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Comment by mrsmee89 | Hacker News Reader

As someone who typically gets their energy depleted around people, there are certain people that increase my energy. There are also times where I almost need to interact with people on a biological level.

Listening to my body is the thing that weirdly, used to take up a lot of energy because I wasn’t used to/ allowed to as a child. So I was constantly making difficult real-time decisions.

As an adult, I’ve learned how to listen to my body and crucially adhering to it’s signals. As someone who like to think, perhaps too much, its the best investment I’ve ever made.

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My story is quite similar. I was always confused that I needed to be with people yet it drained me so much. The focus on observing my energy, as the article highlights, helped me figure things out. Somebody who figured this out about me before I did called me an "introverted people person". That seemed like an oxymoron to me, but it turns out it's exactly right!

I was in a very social role at work (managing managers) and decided I needed to be an engineer again, partly because the social nature of the job was so draining. The only thing that kept me going in management was one-on-ones with certain people who gave me energy. That helped me realize that I'm quite social when I'm with one other person that I know well and enjoy. It's groups and relative strangers that drain me. Since figuring this out, almost all my social engagements are with one friend at a time. It's so nice to consistently get energy from my social life now!

My experience is so close to yours, it's scary, thanks for writing this!

>As someone who typically gets their energy depleted around people, there are certain people that increase my energy. There are also times where I almost need to interact with people on a biological level.

I agree and think that the introvert/extrovert designation is totally relative to the specific players and the specifics of their connecting. At the end of the day, people really want to be heard and maybe these people we label as extroverts are just better at interjecting their story so that people listen to them. I wonder if any studies have been done that measure the amount of time a subject spends talking vs. listening against the their experience of being energy positive vs. negative.

I’ve noticed that there are some people who for me are a neutral. Mostly close family like my kids and wife. It’s not draining or regenerating. No person regenerates my introvert energy. I don’t really get any alone time anymore but I manage. I always thought I would die without big chunks of daily alone time but you get used to anything I guess

Could you elaborate a bit on how you weren't allowed to listen to your body as a child, and what kind of difficult real-time decisions that meant you had to make?

Also, how did you work on improving that as an adult?

Not the poster, but it's very familiar to me. I grew up in the midwest, and a friend from there says, "In the midwest we don't have bodies or feelings."

As a kid, I clearly remember having an epiphany: when people asked my how I was doing, they did not actually want to know how I was doing. There were a number of appropriate answers, "fine" first among them. If you watch the first 20 seconds of "How to Speak Minnesotan", it's this dynamic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-wx11l3nr4

The best way to convincingly say you're fine is to not know otherwise. So by my late teens I was very good at not knowing how I was feeling. After 20 years in California, I have unlearned a lot of this. Yoga especially helped, as at least with my instructor it was basically 90 minutes of learning to pay attention to the subtle feelings in my body. Unsurprisingly, paying attention to my emotional and physical health has a lot of benefits, so I am a much happier person and would never go back.

> After 20 years in California, I have unlearned a lot of this.

Hmm, I’m curious which part. If anything, I seem to notice even more of this tendency in much of Southern California compared to the upper Midwest where I also grew up. The opposite is probably the case in the SF area, however, and possibly the Bay Area in general.

Fair point. I'm in SF. Here there's a lot of focus on personal experience as primary.

@wpietri sums up what I meant very well.

I’ll just add, a concrete method of improving my ability to “listen to my body” is shifting my attention to a specific part of my body especially when I feel vague discomfort. I tend to focus on my torso or chest. This really helps center my experience around noticing instead of judging.

As a bonus, this shift in perspective also allows me to connect with others more authentically.

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