Anxiety and Introversion: Two Faces of the Same Coin

Many people nowadays think that anxiety and introversion two seperate things while in fact they both go hand-in-hand, one nurturing the other.

A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks.

George Orwell, Politics and the English Language

Anxiety: a timeline

Let's face it. If you grew up in a decent family where they care about raising a good child, surely you were told what to do and whatnot. Of course you'd get spanked or punished every once in a while sparkling a short-term trauma to prevent you from repeating the mistake. What this does, besides conditioning you to prevent the punished behaviour, is that it makes you understand deep in your skull that some things are WRONG and some things are RIGHT.

You get to filter your actions and words through the lenses of "Is this appropriate to express? Is this the right thing to do?" And after life hits you with its slings and arrows, especially if you get bullied in high school or raised in an abusive family or any kind of situation that would crushes your self-esteem, those lenses become a habit. So you start learning how to repress your emotions and soon... you just can't even say "Hi" to your classmates like normal people do. Because yourself and your emotions/thoughts are separated by an intellectual abyss of nothingness that was built over the years. This abyss makes you self-conscious about everything you do and in extreme cases you just can't do anything before first feeling hesitant.

That abyss is none other than the favourite disorder of teenagers and young adults: “AnXiEtY”. Getting out of there requires a lot and a lot of work, and this post could be a good start for you if you're suffering from it.

What is anxiety and how does it occur?

Anxiety is the psychological manifestation of inner conflict between two constantly-competing powers. 

Your mind is really good at preventing you from doing emotionally-arousing activities, because arousal, physiologically speaking, is panic, and panic equals trauma. Those activities are usually things we have never done before or things that happened so sudden we didn't expect. We just hate being not in control of the situation, and your mind on an unconscious level abhors it because it must be in charge of what's happening and what's not. So when these kind of situations happen, your mind conjures up every single thought that could potentially hold you back. And it doesn't stop there.

Remember that your mind is bidirectional. You've got the old brain, the primitive part of it, and the high brain, i.e your consciousness. The old brain doesn't think. The old brain does. The high brain thinks and is, most of the time, subject to the old brain will.

Your old brain when unfamiliar with certain situations, it sends signals to your high brain through neurotransmitters and their pathways telling it "F***HSHSSJ THIS IS WRONG WE SHOULDN'T BE DOING THISSSS" and your high brain is like, "What? What's all the fuss about? I mean, he's just a classmate, and I'm just telling him 'Hey!' like it's nothing".

And then your old brain intensfies the signal, "F***. THAT. NO. F***ING. WAY. F***YOU. WE HAVE NEVER DONE THIS BEFORE AND WE SHOULD KEEP IT THAT WAY!!!!!! COME ON SEND SIGNALS TO THE LEG MUSCLES AND MOVE'EM AWAY FROM HERE!"

And that's what creates anxiety. Easy. Two brains that are armed with different equipment are conflicting in a short span of time, and I mean a couple of seconds here.

See those blue and red lines stemming from the lower brain to the higher brain? Those are the pathways that transport neurotransmitters from the old brain to the higher. Just look how it spreads all over the cereberal cortex and bear in mind that this is a 2D approximative represnetation of the system. In the real brain those pathways are all over the place.

And here is the thing, your old brain is not only in control of the release of those chemicals but also your nervous and endocrine system. The former acts in a matter of nanoseconds sending signals through neurotransmitters and the endocrine system operates in longer duration through the slow release of hormones from your glands. All of this regulates your behaviour and changes it either in the present moment or in the long run.

My point is, your old brain is EXTERMELY powerful. From a chemical standpoint, it has the advantage and his odds winning the conflicts are always higher. The other problem is that it's unaccessible. Remember when I told you that your old brain does and doesn't think? I meant that it doesn't need your consciouss approval to send those signals to your consciousness. It forces its will upon your consciousness.

But that doesn't mean that it can do whatever it wants. Your higher brain is in REAL control of the situation. Your consciousness can overcome whatever primitive instinct in your brain and do whatever it really wants. It just needs practice and getting used to. And once you do it more than enough, your old brain finally realizes that it's no big deal and chills everytime you're about to have an anxiety strike.

Why introversion is not a thing

So because someone experiences social anxiety a couple of times or lives through some difficult times like bullying and stuff, their self-esteem goes downhill, they find shelter in staying at home in front of their screens. What this does is that it worsens social anxiety even more. And then they come in terms with it and they compact everything they suffered from anxiety under, "Introvert, Geek, Nerd" like it's some cool thing.

