Introverts should (sometimes) act like extroverts

If I ever need a reminder that I’m not a natural extrovert, I need only to look at the journal I kept during the early days of my improv classes. “I am having incredible dread about improv tomorrow,” I wrote one day. “I would literally pay any amount to get out of this class,” I moaned on another. “You can’t be bad at improv, but I feel like I am bad at improv,” I wrote after a class during which I gave up in the middle of a game called Big Booty and said simply, “I can’t take this anymore.”

I had enrolled in improv because I was trying to become more extroverted, as part of a sweeping personality-change project that I document in my new book, Me, But Better. Extroversion is one of the “big five” personality traits that scientists say make up a person’s disposition, along with openness to experience, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Extroversion is associated with socializing and cheerfulness, and as a hardened introvert, I knew I needed a mechanism to force me out of my house and into gregariousness. Improv seemed like the full-immersion extrovert experience.

But it wasn’t going well, and at times, I thought about dropping the class or giving up altogether. Even after I got better at improv, I still felt nervous before every class. And the other activities I was doing to boost my extroversion — like going on long hikes with strangers — were only mildly pleasant, at best. I had this notion that, since I was an introvert, I should avoid difficult social situations like, well, improv class.

I’m glad I didn’t give up, though. It turns out that behaving in an extroverted way can have surprising benefits, even if you’re an introvert. And these perks of extroversion would only reveal themselves to me in time, after many, many hours of playing Zip Zap Zop against my will.

Compared to introverts, extroverts are happier, research unfortunately shows. An exhaustingly chirpy series of studies has found that social connection is one of the strongest predictors of well-being, and extroverts are more socially connected. In lab experiments, extroverts tend to interpret ambiguous stimuli more positively, hearing the word “won” rather than “one,” for example, or writing more uplifting short stories based on generic prompts. People who are extroverted as teenagers remain happier even when they’re 60.

I understand that introverts might not be thrilled to hear this — I wasn’t, either. But Sonja Lyubomirsky, a psychologist who has studied this phenomenon, says it’s worth focusing less on the “extrovert” part of this and more on the fact that these individuals are more enmeshed in community. “Connection is really the key to happiness,” Lyubomirsky told me. And there are ways to square your natural introversion with the universal human need for connection. You don’t have to mingle with everyone at the office party, for instance. You can just call a trusted friend for a one-on-one conversation. Even hanging out with others and listening more than you talk can be a form of “extroversion,” Lyubomirsky says.

While it’s true that extroverts enjoy talking, people, and attention, they also enjoy activity, period. Therefore, to boost your own levels of extroversion, you can just sign up for an activity — in addition to improv, I tried sailing — and commit to going, even if you don’t plan to talk much.

Though there’s nothing wrong with being an introvert, several studies have shown that when introverts occasionally behave in extroverted ways, they experience more “positive affect” — science-speak for good feelings. “I started doing these studies because I didn’t believe them,” says John Zelenski, a psychology professor at Carleton University who has replicated this finding, and who himself is introverted. But “it absolutely seems correct that if you get people to act extroverted — and usually, that means socializing for a few minutes — there’s a big mood boost there.”

The reason for this twist is that behaving against our natures doesn’t bother us as much as we fear it might. In one study, introverts even reported feeling truer to themselves when they were behaving like extroverts. That’s because, much as we might prize authenticity, we have other desires, too. We want to handle difficult situations appropriately, feel embraced by others, and accomplish our goals — and most of us also want to feel happier and more connected. Sometimes, achieving those things means going against our “natural” personality traits.

“Lots of things that we may not initially like doing actually really benefit us,” says Lyubomirsky, who, as an example, offered that she now loves running but took a while to get into it. “A lot of things in life don’t feel natural at first. … Just because it doesn’t feel comfortable and natural doesn’t mean it’s not authentic.” Authenticity can come from familiarity, and the only way to build familiarity is through experience.

