feelings – INFJ Ramblings

INFJ Extraverted Feeling (Fe) and Making It Work for You

Sun, 18 Jan 2015 10:28:28 +0000

One of the most prominent functions for INFJs is extraverted feeling (Fe). It is one of the things among INFJs that can be easily observed by others and can be something to look out for in order to spot an INFJ. Fe is what INFJs use primarily when dealing with other people and the outside world. To sum it all up in a simple view, it can be seen as having a keen sense of the outside world which easily affects us emotionally. It helps us to understand how the people around us are feeling and also how to express how we are feeling to them. If INFJs have strong feelings or opinions about someone we often tend to express them in one way or another since this type of expression comes natural to us because of Fe. This is why INFJs can be very loving and caring with the people we like but find it hard to get along with people we don’t like. INFJs can often end up in heated debates with other people when we feel they act careless, selfish or in any other way pose a treat to our values. Similar to ENFJs, but INFJs as introverts also more often choose to avoid arguments with others. We instead internalize a lot of feelings which can end up affecting us in a negative way in the long term. Fe is a natural process for INFJs to deal with emotions and we need to express them with our Fe in order to deal and process them. This is why therapy and expression through art can be so beneficial for INFJs.

What is important to understand as INFJs is that our happiness depend not only on learning to understand why we react, think and do what we do. But also how we can predict and change our behavior accordingly to benefit us. Life can be more difficult for INFJs then many other personalities at times, and that’s why this is even more important for us. From what I have learned it is crucial for INFJs to start understanding and taking charge of how our emotions affect us. INFJs are a very feeling oriented type of personality, we are deeply emotional and most of our problems in life will relate to this heightened emotional sensitivity.

Taking control of how your Fe affects you in everyday life is a good first step to gaining more stability in your life. The steps to succeed with this is more simple then you might think and applying them in practical situations will help you gain an understanding and start changing yourself over time. This is how I would break it down in three steps:

1. You need to start noticing Fe and how your emotions fuel you in your everyday life. You need to realize how much your feelings control your well being, and how much the external control your feelings. Notice how your negative thought loops are often created from what happens out in the environment around you. How other peoples feelings somehow affect and get ahold of yours. How the external world often creates all the thoughts and feelings you experience at the moment. Practicing meditation is also a fast way of gaining this realization because when you shut out the external often, you start to realize that without it what you are left with inside is stability, calm, clarity and peace. That without all the things happening around you a lot of the negative feelings you might experience start to fade away. Use this as proof to help you understand how really extraverted your sense of feeling is. INFJs depend much on their environment for how they feel inside. Surrounding yourself with loving and caring people is crucial for your development.

2. Your second step is to start to predict your emotions. Understanding and predicting what causes you your pains starts to separate you from it. It helps you understand that even though your feelings can sometimes take ahold of you or jump out and surprise you, it is not who you are. When somebody gets you angry, it is really that external energy that affects you and how you choose to react to it determine how you will feel towards it. Your emotions are not much different then any other sense in your body like smell, taste etc. With practice you can change how it affects you.

3. The last step is to learn to let go. When you respond with anger or sadness to what somebody did to you or something that happened, what you really did in your mind before that was to create presumptions on how something should turn out. You create an ideal of how you want something to be or how somebody should act. You have to realize that trying to control what other people do or what happens in the outside world is pointless because you simply can’t. Hence chasing negative emotions that result from them is only you causing yourself more pain because you can’t control the situations. Every time it happens to you again, your mind is as surprised as the previous time and have failed to learn that grasping ideal situations really is pointless. The mind is fascinating in that way that it still thinks it can control the situation the next time and ends up letting itself down over and over. I like to picture it that it is no different then hitting your head against a brick wall, over and over.

Realize that how you react to your emotions will form the foundations for how you feel inside. Start to let go of what you cannot change and the mind will stop holding on to these negative feelings and there will be more room for what makes you happy instead. Extraverted feeling is a great ability of INFJs and can bring you much happiness in your life as long as you stop letting it control you and cause much negative emotional feedback. Start cultivating love and stability inside yourself and this will end up being what you express with your Fe to the outside world.

Here is a book I highly recommend to cultivate emotional health and stability, a great book on meditation and mindfulness:

The post INFJ Extraverted Feeling (Fe) and Making It Work for You appeared first on INFJ Ramblings.

