Сьюзан Кейн - Quiet [The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking]

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 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 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 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. Over-arousal 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.