Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can\'t Stop Talking pdfdrive com

inhibited
, and that’s exactly how I still feel at some dinner

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parties.
This ability to stretch ourselves—within limits—applies to extroverts,
too. One of my clients, Alison, is a business consultant, mother, and wife
with the kind of extroverted personality—friendly, forthright,
perpetually on the go—that makes people describe her as a “force of
nature.” She has a happy marriage, two daughters she adores, and her
own consulting firm that she built from scratch. She’s rightly proud of
what she’s accomplished in life.
But she hasn’t always felt so satisfied. The year she graduated from
high school, she took a good look at herself and didn’t like what she saw.
Alison is extremely bright, but you couldn’t see that from her high
school transcript. She’d had her heart set on attending an Ivy League
school, and had thrown that chance away.
And she knew why. She’d spent high school socializing—Alison was
involved in practically every extracurricular activity her school had to
offer—and that didn’t leave much time for academics. Partly she blamed
her parents, who were so proud of their daughter’s social gifts that they
hadn’t insisted she study more. But mostly she blamed herself.
As an adult, Alison is determined not to make similar mistakes. She
knows how easy it would be to lose herself in a whirl of PTA meetings
and business networking. So Alison’s solution is to look to her family for
adaptive strategies. She happens to be the only child of two introverted
parents, to be married to an introvert, and to have a younger daughter
who is a strong introvert herself.
Alison has found ways to tap into the wavelength of the quiet types
around her. When she visits her parents, she finds herself meditating and
writing in her journal, just the way her mother does. At home she
relishes peaceful evenings with her homebody husband. And her
younger daughter, who enjoys intimate backyard talks with her mother,
has Alison spending her afternoons engaged in thoughtful conversation.
Alison has even created a network of quiet, reflective friends.
Although her best friend in the world, Amy, is a highly charged extrovert
just like her, most of her other friends are introverts. “I so appreciate

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people who listen well,” says Alison. “They are the friends I go have
coffee with. They give me the most spot-on observations. Sometimes I
haven’t even realized I was doing something counterproductive, and my
introverted friends will say, ‘Here’s what you’re doing, and here are
fifteen examples of when you did that same thing,’ whereas my friend
Amy wouldn’t even notice. But my introverted friends are sitting back
and observing, and we can really connect over that.”
Alison remains her boisterous self, but she has also discovered how to
be, and to benefit from, quiet.
Even though we can reach for the outer limits of our temperaments, it
can often be better to situate ourselves squarely inside our comfort
zones.
Consider the story of my client Esther, a tax lawyer at a large
corporate law firm. A tiny brunette with a springy step and blue eyes as
bright as headlamps, Esther was not shy and never had been. But she
was decidedly introverted. Her favorite part of the day was the quiet ten
minutes when she walked to the bus along the tree-lined streets of her
neighborhood. Her second favorite part was when she got to close the
door to her office and dig into her work.
Esther had chosen her career well. A mathematician’s daughter, she
loved to think about intimidatingly complex tax problems, and could
discuss them with ease. (In 
chapter 7
, I examine why introverts are so
good at complex, focused problem-solving.) She was the youngest
member of a close-knit working group operating inside a much larger
law firm. This group comprised five other tax lawyers, all of whom
supported one another’s careers. Esther’s work consisted of thinking
deeply about questions that fascinated her and working closely with
trusted colleagues.
But it happened that Esther’s small group of tax lawyers periodically
had to give presentations to the rest of the law firm. These talks were a
source of misery for Esther, not because she was afraid of public
speaking, but because she wasn’t comfortable speaking
extemporaneously. Esther’s colleagues, in contrast—all of whom