INFJ Social Skills: Surviving in Your Social Life

Sun, 04 Aug 2013 14:29:00 +0000

One of the core talents of INFJs is our interpersonal skills. We are good at getting people to like us and at keeping harmony in the social environment around us. I never realized these things about myself until discovering my personality type and reading about it. I simply thought that most people function like I do. A perfect example of my INFJness in practice is when sitting around a table talking to people. In this situation I want to have eye contact and at some point address everybody around the table personally, in order to make them feel important and included. If somebody is silent to long and I sense that they might feel excluded, I always find a way to address them to push them back in to the conversation. This even happens unconsciously for me and I just do it without thinking. Another thing is that sometimes I let people be wrong in order for them to feel good about themselves. Like when somebody wants to tell you a story which it turns out you have already heard. I don’t want to tell them that, since people get excited entertaining each other. They might tell it to you wrong or inaccurate and instead of pointing it out to them I let it go since there is no reason to argue or give remarks on such minor things.

One of the reasons we focus on keeping harmony in the social realm around us has to do with the nature of our auxiliary function Fe (Extroverted feeling). The nature of Fe is to express our emotions outward, applying what’s inside us to the outside world. This is the reason why INFJs occasionally can get very irritated, angry and complaining when we don’t feel harmony on the inside. Or the opposite when people around us are very happy, which in turn feeds our Fe and makes us even happier. I read an article awhile ago and in it they mentioned this as the ‘oil on fire’ effect. Whatever feelings burns inside us gets intensified from equal feelings from the outside world, i.e. pouring oil on the fire ignites it more. Of course this is both a good and a bad thing for an INFJ as it can be a source of anxiety and overloading us with feelings.

A problem with being and INFJ sometimes is that I can doubt that other people like me or enjoy my company. This in turn make me try even harder and give more to people around me. Often however we can end up being taken advantage of when we put ourselves in such situations. It all has to do with self confidence and being highly idealistic often comes with having a not very balanced self esteem. It is not that we don’t value ourselves, it is that we often value others higher because we care about them. The reality in it all is that even though we feel so different and are different, people often tend to like us even though we think that they don’t. Sometimes after interacting with a lot of people, I can realize that I did better then I felt I did at the time. I can remember so many times people and even complete strangers, opened up to me and talked about things most would not without knowing each other better. How mentally unstable, mentally ill and people that are hurting tend to be drawn to me in some magical way. Among a group they often feel most comfortable talking to me because I never judge them like other people do.

It is because people are insecure about themselves and even though they might not understand it consciously, unconsciously they feel that you can see past their imperfections and understand them and who they really are on the inside. Sometimes this might have the opposite effect with shallow people, maybe they sense that we see past their persona and know that there actually is nothing else there besides fear and insecurities

The core of it all is that we want to bring social harmony to our outside world and the people in it because it also fuels us and makes us feel better about ourselves in the end. However, when other people feel bad, we feel bad. I would go so far as to say that we have one of the purest forms of empathy. We can feel exactly what other people feel and therefore we can relate and understand people, even at times better than they can understand themselves. INFJs are deep, caring and kind people at heart. We see and feel so much of the world and it affects us in such a way that it’s highly unlikely for us to ever want to hurt other people. We want to help them because helping them is in turn also helping ourselves.

The post INFJ Social Skills: Surviving in Your Social Life appeared first on INFJ Ramblings.

INFJ anxiety and stress

Thu, 01 Aug 2013 22:10:00 +0000

Sadly enough, it turns out the most popular posts on this blog is the ones that are about anxiety and INFJs. I know this is a big part of being this personality type so I thought I’ll do another post about it and try to summarize my experiences further.

(At the bottom of the post I have also put together an INFJ survival kit of the best products to improve your life)

I’m a INFJ and a HSP (Highly Sensitive Person), if you are not familiar with HSPs you should Google it. Basically it’s a well researched classification for people with unusually sensitive nervous systems, and because of this they struggle with feelings or sensory stimuli. We feel things on a higher scale then others. Looking at statistics HSPs are common among INFJs and INFPs, but they do occur among most personality types to certain degrees. I experience this heightened sensitivity in both my feelings and senses. It is pretty understandable since as an INFJ I am both a feeler and also have dominant and inferior perceiving functions. Se (extroverted sensing), is our inferior function and this is a highly unconscious function together with our dominant Ni (introverted intuition). They operate mostly together in our subconscious and Se fuels our primary Ni with external information.

Our Se basically acts as a balance to our highly intuitive state of functioning which makes us very perceptive of our external environments and other people. This can be both a gift and a curse for INFJs since we take in so much information it can be hard to filter it at times and we can get overloaded. Since our dominant perceiving function is introverted it also gets even more focused and turned inward compared to people with an extroverted equivalent. The problem with introverted intuition as dominant is that since it is introverted we might tend to internalize feelings even without being aware of it.

