Introvert Hangovers Are Real—Here’s How To Cope
If you’re an introvert, you know how draining it can be to interact with people for a long period of time.
Introverts are energized by spending time alone, so when they don’t get an opportunity to recharge, exhaustion sets in. Depending on their level of introversion, some people might actually have physical symptoms following a long bout of socialization. Blogger Shawna Courter describes this sensation as an “introvert hangover.”
If you’re not an introvert and have no idea what Courter is talking about, the description from her blog might help you better understand the burnout that can happen to introverts after a long evening of socializing:
“An ‘introvert’ hangover is a pretty terrible thing to experience. It starts with an actual physical reaction to overstimulation. Your ears might ring, your eyes start to blur, and you feel like you’re going to hyperventilate. Maybe your palms sweat. And then your mind feels like it kind of shuts down, building barriers around itself as if you had been driving on a wide open road, and now you’re suddenly driving in a narrow tunnel. All you want is to be at home, alone, where it’s quiet.”
Some people who are more ambiverted (aka, halfway between an introvert and extrovert) fall in the middle and don’t have any physical symptoms, but desperately need some alone time to process things. Other people who describe themselves as extra-introverted might have even worse symptoms.
Luckily, Psychology Today has some tips to help introverts build and maintain their resilience, which will also help them cope with or avoid “introvert hangovers”:
- View your temperament as a positive—it’s not a bad thing to be introverted.
- Understand what it is in particular that overstimulates you.
- Find your own ways of interacting with the world, even if it doesn’t match the ways of most extroverts.
We all prefer different levels of socialization, but the more in tune you are with what energizes you and what exhausts you, the more you can avoid those “introvert hangovers.”
Photo by Mic445 
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