QUIET, please!

Do you find yourself chatting to the dog in the kitchen at parties? Declining invitations because you have plans... with yourself? Odds are, you're an introvert. And, contrary to popular belief, that has very little to do with being shy or antisocial.

- Liesl Robertson

More than a century after psychotherapist Carl Jung first introduced the terms ‘introvert’ and ‘extrovert’, experts are still arguing about what actually makes someone an introvert.

Extroverts, not so much. We haven't heard a word of complaint from them. Most likely because they rarely take issue with their label — and why would they? It's fairly unanimously seen as a positive. ‘Extroverts have always tended to benefit from the assumption that their way of doing life was the psychologically healthy one,’ writes social psychologist Bella DePaulo.

Susan Cain, the author of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking (which is seen as a defining text when it comes to introversion) calls this the ‘Extrovert Ideal’: ‘the omnipresent belief that the ideal self is gregarious, alpha and comfortable in the spotlight. The archetypal extrovert prefers action to contemplation, risk-taking to heed-taking, certainty to doubt. He favours quick decisions, even at the risk of being wrong. She works well in teams and socialises in groups.’

If you're a technologically gifted loner who launched a multi-million-dollar company from your garage, you get a pass. Everyone else needs to conform; learn to thrive in a noisy open-plan office; and come to happy hour for karaoke or ‘risk being discounted because of a trait that goes to the core of who they are’.

So what does it mean to be an introvert? Does it mean that you are shy and quiet? That you dislike socialising? That you are awkward and standoffish around strangers? That you are socially anxious? That you are thoughtful and introspective? Or that you find other people overstimulating?

No one can quite agree on the parameters. The most common definition these days is centred on the idea of a social battery: Introverts need time alone to recharge, whereas extroverts are fuelled by being around people.