Introverts Vs Extroverts-during Covid
So over the next up and coming weeks due to the loosening of lockdown rules and the swarm of reclaiming the office space like bees to a hive protecting its Queen. After nearly a year of lockdown with the year 2020 was very unpredictable at best.
Mostly workers in offices been isolated at home stuck on furlough, free money it seems at first. However this can be discounted if you’re unlucky too. A friend of mine was getting 50% pay for same amount of work, then made redundant at the click of a finger.
Issues for people
Introverts, Extroverts and COVID: What Lockdown Taught Us About Mental Wellbeing
When much of the world entered lockdown in 2020, millions of people were suddenly participating in an enormous social experiment.
Homes became offices.
Kitchen tables became classrooms.
Meetings moved onto Zoom.
Families spent unprecedented amounts of time together, while people living alone could go days or weeks with very little physical human contact.
Normal routines disappeared almost overnight.
At the time, one apparently simple idea became popular: introverts would thrive in lockdown while extroverts would struggle.
It made intuitive sense.
If an introvert enjoys solitude and an extrovert gains energy from social interaction, surely forcing everybody to remain at home would favour one personality over the other?
I wrote about that question during the pandemic.
Looking back several years later, I think the more interesting lesson is that the question itself was too simple.
COVID did not merely reveal differences between introverts and extroverts.
It demonstrated how profoundly our mental wellbeing can be affected when our environment, personality, relationships, work and need for human connection stop fitting together.
The Great Personality Assumption
During lockdown, introversion was sometimes treated almost like a superpower.
Memes joked that introverts had been preparing for social distancing their entire lives.
Extroverts, meanwhile, were portrayed as desperate to escape their houses and find other people.
There was some logic behind the stereotype.
Someone comfortable spending considerable time alone might initially find staying home less disruptive than somebody whose normal life revolved around colleagues, friends, events and busy social environments.
But enjoying solitude is not the same thing as enjoying enforced isolation.
And enjoying people does not mean somebody is incapable of spending time alone.
Research conducted during the pandemic eventually produced a much more complicated picture.
One 2020 study found that greater introversion predicted more severe loneliness, anxiety and depression associated with COVID-related changes. Research in Spain similarly found lower extraversion associated with poorer adaptation to lockdown. Other large international research suggested the relationship between restrictions, extraversion and depressive symptoms could work differently depending upon circumstances.
There wasn’t one universal “introvert experience” or “extrovert experience.”
And perhaps that should have been obvious.
Human beings are more complicated than personality labels.
Solitude and Loneliness Are Not the Same Thing
This distinction became particularly important during COVID.
Solitude is often chosen.
Isolation often isn’t.
An introverted person may genuinely enjoy an evening alone after spending the day interacting with other people.
But remove the workplace, café, gym, family visit, conversation with a neighbour and freedom to decide when to see somebody, and that solitude becomes something entirely different.
Choice matters.
There is an enormous psychological difference between:
“I want to stay home tonight.”
and
“I cannot leave.”
The physical behaviour may look identical from outside.
The internal experience isn’t.
This helps explain why the assumption that introverts would automatically flourish under lockdown was questionable.
People who need less social stimulation still need human connection.
Extroverts Faced a Different Problem
For somebody accustomed to receiving considerable stimulation through other people, lockdown could remove many of the activities regulating everyday life.
The commute disappeared.
Colleagues disappeared.
Restaurants, pubs, clubs, gyms, religious communities, hobbies and social gatherings disappeared or became severely restricted.
Technology attempted to fill the gap.
Zoom calls became ubiquitous.
Families held video gatherings.
Friends organised online quizzes.
Businesses recreated meetings virtually.
These technologies were enormously useful.
But a screen does not perfectly reproduce physical human interaction.
For some people, the result wasn’t simply boredom.
It was the disappearance of many of the environmental cues and relationships around which their lives had been organised.
Working From Home Wasn’t One Experience Either
Before COVID, working from home was often presented as a perk.
Then millions of people experienced it simultaneously.
And we discovered that “working from home” could mean completely different things.
For one person it meant:
No commute.
More autonomy.
Quiet.
Greater concentration.
More time with family.
For another:
Isolation.
Constant interruption.
Poor workspace.
Children requiring attention.
Relationship tension.
Back-to-back video meetings.