A desire to remain “authentic” is one reason people may balk at the idea of changing themselves — either through personality change or otherwise. But living authentically can also mean acting in ways that feel, at first, uncomfortable, as long as those actions draw you closer to your values and goals. Many of us, if we followed the North Star of “authenticity,” would quit our jobs, neglect our families, and watch Love Is Blind all day. But what is instinctive is not always best.

This doesn’t mean behaving like an extrovert constantly, just occasionally. I told Zelenski about a time I had to collect “man on the street” interviews as a reporter — a horrible task that involves approaching random strangers and lobbing questions at them in an attempt to find a pattern of responses for your story. One freezing cold night in New Jersey, I didn’t conceal my misery well enough. As I mangled my words and rubbed my hands together, one woman looked at me with pity and said, “Don’t worry, you’re almost done.”

“After a while, it does get old,” Zelenski acknowledged.

To figure out how to get better at these forays into extroversion, I called up Gillian Sandstrom, a senior lecturer in psychology at the University of Sussex in the UK. More importantly for my purposes, she talks to strangers — on the street, on vacation, even in the sacred space of the London Tube. She researches the power of “weak ties,” casual acquaintances with whom we interact, but usually only briefly. People who have lots of weak ties, who make eye contact and idle chitchat with baristas and neighbors, feel happier than those who don’t, her studies find.

Initially, her research felt alien to me. I had stopped working in an office when the pandemic started, and I didn’t miss it at all. I live in the suburbs, so I don’t interact with many people unless I make a point to — and I usually don’t.

Sandstrom told me she’s the same way: She’s an introvert and tends to avoid demanding social situations. But she uses talking to strangers as a coping mechanism of sorts. If she’s in a big, crowded room, she finds someone who’s off by themselves and starts a one-on-one conversation.

One way to open such a conversation is by making a statement, rather than asking a question. For instance, when Sandstrom is on public transportation, she’ll test the waters by complimenting the person sitting next to her. (She recommends remarking on something other than their looks.) Or, she’ll comment on something in the environment — if they have a suitcase, she’ll ask where they’re going. One time, she was walking in a park and noticed a man smiling at some ducks. “Aren’t they cute?” Sandstrom said. She and the man ended up chatting for half an hour, since they were walking in the same direction. At the end of her conversations, Sandstrom just says something like, “Thank you, it’s been nice talking to you,” and walks off.

I told Sandstrom that I don’t miss my weak ties much, and I’m not really one for small talk. We either have to get to the bottom of your childhood trauma, or we’re not talking at all. The thing is, she pointed out, most weak ties probably aren’t going to become long-term relationships. I needed to set the stakes way lower. Her conversations tend to last just a few minutes, and sometimes, they’re nothing special. But just like a mediocre movie wouldn’t make you swear off cinema forever, one bad conversation shouldn’t keep you from trying again.

Over time, these weak ties do benefit us, even if we don’t especially notice them. They make us feel woven into the social fabric, Sandstrom says, like we’re part of something bigger. “When I do talk to people, I feel better,” she told me. “It’s almost always at least an average experience.” And when a conversation is unusually engaging, “it feels awesome, because I wouldn’t expect there to be anything coming from it.”

As I sped home from my first improv class, I detected something that, honestly, floored me. I was smiling. Even though I would continue to dread it for months, something about the whole exercise was just so fun. I’m rarely immersed in something that’s meant to be light and exuberant, as opposed to correct or exacting. Because it was the middle of the pandemic, it had been months since I’d socialized with a group of people. The electricity of improv had invigorated me, in spite of myself.

I found myself living out Lyubomirsky’s adage, that sometimes things that don’t seem natural end up feeling pretty good. The pioneering psychologist Jerome Bruner said that “you more likely act yourself into feeling than feel yourself into action,” and I had literally acted myself into feeling happy. Sometimes, it seems, introverts should agree to do activities before we feel like doing them. Occasionally, you have to commit to socializing. If you wait until you’re in the mood, you’ll never go.