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[ENFP] ENFPs, do you need a lot of alone time?

kyuuei

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What I love: NEEDING time away from people that I choose.
What I hate: Being in a situation where I'm stuck alone.

I love having the ability to interact with people at any time. I have IRL friends, phone-talk friends, online friends, gaming friends, etc. I love having people in my house that I CAN talk to and interact with. I like being overwhelmed with people and then taking a whole day or afternoon to myself.

What I can't stand is situations like the one I'm in now: I'm at training, so for the next 2 weeks I'm in a hotel by myself.. Which is fine during class times, but this weekend I could have been stuck by myself in a room with nothing to do and no one to talk to. :c

I tend to do unhealthy things when I'm forced to be by myself--one of the biggest is spend money. XD
 

Betty Blue

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I love my alone time, i thrive on it.
Without it i am likely to go into over confused drive.
I take in so much on an intuitive and emotional level that i need time to sift through it all alone. I don't analyise it, at least not in a practical fashion. I can read, clean, paint or potter and the intensity ebbs away making space for the new and exciting things of tomorrow.

It's also a lot to do with freedom, i hate to feel caged.
 
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011235813

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Stepdad is ENFP 7w6 so/sx. Not one of your "most introverted extrovert" ENFPs either ... he's very, very, very social and always wants to go out and talk to people, picks up randos everywhere and is suddenly best friends with them overnight, and has a habit of collecting strangers on planes or in concerts and the like and bringing them home for dinner. :shock:

He does need alone time to re-center himself and encroaching on his space and prodding him when he's cocooning is a poor idea. I just haven't noticed that he needs much of it but then again, I'm very introverted, even for an introverted type.
 

targobelle

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Yes I do test close on the E/I dichotomy. Hmm with lower energy people, I can be energised for hours but with high energy environments, I get drained really fast.

yes yes yes so very much YES!
 

animenagai

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Fuck yes. I've spent weeks, months even just staying at home with my family (though I assume things would be different if I lived alone). The Fi hypothesis is an interesting one. You wouldn't think something like that could explain so much of our introversion, yet I think it's true that I'm not as emotionally open as I should be. Not a lot of people know just how sensitive I am. When I'm in public, I don't try to hide my emotions per se, but I definitely don't express everything I feel either. I'm a guy who dances to love songs in musicals, I write poetry as an emotional outlet, I like having a good cry from time to time as a form of release. Having said that, I don't think I've done any of those things in public. If I did, I certainly didn't make it obvious. Having alone time lets me do all those things.
 

Qlip

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I've only discovered myself as an ENFP recently. It wasn't a matter exactly of having trouble pinning down a type, it was because I had some situational depression going on among other things and didn't behave to type. This subject has been a frustration to me as I'm figuring myself out. Not only do I need alone time, but I also need extrovert time. It's hard finding a balance.

After three days or so of mostly being on the move, I strongly feel the urge to hole up. After two or so days of having no contact with people or without at least going out and feeding my Ne as a substitute, I start to get anxious, then eventually I fall into a funk that is hard to pull out of. I don't like being beholden to my type's demands.
 

King sns

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I have been thinking about this a lot lately actually. Things that I do that are extroverted with my friends do not always translate into what my brain would like to do. Sometimes in speech when I'm with other people end up coming off incomprehensible. (Not "over their heads", just silly and nonsensical.) So when I get home at the end of the day, I need to just let things in my mind go off in every different direction. I need to work on my little silly projects, write the journals and the stories and (whatever it is) I am writing, read the books, and sometimes just stare up into the sky and think and feel without feeling like I may be judged. (Sometimes about the sky and sometimes about other stuff.) Figuring things out without corrections. (Ti would be a helpful tool, but it's not there, so...) So yeah, it ends up being a strong need for alone time at the end of the day.
 

King sns

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The topic of extroverts needing much time alone is pretty confusing to me, esp if they become drained by others. Yes, I know that some extroverts (it's not just ENFPs either) need a lot of time alone but that is also the mark of an introvert. And many introverts say they are not shy and I believe them. Distinguishing Introvert/extrovert gets confusing except in the case of outliers.

