IntrovertWorld. Health and Wellness.
5 Ways To Maintain Connection With your Loved Ones as an Introvert
Do you find it hard to make time for the people you love?
Introverts love being alone. Sometimes a little too much.
It’s easy to get soaked up in your alone time and forget to check in on the people you love especially if you enjoy spending most of your time on yourself.
This does not mean you don’t care about or think about them. Usually, it’s just a combination of ‘ I don’t really want to make any calls right now’ and ‘I’ll get to it right after I finish reading this book or watching this movie’ which then goes on for a whole hour and the day ends before you get to call your loved ones.
It’s not that you don’t think about them, sometimes it just slips your mind.
Like many other activities worth accomplishing, it is easier to get this done with a strategy rather than waiting for your mind to do you right because if it had to pick between inaction and making effort, you would never have friends to check in on in the first place.
Here are 5 things you can do to maintain your meaningful relationships.
1. Schedule calls or meets in your calendar
Set time apart in your calendar to catch up with your loved ones.
Do it as you would schedule an important work call or meeting and stick to your schedule.
Socializing can slip away when you spend almost all your time working and the little left re-energizing which is often time spent alone for many introverts.
Improving your social life by maintaining a healthy meaningful relationships with your loved ones helps you achieve a healthy work-life balance.
A healthy social life is a significant indicator of overall wellness. Being social plays a role in our lives that cannot be substituted by other activities or approaches to wellness. We are meant to be social beings. Feeding that part of us is important. As a bonus, it nourishes our creativity.
2. Set reminders for their special days
If your loved ones celebrate any birthdays, anniversaries, or occasions, set a reminder to share in the celebration with them.
You don’t have to attend all events or accept all invites. But let them know you are thinking of them.
That will go a long way in maintaining your relationship. Not sharing their celebration may leave them feeling unseen, underappreciated, or neglected.
Call them, send a card or gifts, and when you can, attend that event and let them that you care about them and the things that matter to them.
3. Build social habits
If you’ve read any of my previous posts on building habits derived from the book Atomic Habits by James Clear or the book itself, you will learn there are various practical ways to build habits.
You will also get to learn the significance of building habits in our lives. My absolute favorite is habit change through identity change and vice versa.
The person you are is the sum of your habits. You can change the person you are by changing your habits.
You can decide to be the kind of person who regularly checks in on their loved ones by implementing habits that with time turn you into a person who routinely does this.
An easy way to implement a new social habit is by setting an exact time and place for it or stacking it onto an existing habit.
For example, you can decide, ‘I will call my mom every Wednesday after I get groceries’. You’ve set a particular time and day, and stacked the new habit onto an already existing habit which makes it more likely to implement as compared to ‘I’ll call my mom once a week’.
You’re likely to skip Monday through Friday because you always have tomorrow and before you know it you’re spending your weekend with your phone turned off in relaxation mode and you never got to call your mom.
Habits carried out over time eventually become part of our routine and make having a healthy social life much easier.
4. Be involved in their life activities.
It’s easier to catch up with people if you have an idea of what’s going on in their lives.
Sometimes we find it hard to pick up the phone and make a call to a loved one because we are not sure what we’ll talk about and don’t want to be stuck in that awkward silence where we are just listening to each other breathe.
Being involved in their lives and allowing them to be part of yours gives you something to make a conversation about and makes those phone calls something to look forward to.
5. Engage in their kind of activities once in a while.
There’s a chance that most people in your life are extroverted.
The biggest difference between introverts and extroverts is how they enjoy spending their time. Introverts are energized by low-stimulating environments due to their high sensitivity to dopamine and, therefore, prefer to spend most of their time alone or in low-stimulating environments.
Low-stimulating environments drain extroverts. They are recharged by spending time in highly-stimulating environments.
By this definition, introverts and extroverts have different perceptions of fun.
Taking the initiative to spend time with the extroverts in your life in their preferred settings and inviting them into yours helps create a bond and understand each other.
A huge part of maintaining a connection with your loved ones is getting yourself to do it even when you’d rather not. It shouldn’t be pushing your social limits, however.
Moderation :)
Your introverted holistic health writer, 💜
Wambui Njuguna.