I’ve been battling anxiety and stress on a daily basis for most of my life and a lot of it tend to come from being highly sensitive and intuitive. I even had full blown panic attacks or mania in the past when it is at it’s worst. Usually my state of being in general influence the magnitude of negative feelings, my anxiety grows worse if there is something bothering me in my life. What helps is dealing with things as soon as you can, because if you let them sit there and bother you in the back of your mind they will make everything worse.

To much sensory stimuli can also lead to anxiety for me. High uncontrollable sounds, flashing and intense lights and imagery, busy environments, big groups of people and having expectations put on you tend to trigger these feelings the most. Basically things that connects to our senses and feelings which are not possible to control. I get agitated and nervous, can’t concentrate my thoughts on what is going on and can even feel physically ill. It becomes a downward spiral which side tracks my mood and can bring on other feelings of anxiety completely unrelated to the first cause. For example, an noisy environment can trigger stress which sets off bodily sensations making me feel like something is wrong or I’m sick. Usually when I calm down or the trigger stops I can realize that it’s false feelings, but during it feels like being caught in a grip. You can’t tell if it’s real or not because your usual state of functioning is suppressed. Many describe it as INFJs living in a constant state of disembodiment, we are more connected to our mind then the physical.

Being very perceptive to things makes you want to be able to control these external perceptions. The problem is most other people do not operate in a Ni state of being which makes it all much more difficult for others to relate to. People disturb you with noise or insist on talking to you when you are busy which makes you unable to focus on anything. To many people talking at the same time makes it hard to separate the words. Hard to sleep with background noise or insomnia from to much stimulation. Being among a noisy crowd of commuters in a train without AC can be a real nightmare, draining your energy quickly when your Ni and Se is trying to make sense of all the sensory stimulation. Since we are introverted by nature we tend to consciously focus in on one thing at a time, multitasking and following what’s going on everywhere around you can be exhausting. When you can’t keep up with everything it easily creates stress and anxiety.

Another source of anxiety for me is feelings of perfectionism and high expectations in the self and the external world. It can be that the creative vision you imagined in your mind for your painting, does not appear in the one you created in real life. That you try to express your feelings or self to a person but words don’t suffice in real life, making it reflect what you meant poorly. Or when you have to impress someone, present yourself or your work and you idealize the perfect outcome for it but in real life you can’t seem to pull it off like you imagined. It all has a lot to do with self esteem and expectations our Ni put on our self which we in turn fail to accomplish. Then by being introverted feelers we intensify these feelings inward making us unable to escape and cope with them easily. We can always imagine the true ideal and who we want to be, but we can never achieve it because when we do there will always be something else we want, the next step. We are future oriented and this is what drives our ideals also. Needless to say life as an INFJ is not easy and it’s understandable why others might consider us moody, melancholic and intense at times.

It is important to understand as an INFJ that your feelings sometimes tend to go over the top and to realize when this happens. That it is something temporary and it happens for a reason, it’s your fight or flight response. Your body and mind is telling you that you need to slow down a bit in order to enjoy yourself. Don’t let it consume you because nothing bad will happen feeling anxiety, it is just a feeling and will pass eventually. You will never defeat it since it is in part who you are but you can learn to live with it.

As INFJs living in a western and modern society I think we are unlucky, today’s society is not very adapted for us. It favors everything that we are not and will try to mold us into just that. It is important to remember that we should not try to change our own behaviors because of this. I spent a decade of my life trying to change myself into someone I’m not, to be more extroverted, sensing and thinking as a male since this is how society tells us to be to fit it. Those years of trying didn’t bring me any closer to happiness. I just felt depressed and even more alienated from the world. I the end I came to the conclusion that you have to be yourself and find ways to cope in life instead, treating yourself and your body better. This in turn will improve your life greatly as an INFJ. Since we have no Si (introverted sensing) function in our stack I think we are one of the personalities to benefit the most from a healthy lifestyle. It grounds us and connects us to our bodies better. Feeling detached from my body and the world have been very common for me and also made me question my sanity at points in my life. Exercise have greatly improved these feelings and the overall anxiety I experience.

If you still have not come to terms with the aspect of being an INFJ, I suggest you take a step back and see what you can do to improve your everyday life to better suit you. Even if it means changing your job, relationships or where you live I promise you it’s worth it. Being an INFJ is not easy but there is no point in making it any harder then it already is.

