they think that true extraverts want to be among other people all the time and are always 100% comfortable socially, which is rarely the case.
Every balanced person needs some people time and some alone time. It’s a question of which one of those you need to recover from the other, and also what you focus on more – the inside world or the external world. Many extraverts spend their alone time thinking about how to do things in the external world, or actually doing things physically.
Spot on.
I’ve also found that it’s generally better to ask other people if they think you’re more extroverted or introverted. I’ve known so many extroverts who were screamingly obvious extroverts to everyone else, who insisted they were actually introverts.
Truth is people are situational. In one place and time and crowd you’re extraverted and energized by it and in another you’re the exact opposite. Beyond that, you’re a moving target anyway, people change over time. These changes to set and setting absolutely dwarf personality test results, making them a generalization that’s hard to make use of. Hence why no researchers or scientists accept them, use them in any way, or create new ones, also why all of the current ones, including mb, were made by laypeople, not scientists or even psychologists.