The only possible reasoning I've come up with is that extroverts who need a lot of time alone maybe don't like people that much and withdraw (?)
It's also difficult to tell the difference between an introvert who doesn't like people and an introvert who is truly more energized by being alone.

For me, I really like people to a large extent. I need a lot of time to process what I see throughout the day. It can't just be one thing after the other. When I see a person, I see a lot of things, there needs to be a lot of sleeping and thinking to make sense of everything. When there is a ton of activity around you just cannot do that. The mind is forced on what is going on, not what it wants to do, (process all that information, make understanding of things that are happening that you see.) While people and things give me loads of energy, it ends up being a lot of information to put together, too. Same with learning. I tried to make a healthy case for introversion, and it didn't work out. Introspection makes more sense. I've seen a lot of apparent enxp's have the same conundrum. They need a lot of alone time, but you just can't in your right sense make a case for them being introverts.
 

Qlip

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[MENTION=5489]shortnsweet[/MENTION] Same here. I get tired whenever I have to do something I don't wanna do. I can spend an entire day having nothing to do at work, and then go home tired, only to lay around and let my mind roam around as a relief.. even if that's what I did all day anyway. It's the act of being costrained that wears me out, even if it may be an extraverted activity.
 

Qlip

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[MENTION=5489]shortnsweet[/MENTION] Same here. I get tired whenever I have to do something I don't wanna do. I can spend an entire day having nothing to do at work, and then go home tired, only to lay around and let my mind roam around as a relief.. even if that's what I did all day anyway. It's the act of being costrained that wears me out, even if it may be an extraverted activity.
 

King sns

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[MENTION=5489]shortnsweet[/MENTION] Same here. I get tired whenever I have to do something I don't wanna do. I can spend an entire day having nothing to do at work, and then go home tired, only to lay around and let my mind roam around as a relief.. even if that's what I did all day anyway. It's the act of being costrained that wears me out, even if it may be an extraverted activity.

Yeah, it seems too that a lot of the mind wandering starts with external extroverted activities. Things that I did and saw leading on a line of trying to make sense of what I did and saw and then some other lines of thought. It doesn't come from within, it comes from outside.
 

Lady_X

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i may have answered already but i don't feel like looking...but i'm realizing that i really don't need alone time...i just need time where i can do whatever i want. there can be a whole house full constantly as long as they're not all expecting to be engaged. :)
 

NegativeZero

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The topic of extroverts needing much time alone is pretty confusing to me, esp if they become drained by others. Yes, I know that some extroverts (it's not just ENFPs either) need a lot of time alone but that is also the mark of an introvert. And many introverts say they are not shy and I believe them. Distinguishing Introvert/extrovert gets confusing except in the case of outliers.

The only possible reasoning I've come up with is that extroverts who need a lot of time alone maybe don't like people that much and withdraw (?)
It's also difficult to tell the difference between an introvert who doesn't like people and an introvert who is truly more energized by being alone.

This is because the overwhelming majority of people are actually ambiverts.
 

Santosha

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This is because the overwhelming majority of people are actually ambiverts.

Really? What makes you think this?

I've often considered myself an ambivert, but I seem to score exeedingly higher that other people on this forum in extroversion traits with disc, big 5, etc. I also watch the type-me videos, and about 80% of the self-typed Extroverts seem rather introverted to me. Yet still, cognitively speaking.. I do believe I am more of an ambivert.. So I am interested in why you might think this. =D
 

Elfboy

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on any MBTI test I take, I score almost exclusively introverted. Big 5 on the other hand I score high as hell on extroversion, probably because extroversion on the big 5 is behavioral and can be learned. frankly, the behaviors associated with extroversion on the big 5 are much more advantageous, so I probably adopted them unconsciously with that in mind
 

Starry

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I didn't read this thread. I didn't even read the OP. I'm just answering the title...by saying I need ridiculous amounts of alone-time. And I always have.
 
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