unhappiness – INFJ Ramblings

Unhealthy INFJ Challenges: Balancing HSPs, Empaths & Intuitives

Fri, 04 Jul 2014 10:26:17 +0000

If you’re an INFJ, HSP, empath or intuitive personality, it is safe to say we all share the challenge of staying balanced emotionally in life. But it has to do with a lot more then just emotions. Our bodies and mind are way more interconnected then we want to believe they are, and when you are facing emotional distress in life it can often come in a physical form, like burnout or depression. Western healthcare have always approach health in a very non holistic way. That mental and physical health are separate issues and have often only put emphasis on treating symptoms then actually solving health problems or preventing them. Health should be approached as a whole process since everything in our body is part of an whole, your brain controls your entire body and your brain is the outlet of your conscious self. Chronic illness can stem from longterm emotional distress, just as mental illness can grow from always being sick in your body.

Being an intuitive, empath or HSP type of personality makes you even more vulnerable to these kinds of health issues. You are easier pressured and stress is felt on a higher level then other people do. Emotional distress from things that happen in your life takes a greater toll on you and demands from family, friends and work can easily leave you feeling burned out and unable to handle, or even face the situations. Most of us learn all of this the hard way and statistics show that all of us will be depressed and reach some form of adrenal burnout during our lifetimes, some more times then others. If you are more susceptible to these things then you are also in more danger of suffering major depressions, mental illnesses, eating disorders, drug use and health issues like for example hypertension and cardiovascular disease.

Because of this we owe it to ourselves and others to develop good coping mechanisms in life to help us overcome these problems and also show others how they can. If you look around yourself in life among your friends and family, you can easily see that we all have some kind of crutch in life, something we can depend on for safety and comfort when life becomes painful. It might be as common as comfort food, using television as an escape or abuse of alcohol, drugs, sex and pornography. Or if you remember those kids back in school that used to pick on everybody, that was their way of coping with their own issues at home, like and escape so they would not be the ones feeling the worst all the time. Needless to say we all have these habits as a way of self defense from our own pains. The problem is these habits can grow out of control and cause further issues in our lives. When you never learn to correctly face your own emotions and problems you will eventually grow unable to handle them at all, this is where depression, panic attacks, chronic fatigue syndrome and the like kicks in. It is at this point where you realize your crutches doesn’t hold up anymore and you feel overwhelmed and hopeless, unable to rid yourself of your own pain. In almost all type of depression and stress disorders, particularly feelings of overwhelm and hopelessness is the primary culprits.

The way we need to change here is in the way we view the world. Because the world is not responsible for our own emotions, we are. What we need to understand is that peace and happiness is not something we will every find out there in the external world, it is something that we can only find within ourselves. To quote the Buddha, the mind if the forerunner of all things. Just as you are what you eat, you also are what you think. If you keep grasping and holding on to pain, longings and demands you put on people and life, you will never be able to get away from those negative thoughts. Only when you understand that the world and our minds are ever changing, that every negative emotion and thought will pass just as the one before it. That you as a person is not made up by your thoughts, they are just as clouds floating by on a blue sky. What you need to learn is to see them for what they really are and let them pass by.

What I’m talking about here is very much the practice of mindfulness and meditation, two healthy ways of learning to understand your mind and emotions. They offer ways of overcoming the pain of life and also how to reach a state of happiness not related to anything in our external world. The best thing about mediation is that when you finally understand that peace is something you already have within yourself, issues that arise in your life won’t matter that much anymore and you can approach these in a healthier way without relying on false crutches that offer nothing more then temporary relief.

The reason why I haven’t been posting that often here is because of this subject I’ve been talking about in this post. I’m actually working on an ebook about how important our mind and body connection really is and how to take care of it. The book is laid out to offer practical solutions and skills you can learn and apply in your own lives to easier overcome emotional pain, depression, illnesses and also to focus yourself and reach your goals in life. Even though the book will be made for HSPs, empaths and intuitives the skills can be applied by anyone. Of course everybody on the mail list for this blog will receive a free copy as soon as I’m done with it, which should be sometime this winter. The book will touch a range of subjects from meditation, mindfulness, yoga, achieving happiness and emotional freedom, herbal medicine, supplements, exercise, acupuncture, floating and more. Basically many techniques and habits you can apply to your life to live happier and healthier, all through a HSP, empath and intuitive perspective.

I’ll keep updating this blog with small bits and pieces from chapters that will be coming in the ebook. Meanwhile I want you guys to comment or email me if there is anything particular you want me to research and include in the book. You can comment at the end of this post or email me at alex@infjramblings.com

Until next post, take care!

The post Unhealthy INFJ Challenges: Balancing HSPs, Empaths & Intuitives 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.

INFJ Characteristics: Idealist, Morals and Hardships in Life

Sat, 27 Jul 2013 11:51:00 +0000

Been reading a bunch of INFJ articles lately and it sparked some thoughts about our idealistic tendencies and implementing our intuitive ideals in our external physical world. In other means the constant struggle we have between Ni and our inferior function Se. I can relate to this in my line of work since I work with digital arts for a living. I often get a feeling or image in my mind of how I envision the result to be, or how it should be in order to get the result I want (Ni). However, the real challenge comes in actually creating it in real life (Se).

Often the outcome in the real world does not meet up to the envisioned ideal or moral in our mind, it’s not enough and this is where the pressure point for our intuition and inferior function lies. Where we create our stress. This is the source of our perfectionist tendencies, INFJs have the ability to envision a perfect ideal that is not possible to reach in the real world where things are chaotic and much the opposite of what we want. We gain many of our talents from this since we somehow are able to see these solutions that are not based on anything we previously know in the real world. They just appear to us out of the the blue. One theory could be that this has to do with the connection of opposites and our talent of jumping from A to D without having to pass by B and C.

This is where the internal power struggle lies and the part of us which we should all strive to understand better in order to live a life free from stress and anxieties. We create these ideals for everything in our lives. Like how we should behave in situations, how things should play out , how our relationships should be, what job we should have or how we should feel about things. When these ideals turn out the opposite of what we envision them to be we can feel unhappy, full of disappointment and regret. One might even argue the question of what is the point of there existing INFJs and having this ability if our morals and visions can never be actualized in real life.

I think that even though this might bring us much unhappiness in our lives this is how we are meant to be and we should not strive for being something we are not if we ever want to feel good about ourselves. This is our driving force which pushes us forward in our lives and let’s us see and feel things others simply cannot. We need to follow our hearts in this and when things does not turn out how we wished them to, we have to remember that this is how life is. The important part is trusting yourself and staying true to what you think and feel about things, even when life tries to tell you otherwise. Intuition is our key.

The post INFJ Characteristics: Idealist, Morals and Hardships in Life appeared first on INFJ Ramblings.