I'm here to tell you that it is not and that you're missing a lot in believing that it's okay be an introvert.

First of all, remember that your current state is unnatural. Suppressing your thoughts and your emotions, isolating them from the outside world and other individuals is f***ed on so many levels I can't even begin to imagine. It creates a discrepancy between who you truly are and what image you’re projecting of yourself to the outside world.

Being introvert is not who we humans are. Introversion is a byproduct of the 20th Century and of the rapid progression in technology and services. Nowadays, you don’t need other people to survive, and most importantly, you don’t need to go through a chain of people in your life to get to whatever you’re looking for. All you need to do is simply click a few times, type a few letters and numbers using the tips of your fingers and that’s it: foods and drinks delivered, taxes paid, and you checked on your friend… all just by sitting back on your ass in the comfort of your couch and twitching your muscles a bit.

This lifestyle gave rise to individualism. Basically, everyone is minding their own damn businesses and as long as your busnisses don’t intersect, you may as well kill yourself by jumping off a bridge and no one will care or notice because it doesn’t really affect them as persons.

But here is the thing: THAT IS NOT WHAT WE ARE DESIGNED FOR.

I'm not saying we should all be watching each other and keep on contineous supervision. I'm saying that being alone is not as beneficial as we might think. Sure it gives you your personal freedom and private space to do whatever you want, but at the same time cutting human contact altogether might have some serious psychological consequences.

Our minds are not designed to live in isolation. We are SOCIAL ANIMALS. Being social is something embedded deep in our DNA, and hadn’t been for it, we would have been long gone as species, think of the Nethanderals.

The Nethanderals were the closest species to us Homo Spaiens back in the day. They stood on two feet, had the same morphological structure (more or less) but they were wolves. They learnt how to survive on their own and their minds couldn’t develop the ability of language. There was no interactions between the living beings of that species to finally figure out a way of communication.

Language is a byproduct of our sociability. Homo Sapiens managed only not to survive but also strive because we are SOCIAL and we COMMUNICATE with each other. Not just instinctual desires that assures our survival, such as sex, food gathering, and warning from danger, but other creative thoughts and ideas about different objects of the world. Being social and communicating with each other in the course of billions and billions of years paid off on the long run and helped us make it all the way to the top of the food chain. A few more hundreds years and we are fully exploiting the resources of our planets and are becoming a intergalactical civilization (Musk plzzzz)

In those billions of years, those who were isolated were killed and were deemed as weak. Those who didn’t have any social bonds were conspired against and murdered. So the genes being replicated in your cells as we speak belong to those who were social. Those who survived and navigated the social sphere of the tribe.

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This phenomenon of our brains being unadequate for today’s world is called “Mismatch” in Evolutionary Psychology. Our minds are not designed for this world, people. Read that multiple times and let it sink in. Our minds are not designed for this world.

Our minds are extroverted by nature. Introversion is a twisted state of affairs that should be worked on as soon as one becomes aware of it. 

If there is something that we are extremely good at, then it’s adaptation. It doesn’t matter what we do, when, or where we are put, we would always find a way to adapt: psychologically, biologically and socially. If you stay at home for a few days not interacting with any person, of course you will feel anxious when you start talking to other people again. You get used to loneliness and there is nothing wrong with it so your mind assumes it’s the good thing to do.

There is no introverted and extroverted. A bro once told me that he oscilliates between the two. He can’t really place himself on the scale because it depends on how sociable he is on that moment: did he meet a lot of people? Did he stay at home for a long time all by himself? …etc.

So my point is… If you isolate yourself and become an introvert, you’re only harming yourself psychologically. You’re increasing the abyss between yourself and your emotions and thoughts. You will never go far in life and you’ll miss many opportunities in the future that had you had the guts to stand for yourself, you would have seized.

So this has to stop now. Drop the introvert argument and gather your shit together.

And as a starting point, you can start with expressing your distaste to a certain person, thing, joke, or situation if you do find the situation weird. If you think that something funny happened albeit being problematic to laugh at, don’t overthink it. Laugh your ass off and they can all suck a d***. If you’re angry or feel uncfomrotable at someone or something, let him/her or those around you know. Feeling anxious? It’s okay. Show them that you’re perturbed by whatever it is that is going on and make yourself heard (More on this here).

You need to work on this for a long time until you finally become in harmony with yourself. Now, whatever you feel or think is expressed to the outer world and people know about it. Whatever comes to your mind during some social interaction should be verbalized (unless of course it’s absolutely f***ed). The key to this is loosen up and just follow the flow of the conversation and where it’s leading you... More on this on my next post.