This for sure; it's a kind of anxiety that can be alleviated with self-confidence and exposure over time, or in other words, practice. Loads of people have trouble with small talk because they don't know how it works, but it can be learned and practiced.

How to learn it?

How about getting extremely drained in loud and chaotic environments where even conversation abilities break down due to noise? Im getting older and give a lot less fucks as well but some things that were extremely unpleasant that I used to have a hard dime with are no longer on my calendar. Why go through the pain when there is zero gain? Why even bother? If I really have to, in such environments, in order to tolerate it I blast white noise on my headphones, kindof pointless in the end if you ask me. Whereas small settings, with less than a dozen people around are a lot more productive. Not hiding this fact makes it even more tolerable, I just excuse myself from these envs.

I have heard from a psychologist that folks often confuse introversion with social anxiety. Introversion is having your default focus tending to be inwards, whereas social anxiety can make situations like you are describing unbearable.

Obviously there are other reasons for this too like overstimulation from sensory input. But I think there is truth to this statement.

This is what I tend to believe (as a very high scoring introvert on various types of tests). Introversion in a physiological sense is high sensitivity to external stimulation. Fill up the bar too fast, it can cause an anxiety response.

Some people then struggle with dealing with overstimulation, leading to anxiety disorders and a learned aversion to high stimulation situations/environments which often social situations are.

The nuance, I think, is that what constitutes stimulation isn't objective and will vary from person to person.

I'm no psych, but this sounds more like a description of the autism spectrum than introversion.

It very much is not what autism is. At a superficial level you can describe some of the characteristics this way, but autism is vastly more complicated then a simple sensitivity to stimuli.

Like I said, I'm not a psych, but I was diagnosed with inattentive ADHD as a kid and had to get medical waivers approved to join the military and fly. Channelized attention and having to force myself to focus on mundane, boring tasks (with varying levels of success) are a thing I have dealt with my whole life. Oversensitivity to stimuli is not.

I have a very similar experience. However I gently disagree with the language of introversion getting "worse". To me it's not a negative at all. In lockdowns in 2020 as an extreme example, it showed up as a major strength, a resilience to the loneliness that my extrovert friends struggled badly with.

Oh, I didn’t mean it like that. I meant it “increased”. You are right. I agree, it’s nothing negative and it can be a superpower.

The lockdowns - while societally a major disaster - where something of a personal net positive for me (which I cannot talk about because folks become angry with me).

I think there's at least 3 different dimensions here:

1. Comfort vs. Anxiety: how anxious does a particular interaction make you feel.

2. Introversion vs. Extroversion: are you more recharged or more drained by social interaction in general. (anxiety probably causes people to be more drained than they would otherwise - anxious people probably consider themselves more introverted than they actually are)

3. Awkward vs. Fluid: is handling a social situation correctly hard or automatic? (the expectation of being awkward increases anxiety; anxiety may increase awkwardness)

Some extra dimensions:

- Experience level in a given kind of social interaction

- How much social interaction someone "needs" (e.g. they might get recharged by being social, but not need much charging)

I agree that social anxiety and introversion often get conflated. Another component of introversion I have found for myself seems to be physiological. I have always considered myself fairly introverted and have also had a fair amount of social anxiety. In my younger years I largely isolated myself for large periods of time. At one point I started taking a vitamin B supplement to attempt to treat some RSI nerve issues. It didn't seem to impact what I was trying to treat, but I began to crave social interaction which was challenging for me because nothing in my life was structured to provide me with social interaction and I still had enough social anxiety that I did not even consider seeking out interaction more directly (like going to a bar and chatting with people). The craving of social interaction went away after I stopped taking the vitamin B supplement. I experimented on and off with the vitamin B, but it eventually led to me having severe insomnia when taking it so I had to stop. I have noticed a similar but milder response to supplementing vitamin D (both feeling more social as well as insomnia).

Sounds like my experience too.

I absolutely think they are heavily correlated, not least because being an introvert makes it both harder to build up enough experience to get past social anxieties, and easier to make up excuses (to yourself) to avoid trying to, but my social anxieties in most cases have largely gone (some after putting in a lot of effort to expose myself to situations I found both horrifying and draining; now they're just draining), and in other scenarios were never there, while my introversion is as strong as ever.

I have something to add to this. As for me during the years I’ve mentioned that that anxiety is highly tied with a purpose of a given conservation.

Like, things go more smoothly when I do them for work compared to other purposes. It's like when I'm doing something for work, it's easier, as if I have a real reason to communicate with someone, unlike other times. Although it doesn’t annoy me much, I’m interested to know how widespread this is?