No psychological separation between work and home.
That distinction matters because the debate about home working sometimes becomes another false binary.
Office good or home good?
That’s the wrong question.
A much better question is:
What environment enables this particular person to function well?
COVID forced organisations to confront something workplaces should arguably have recognised long before the pandemic:
People do not all perform optimally under identical conditions.
The Problem With Personality Boxes
I mentioned personality systems such as Myers-Briggs and DISC in my original article.
Today I would put considerably more emphasis on something else:
Personality is not a prison sentence.
Labels can sometimes provide useful language for recognising tendencies.
But “introvert” and “extrovert” should not become identities that dictate what somebody supposedly can or cannot tolerate.
Many people sit somewhere between the extremes.
Context also changes behaviour.
You may be highly sociable with people you trust and reserved among strangers.
You may enjoy working alone but hate living alone.
You may dislike large gatherings yet deeply value intimate conversation.
You may need solitude after socialising without wanting an isolated life.
The useful question therefore isn’t:
Which box am I?
It is:
What conditions help me function at my best — and what happens when those conditions disappear?
COVID Showed Us That Environment Regulates Us
This may be one of the most enduring psychological lessons of the pandemic.
We tend to imagine wellbeing as something located entirely inside the individual.
If you’re struggling, perhaps you need to become more resilient.
Think differently.
Manage stress better.
Be more productive.
Develop better habits.
Those things can matter.
But COVID demonstrated something rather dramatically:
Change the environment and you can change the person.
Take away someone’s routine.
Alter their social contact.
Remove their workplace.
Confine several people to the same physical space.
Introduce uncertainty.
Reduce privacy.
Change sleep patterns.
Remove exercise or recreation.
Blur the boundary between work and home.
Then observe what happens.
Sometimes what looks like a problem within somebody is partly a response to the conditions surrounding them.
That insight reaches far beyond COVID.
Connection Is Not the Same as Constant Socialising
One lesson worth preserving is that human connection should not be measured simply by how many people surround us.
Someone can be lonely in a crowded office.
Someone else can spend much of their time alone and feel deeply connected to a handful of people.
The quality, safety and meaning of our relationships matter.
Research during the pandemic repeatedly examined loneliness, psychological distress and resilience because COVID made those relationships unusually visible. Some research also found resilience to be important in adaptation to lockdown conditions.
So perhaps the distinction we should make isn’t simply between introverts and extroverts.
It is between connection that nourishes us and environments that drain us.
What Did We Actually Learn?
Six years later, I wouldn’t argue that COVID proved introverts cope better than extroverts or vice versa.
It taught us something more useful.
People have different psychological needs.
Some need considerably more solitude.
Some need considerably more interaction.
Most of us need both in different proportions.
We also need autonomy, meaningful relationships, privacy, purpose, stimulation, rest and some ability to influence the conditions of our own lives.
Remove enough of those things and wellbeing can deteriorate regardless of which personality label somebody carries.
And that brings me back to the question underneath the article I originally wrote during COVID.
Perhaps we shouldn’t design workplaces, homes, schools or communities around an imaginary “average person.”
Perhaps we should become better at recognising human variation.
The Question After COVID
There was enormous discussion during the pandemic about when we would finally “return to normal.”
But returning to normal was never necessarily the most interesting possibility.
We had briefly seen that arrangements previously described as impossible could change extraordinarily quickly when circumstances demanded it.
People worked remotely.
Healthcare adopted remote consultations.
Businesses changed how they operated.
Families reconsidered where they wanted to live.
Some people discovered they hated working from home.
Others discovered they never wanted to return to an office five days a week.
That information was valuable.
The mistake would be replacing one rigid model with another.
Forcing everyone into an office isn’t the answer.
Forcing everyone to work remotely isn’t either.
Choice, flexibility and fit matter.
The pandemic temporarily removed enormous amounts of choice from people’s lives.
Perhaps one of the better things we can take from that experience is an understanding of just how psychologically important choice actually is.
Introvert or extrovert, none of us exists independently of our environment.
We affect it.
And it affects us.
A note from 2026
I originally wrote this article during the COVID-19 pandemic, when lockdowns, remote working and their psychological consequences were still unfolding. I have substantially revisited it in 2026, with the benefit of hindsight, subsequent research and several more years of professional experience.