To give you a head start on ways to improve your life as an INFJ, I’ve put together the INFJ survival kit. The following are products that I use almost daily and that helped change my life:

Rhodiola Rosea, supplement. This is an adaptogenic herb that helps manage healthy mood and stress response. The most natural and safe anti depressant that can be used daily, long term. Even people who are not depressed can use this to boost their mood levels.

L-Theanine, supplement. Theanine is the amino acid in tea that is responsible for the relaxing effect that tea has on the mind and body. In isolated form Theanine is one of the safest and natural anti anxiety treatments there is. It is so safe that no toxic dosage has been able to be established, meaning you can probably take as much as you can fit in your stomach and it still would not hurt you. Yet, at only 100mg dosage it relaxes you without making you tired and improves cognition and mood. This is my favourite supplement and I highly recommend it to everyone no matter how healthy you are. Modern life is full of stress and this is the best antidote I have found.

Pelter Optime Noise Reduction Earmuff. If you have issues with high noise levels at work or home these are ideal to wear while also look like normal music headphones. Great for relaxing in noisy environments and also great for meditation wherever you might be.

Zafu Yoga Meditation Cushion. Meditation can be a difficult habit to build but is one of the greatest things there is to build mental power and emotional stability. I found that investing in a proper cushion and making it a ritual using it greatly improvement my motivation to stick with meditation as a daily habit. Meditation is free but humans don’t tend to value things that are free as highly. Spending some money on this cushion might just be the push you need to stick to a daily meditation habit.

Calm – Meditate, Sleep, Relax. This is a great and FREE app to use when starting out in meditation. Meditation can be a confusing thing for people who never tried it and never experienced relaxing in that way before. This app helps!

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. This is THE book on the subject of introverts. Filled with useful information, research and tips to help introverts and non introverts understand what this trait is all about. If you are an INFJ this is key for you to reach new heights in your life.

The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich. This book is one of my all time favourite books about life style design. When it comes to INFJs and many INxx types we are often not happy and fulfilled in traditional office or alike job positions. We strive for something more. This book will empower you to find your own path in life and create the life you want to life. Can’t recommend this one enough!

The post INFJ anxiety and stress appeared first on INFJ Ramblings.

INFJ Anxiety Under Stress and Depression

Thu, 01 Aug 2013 22:10:00 +0000

Sadly enough, it turns out the most popular posts on this blog is the ones that are about INFJ anxiety under stress and depression. INFJ under stress often leads to regular anxiety and if prolonged, also depression. INFJ depression can be more intense and this is the case for all feeler type personalities. I know anxiety is common and can be a big part of being this personality type so I thought I’ll do another post about it and try to summarize my experiences further.

At the bottom of this post I have also put together an INFJ survival kit of some of the best products to overcome anxiety, stress and depression for good.

Looking at statistics HSPs are common among INFJs and INFPs, but they do occur among most personality types to certain degrees. I experience this heightened sensitivity in both my feelings and senses. It is pretty understandable since as an INFJ I am both a feeler and also have dominant and inferior perceiving functions.

Se (extroverted sensing), is our inferior function and this is a highly unconscious function together with our dominant Ni (introverted intuition). They operate mostly together in our subconscious and Se fuels our primary Ni with external information.

INFJ Under Stress

Since our dominant perceiving function is introverted it also gets even more focused and turned inward compared to people with an extroverted equivalent. The problem with introverted intuition as dominant is that since it is introverted we might tend to internalize feelings even without being aware of it.

Usually my state of being in general influence the magnitude of negative feelings, my INFJ anxiety grows worse if there is something bothering me in my life. What helps is dealing with things as soon as you can, because if you let them sit there and bother you in the back of your mind they will make everything worse.

INFJ Anxiety

I get agitated and nervous, can’t concentrate my thoughts on what is going on and can even feel physically ill. It becomes a downward spiral which side tracks my mood and can bring on other feelings of anxiety completely unrelated to the first cause.

For example, an noisy environment can trigger stress which sets off bodily sensations making me feel like something is wrong or I’m sick. Usually when I calm down or the trigger stops I can realize that it’s false feelings, but during it feels like being caught in a grip.

You can’t tell if it’s real or not because your usual state of functioning is suppressed. Many describe it as INFJs living in a constant state of disembodiment, we are more connected to our mind then the physical.

Perception Under Stress

People disturb you with noise or insist on talking to you when you are busy which makes you unable to focus on anything. To many people talking at the same time makes it hard to separate the words. Hard to sleep with background noise or insomnia from to much stimulation.

