Social encounter post-processing

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After a high percentage of social encounters, I find that I have trouble looking back and understanding what happened or determining the quality of my social performance. In most 1-on-1 encounters, I am able to maintain conversations, relying heavily on calculation rather than natural discourse. The result is that encounters seem to be, from my perspective, a dizzying flurry of split second calculations, compromising my ability to file away important details of the conversation. During the conversation, I am able to remain outwardly calm, and, for a limited period of time, relatively calm internally. During the post-processing phase, when I am unable to identify the important events of the encounter required to determine a level of success, I tend to panic, particularly after important encounters such as interviews. Since I have had quite a few of these recently, I would love to know if anyone else experiences similar problems or may have developed any useful techniques to reduce the panicky sessions that occur post-encounter, which I find to be irritatingly debilitating.

GET OUT OF MY HEAD!!

Seriously, your brain is just like my brain.

I found that this post-processing is an introvertive trait. If you have too many extrovertive events in short succession, you will experience "buffer overflow".

When you feel this panic start to boil up, just sit down and watch 10 episodes of a TV show in a row (the more involving and immersive it is, the better). I am serious. Your brain will process the cues in background, as it learned from a young age, and you are giving it more CPU cycles by putting it into "passive observer" mode.

In short, solitude and continuous, passive distraction helps me prevent these buffer overflows.

Also, WoW is a good game for that... doesn't use much of the brain, but the colors are calming.

I have to underline that solitude ALONE will not cut this. You need DISTRACTION, which is key.

I have this problem...I find social interaction (especially with more than one person) exhausting because I need to analyze the interaction and what social cues I missed etc. I feel anxious/agitated for awhile after the interaction and often can't sleep that night..........especially if I'm unable to analyze everything that happened properly which often happens in group settings (too much to process) . It's like a bad aftertaste........

I don't know how to deal with this

This is my issue exactly. This was so much of an issue I had to leave the college I was living at, transfer to live at home and go somewhere I wouldn't have to live with a roommate.

I can engage in social interactions - but it takes so much effort and exhausts me that afterward, when I get alone time, I don't want to work on anything else and just want to relax rather than study/etc.

I do exactly what you said you do for 1-on-1 conversation, but it's stil like you said. In larger social group situations, I tend to do this to a point, but after awhile it degrades and the quality lowers. Often times I'll end up appearing like a fool because I couldn't keep up the necessary social quality. Most of my good friends know this, and deal with me acting like a moron after a bit. Some people who don't know me think I'm being purposefulness 'quirky' or trying to be funny, but it's frustrating that I can't seem to hold my own or even tell what I did wrong in a lot of cases afterward.

The best advice I can give for one on one conversations is to slow how fast you're speaking so that you can calculate before anything is said. All it really does is extend teh time you have to try and control the situation, but it helps me when the situation is really stressful and keeps me from babbling. Well, most of the time.

I am having this problem right now and it's awful. I can't focus on my uni work because I have all this busy-ness in my head trying to process all the interactions I've just had (mostly by email but still a lot to take in). I'm exhausted. I just cooked a cake to try and distract. going to go for a swim to distract. yeah basically, I think distracting myself, resting and letting time pass in solitude is what it will take before I can get on with what I need to do. hope this helps:)

[quote="Bells"]
I can engage in social interactions - but it takes so much effort and exhausts me that afterward, when I get alone time, I don't want to work on anything else and just want to relax rather than study/etc.

quote]

you must have posted at the same time as me but this is exactly how it is for me. I can't study on campus, I study by long distance otherwise i spend all my energy just getting there, seeing people, coming home and can't actually do any work. I'm glad I found out about long distance study because this way I can actually get somewhere.

Yea, I transferred after struggling for a year and a half, spending most of my time overwhelmed by the amount of social interaction I had to do - and in a way, wanted to do, getting to classes, etc. I'm taking distance classes this spring/summer and will be hopefully transitioning to commuting to a nearby University - though I'm going to try and contact to see if I can get a single room and then limit my social interaction.

I need to get better at this issue because for Grad School, I'm going to have to live out of state and Have to go to a decent Uni to do hands on field work/internships. /sigh/ I hate this problem...

I definitely couldn't deal with a roommate! Right now I’m writing a thesis for my undergrad degree and every time I have to interact with my thesis advisor I am absolutely too exhausted to study or do anything productive(like you said) even though I love what I'm studying and spend most of my time studying. ......I feel the need to take time to "process" the interaction....

I slow down my speech to control social situations...it does help me (I think)......prevents some of my horrible social mistakes .........but people get really annoyed by my long drawn out sentences with frequent ummm's and uhhh's................