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happened to be extroverts—were spontaneous talkers who decided what
they’d say on their way to the presentation and were somehow able to
convey their thoughts intelligibly and engagingly by the time they
arrived.
Esther was fine if given a chance to prepare, but sometimes her
colleagues failed to mention that they’d be delivering a talk until she
arrived at work that morning. She assumed that their ability to speak
improvisationally was a function of their superior understanding of tax
law and that, as she gained more experience, she too would be able to
“wing it.” But as Esther became more senior and more knowledgeable,
she still couldn’t do it.
To solve Esther’s problem, let’s focus on another difference between
introverts and extroverts: their preference for stimulation.
For several decades, beginning in the late 1960s, an influential
research psychologist named Hans Eysenck hypothesized that human
beings seek “just right” levels of stimulation—not too much and not too
little. Stimulation is the amount of input we have coming in from the
outside world. It can take any number of forms, from noise to social life
to flashing lights. Eysenck believed that extroverts prefer more
stimulation than introverts do, and that this explained many of their
differences: introverts enjoy shutting the doors to their offices and
plunging into their work, because for them this sort of quiet intellectual
activity is optimally stimulating, while extroverts function best when
engaged in higher-wattage activities like organizing team-building
workshops or chairing meetings.
Eysenck also thought that the basis of these differences might be
found in a brain structure called the ascending reticular activating
system (ARAS). The ARAS is a part of the brain stem that has
connections leading up to the cerebral cortex and other parts of the
brain. The brain has excitatory mechanisms that cause us to feel awake,
alert, and energetic—“aroused,” in the parlance of psychologists. It also
has calming mechanisms that do the opposite. Eysenck speculated that
the ARAS regulates the balance between over-and under-arousal by
controlling the amount of sensory stimulation that flows into the brain;
sometimes the channels are wide open, so a lot of stimulation can get in,
and sometimes they’re constricted, so the brain is less stimulated.
Eysenck thought that the ARAS functioned differently in introverts and

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extroverts: introverts have wide-open information channels, causing
them to be flooded with stimulation and over-aroused, while extroverts
have tighter channels, making them prone to under-arousal. Overarousal
doesn’t produce anxiety so much as the sense that you can’t think
straight—that you’ve had enough and would like to go home now.
Under-arousal is something like cabin fever. Not enough is happening:
you feel itchy, restless, and sluggish, like you need to get out of the
house already.
Today we know that the reality is far more complex. For one thing,
the ARAS doesn’t turn stimulation on and off like a fire truck’s hose,
flooding the entire brain at once; different parts of the brain are aroused
more than others at different times. Also, high arousal levels in the brain
don’t always correlate with how aroused we 
feel
. And there are many
different kinds of arousal: arousal by loud music is not the same as
arousal by mortar fire, which is not the same as arousal by presiding at a
meeting; you might be more sensitive to one form of stimulation than to
another. It’s also too simple to say that we always seek moderate levels
of arousal: excited fans at a soccer game crave hyperstimulation, while
people who visit spas for relaxation treatments seek low levels.
Still, more than a thousand studies conducted by scientists worldwide
have tested Eysenck’s theory that cortical arousal levels are an important
clue to the nature of introversion and extroversion, and it appears to be
what the personality psychologist David Funder calls “half-right”—in
very important ways. Whatever the underlying cause, there’s a host of
evidence that introverts 
are
more sensitive than extroverts to various
kinds of stimulation, from coffee to a loud bang to the dull roar of a
networking event—and that introverts and extroverts often need very
different levels of stimulation to function at their best.
In one well-known experiment, dating all the way back to 1967 and
still a favorite in-class demonstration in psychology courses, Eysenck
placed lemon juice on the tongues of adult introverts and extroverts to
find out who salivated more. Sure enough, the introverts, being more
aroused by sensory stimuli, were the ones with the watery mouths.
In another famous study, introverts and extroverts were asked to play
a challenging word game in which they had to learn, through trial and
error, the governing principle of the game. While playing, they wore
headphones that emitted random bursts of noise. They were asked to

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adjust the volume of their headsets up or down to the level that was
“just right.” On average, the extroverts chose a noise level of 72 decibels,
while the introverts selected only 55 decibels. When working at the
volume that they had selected—loud for the extroverts, quiet for the
introverts—the two types were about equally aroused (as measured by
their heart rates and other indicators). They also played equally well.
When the introverts were asked to work at the noise level preferred by
the extroverts, and vice versa, everything changed. Not only were the
introverts