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How daily life can bore introverts

Introvert boredom

Introverts find the everyday grind to be monotonous for one reason:

We guard our time fiercely and loathe seeing it wasted, whether in traffic jams, long lines at the grocery store, or mindless chitchat. 

Who'd know better about the value of time than the very people who spend so much time contemplating life?

Unless we make an active effort to enrich our lives with things that transcend the day-to-day humdrum, we can find ourselves rather bored and glum.

Here's the good news: With their exceptionally active minds, introverts have no trouble finding ways to preoccupy themselves. 

For starters, many of us are perpetual daydreamers who often get lost in our thoughts.

If you happen to see an introvert zoning out, it might be because he or she is ruminating over:

- a new idea for a book they're writing

- the next destination on their travel list

- the motives of a person in their life

- the cosmos, philosophy, or some other profound subject

But sometimes we need a tad of inspiration, or we would rather focus our attention on something or someone outside of ourselves. 

And that's where outlets like books, movies, and music come in. 

I, for one, can't walk on the treadmill at the gym for more than five minutes unless I can listen to music -- and not just any songs, but ones I truly enjoy. Otherwise, a workout session becomes an exercise (pun intended) in dullness. 

I listen to music, in fact, while doing virtually anything else you can think of -- working, washing the dishes, trimming my nails. Music can make the most unpleasant tasks seem more bearable. 

Movies and books, for their part, offer even greater potential for escapism.

Whether it's immersing ourselves in a romance novel or going back in time through a movie's depiction of the Civil War era, we use these outlets to pull us out of the present, if momentarily. (Of course, we remind ourselves not to stay there for much too long, as avoiding reality will only hurt us in the long run.)

For example, I love picturing what it was like living in 18th century America amid calls to break from the mother country and become an independent nation. How it must have felt to live in the era of brilliant statesmen like Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Ben Franklin, and Alexander Hamilton.

Most introverts may be quiet and introspective, but we have the richest, loudest minds of anyone. And if you earn our trust, we'll share that extraordinary world with you!

But there's no question introverts can regard life as a slog unless they have their books, music, and movies with which to stay intellectually engaged. 

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