In the first year of our relationship my partner and I worked together to clear out the closet underneath the basement stairs.  Colleen reached into the closet and pulled out every last box, random tool, and miscellaneous item.  Now that she could see everything spread out on the living room floor we were able to sort things into categories and create systems.  All I saw was too much.  Completely overwhelmed I literally folded in on myself.  I was done before we even started.  She couldn’t figure out my response.  “I thought you wanted to do this together?”  We stumbled through the interaction discovering our different styles and seeing how those styles simply bumped up against each other.

It was eye opening.  We have referred to this experience with humor and knowing over the years.  Looking at this through the introverted lens – my response was a classic introverted response.  It’s what I call the “Costco response”.  Walk in, look around, get overstimulated, shut down.  As I’ve talked about in other posts, introverts are physiologically wired to protect against over stimulation and when there is too much stimuli we shut down.  A great strategy for preventing this is to manage the stimuli by “chunking it down”.  Take a task or project and turn it into manageable bite size steps.  Focus on one “chunk” at a time.