Being among a noisy crowd of commuters in a train without AC can be a real nightmare, draining your energy quickly when your Ni and Se is trying to make sense of all the sensory stimulation.

Since we are introverted by nature we tend to consciously focus in on one thing at a time, multitasking and following what’s going on everywhere around you can be exhausting. When you can’t keep up with everything it easily creates stress and anxiety.

Expectations Can Trigger Depression

That you try to express your feelings or self to a person but words don’t suffice in real life, making it reflect what you meant poorly. Or when you have to impress someone, present yourself or your work and you idealize the perfect outcome for it but in real life you can’t seem to pull it off like you imagined.

It all has a lot to do with self esteem and expectations our Ni put on our self which we in turn fail to accomplish. Then by being introverted feelers we intensify these feelings inward making us unable to escape and cope with them easily.

We can always imagine the true ideal and who we want to be, but we can never achieve it because when we do there will always be something else we want, the next step. We are future oriented and this is what drives our ideals also.

Needless to say life as an INFJ is not easy and it’s understandable why others might consider us moody, melancholic and intense at times.

Your body and mind is telling you that you need to slow down a bit in order to enjoy yourself. Don’t let it consume you because nothing bad will happen feeling anxiety, it is just a feeling and will pass eventually. You will never defeat it since it is in part who you are but you can learn to live with it.

INFJ Depression

I spent a decade of my life trying to change myself into someone I’m not, to be more extroverted, sensing and thinking as a male since this is how society tells us to be to fit it. Those years of trying didn’t bring me any closer to happiness. I just felt depressed and even more alienated from the world.

I came to the conclusion in the end that you have to be yourself and find ways to cope in life instead, treating yourself and your body better. This in turn will improve your life greatly as an INFJ.

Since we have no Si (introverted sensing) function in our stack I think we are one of the personalities to benefit the most from a healthy lifestyle. It grounds us and connects us to our bodies better. Feeling detached from my body and the world have been very common for me and also made me question my sanity at points in my life. Exercise have greatly improved these feelings and the overall anxiety I experience.

Conclusion

Being an INFJ is not easy but there is no point in making it any harder then it already is.

Read more about how to beat depression easy in our other article.

To give you a head start on ways to improve your INFJ depression, anxiety and when under stress, I’ve put together the following INFJ survival kit.

These are products that I use almost daily and that helped change and shape my life as an INFJ for the better:

Rhodiola Rosea, supplement – This is an adaptogenic herb that helps manage healthy mood and stress response. The most natural and safe anti depressant that can be used daily, long term. Even people who are not depressed can use this to boost their mood levels.

L-Theanine, supplement – Theanine is the amino acid in tea that is responsible for the relaxing effect that tea has on the mind and body. In isolated form Theanine is one of the safest and natural anti anxiety treatments there is.

It is so safe that no toxic dosage has been able to be established, meaning you can probably take as much as you can fit in your stomach and it still would not hurt you. Yet, at only 100mg dosage it relaxes you without making you tired and improves cognition and mood.

This is my favourite supplement and I highly recommend it to everyone no matter how healthy you are. Modern life is full of stress and this is the best antidote I have found.

Pelter Optime Noise Reduction Earmuff – If you have issues with high noise levels at work or home these are ideal to wear while also look like normal music headphones. Great for relaxing in noisy environments and also great for meditation wherever you might be.

Zafu Yoga Meditation Cushion – Meditation can be a difficult habit to build but is one of the greatest things there is to build mental power and emotional stability. I found that investing in a proper cushion and making it a ritual using it greatly improvement my motivation to stick with meditation as a daily habit. Meditation is free but humans don’t tend to value things that are free as highly. Spending some money on this cushion might just be the push you need to stick to a daily meditation habit.

Calm – Meditate, Sleep, Relax – This is a great and FREE app to use when starting out in meditation. Meditation can be a confusing thing for people who never tried it and never experienced relaxing in that way before. This app helps!

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking – This is THE book on the subject of introverts. Filled with useful information, research and tips to help introverts and non introverts understand what this trait is all about. If you are an INFJ this is key for you to reach new heights in your life.

The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich – This book is one of my all time favourite books about life style design. When it comes to INFJs and many INxx types we are often not happy and fulfilled in traditional office or alike job positions. We strive for something more. This book will empower you to find your own path in life and create the life you want to life. Can’t recommend this one enough!

The post INFJ Anxiety Under Stress and Depression appeared first on INFJ Ramblings.