Among the more common recommendations public health experts hand down to seniors is the importance of maintaining social connections. They cite volumes of research showing how disengaging from society as we grow older can contribute to any number of chronic illnesses and various levels of cognitive distress. Responding appropriately to these warnings, however, can present a daunting challenge to introverts like me and My Lovely Wife, who are more likely to celebrate than lament the cancellation of a social gathering.
Still, we do make an occasional effort to get out and see people, and we’ve been more sociable than usual lately. A recent Friday afternoon visit to our grandson’s school for a second-grade science program, for instance, featured an impromptu reunion with a gaggle of our extended family. It was followed the next day by a tour of a new art exhibit at the invitation of a couple we hardly knew. The following evening, we hosted our adult offspring and their families for a belated birthday bash.
This can be a bit much. Social fatigue set in on Monday, and I was in no mood to respond favorably Tuesday evening when a couple of my best friends tried to persuade me to join them for some lively banter at a neighborhood tavern. “It’s not at the top of my list,” I texted. “Maybe next time.”
I’d like to think of this as a form of “positive disengagement,” an offshoot of Laura Carstensen’s socioemotional selectivity theory. Carstensen, PhD, founding director of the Stanford Center on Longevity at Stanford University, challenges the conventional notion that older adults naturally winnow their social connections and grow more reclusive as a symbolic preparation for death. Instead, her research points to a more positive motivation: an emphasis on quality over quantity.
“Social networks do indeed decrease in size, yet the typical psychological profile of aging is generally positive and socially engaged,” she writes in a 2021 report in the Annual Review of Psychology. Seniors just become more selective about their interactions as they grow older, she argues. Declining an invitation for a night out on the town when you really need a quiet evening at home with a good book is not a troubling sign of reclusiveness — it’s a positive act of self-care.
Mastering this approach may actually be easier for us aging introverts than for our extroverted peers. As Mark Lipton, PhD, writes in Psychology Today, the natural inclination to limit our social connections helps us cope more comfortably with the inevitable erosion of friendships that all older adults face. Our preference for calm and avoidance of stressful interactions, he adds, may even slow the biological aging process.
“While extroverts have long been celebrated for their social-butterfly abilities,” he notes, “it turns out that the introvert’s natural inclinations may serve as a built-in buffer against some of aging’s most common challenges.”
Lipton cites various research attesting to what Robert McCrae, PhD, at the National Institute on Aging has called the “introvert advantage” in dealing with the social constrictions that come with aging. Helene Fung, PhD, of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, for example, has led studies showing that introverts are less anxious than extroverts about their shrinking networks. And research from the German psychologist Klaus Rothermund, PhD, also suggests that introverts have developed the coping mechanisms necessary to navigate the shifting terrain of social connections in our old age.
Argues Lipton: “Such skills as comfort with solitude, the ability to self-reflect, and the capacity for deep one-on-one connections become increasingly valuable as we age. It’s as if introverts have been unknowingly practicing for their senior years all along.”
That’s one way to look at it, I suppose, but recent experience suggests that it’s less about any conscious — or unconscious — preparation than about our individual threshold for sociability.
At a certain point, some of us just need to retreat and regroup. A week or so after my uncharacteristic flurry of socializing, for example, it seems I’m ready to reengage. Just not too much.
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