Mindfulness and Creativity for INFJs on the Meyers-Briggs
Are you an INFJ? Do you have trouble shutting off your mind and being mindful? How does mindfulness help you be more creative? Find out in this exploration of the INFJ mind.
I’m an INFJ (Introverted, iNtuitive, Feeling, Judging) on the Meyers-Briggs Personality Assessment. INFJ’s comprise about 1% of the population and are the rarest personality type.
We are very much in our heads, and it can be difficult to shut our minds off. We’re incredible aggregators, pulling in all the things we’ve seen, heard, done, read, felt, or learned over months, years, decades or even a lifetime and turning them into succinct, wise and practical insights that can be applied to daily life. This is why INFJ’s tend to be quiet and almost invisible and then suddenly come out with something brilliant that people stop and listen to.
Is an INFJ Good at Being Mindful?
Before I answer that, let’s define mindfulness:
Mindfulness is the practice of paying attention to the present moment with openness, curiosity and acceptance. It involves being aware of one’s thoughts, feelings, sensations and surroundings, without judging them as good or bad. Mindfulness can help reduce stress, improve well-being and enhance performance in various domains of life.
So, let’s go back to that question about whether an INFJ is good at being mindful.
The short answer: yes and NO.
INFJ’s may either be one of the most mindful of personality types or the least of all… depending upon how you look at it.
The long answer…
Where INFJ’s Shine
An INFJ’s ability to be present and fully engaged can really shine in one-on-one conversations. We’re very attuned to body language, tone, and picking up emotion and energy in addition to the words. We are excellent active listeners in one-on-one conversations … which makes us great coaches, advisors, mentors, consultants, and teachers. We can also be great at leading groups of likeminded people in deeper dive conversations because we can aggregate what’s said and pull the shared thoughts cohesively together. This shows up in teaching as well. We can lead discussions while teaching once we learn to be assertive enough to bring people back to topic if they stray.
On a subconscious level, we are incredibly observant… listening, processing, filing everything we see, hear, learn or feel. And yet… we can be completely clueless that we are doing it.
We may feel like we have nothing to say or to contribute to a group conversation, so we sit back and listen, taking in the nuances. Then, suddenly, everything will coalesce into a wise thought that brings clarity to what everyone has said. When we finally do speak up, people listen.
So, a case could be made that INFJs are constantly observing and filing every moment of our lives so it can be aggregated and reordered into new creations and insights.
The beauty of leading a group or teaching a class or having an hour consulting call with a client is that there is a fixed start and end time. In those settings we are largely in control of when the event is done and where the conversation goes. INFJs need our alone time, our regroup time. We can be incredibly “on” when we’re on, but we cannot be “on” indefinitely. Remember, we’re INTROVERTS!
Where INFJs Struggle with Mindfulness
On the other hand, mindfulness for an INFJ can be difficult because we are often not consciously present to the moment. We’re in our heads, working an abstract concept or thinking about something in the past or the future. Mindfulness is about being in the present moment, and we’re rarely consciously there for long. We’re analyzing the last thing someone said and not present to the current comments going on around us.
Why INFJ’s Seem So Oblivious
At other times, we may completely check out of a conversation and be lost in our own thoughts. This most likely happens when people are engaged in small talk and chit-chatting about various topics that do not hold our interest or seem of any practical use to us. It can be incredibly difficult for an INFJ to stay engaged in “idle chit-chat.” We’ll contribute little, and we’ll most likely be thinking about something completely different in our minds.
I can’t tell you how many thousands of times, I’ve completely disengaged when there are several topics being discussed around me (either by one group or multiple groups). Then, someone will ask me a direct question, and I have to ask them to repeat it, because I might have been physically present, but I was not mentally present at all.
Or, I’ll be checked out of a conversation and suddenly people start laughing at something funny that’s been said, and I have to ask them to repeat it because I completely missed it.
Also, INFJ’s are not incredibly aware of our thoughts. Our thoughts run freely, connecting from one point and subject to another like thousands of levels of hyperlinks on the internet. We’re down a rabbit hole with our thoughts in a heartbeat and not really sure how we got there.
INFJ’s Disconnect from the Physical World
We’re also not present to the sensations and surroundings of the outside world because we’re lost in our inner world. For years, I was incredibly non-observant of the physical world around me. As I’ve gotten more into nature observation and nature photography, I have increased my capacity to observe my physical environment.
I’ve also been working on being more present to my own body and what it is feeling. I have been known to ignore bodily sensations because I’m too busy working on something. For example, I could be sitting in an uncomfortable position for hours at the computer and do nothing to correct it because I’m so lost in my thoughts that I don’t even notice what’s going on with my body.
Why INFJ’s Can Reach Sensory Overload and Checkout
Think of Lucy with the chocolates on the conveyor belt on the I Love Lucy Show. As long as the iNFJ is taking in new information, learning, listening, and feeling, s/he is also simultaneously filing things away while taking in new input.
The constant filing and aggregating that goes on in an INFJ’s mind is why INFJ’s tend to disengage when too many ideas or concepts are being tossed out in random conversations. We can’t possibly file all of the desperate concepts … especially if we don’t see them as useful for the future. When we have to quickly cull through those various comments to decide which ones to file and which ones to discard, we’ll simply stop listening. We shut off our input channels. Or we’ll fixate on one useful comment and run down a rabbit trail with it in our minds and miss everything that was said after it.
What Mindfulness Practices Work for an INFJ?
These are a few of the mindfulness practices that work for me as an INFJ.
Get In Your Body
Doing something that forces me to be in my body puts me in the moment – whether it’s gardening, washing dishes, cracking black walnuts, yoga, exercising or napping. When I’m doing something physical, I move to the moment, and my mind quiets. I have very few thoughts when I’m physically engaged. It’s a reprieve from an ever-working mind. Over-thinking disappears.
But, you have to know something about these moments when an INFJ can seemingly shut off our brains. Our subconscious minds are not really shut off. The subconscious is still working. An INFJ is constantly aggregating and filing information that can be referenced and combined to create something later. So, when an INFJ can go into a mindful state and shut off the conscious processing, it really is a major benefit.
When an INFJ has the chance to get in their body or clear their mind of new thoughts, the subconscious mind can catch up on some filing. Imagine a day’s full of new experiences, information and data sitting off to the side, waiting to be filed. The INFJ takes 30-minutes to wash dishes and while doing so, his or her subconscious mind files and sorts the backlogged data that it’s got waiting in the wings to be filed and catalogued.
Mindfulness and the INFJ Epiphany or “Rapid” Creation
Have you ever seen a mushroom pop up overnight? In one Native American language, there’s a word for that. It’s Puhpowee! Puhpowee refers to “the force which causes mushrooms to push up from the earth overnight” in the Anishinaabemowin (Ojibwe) language. In many ways, an INFJ’s wisdom and creations are best described as “Puhpowee!” And mindfulness plays a role in expediting those Puhpowee moments.
INFJs need at least two important things to be creative: input and relaxed internal reflection time.
INFJ’s Need Input
It’s to be noted that INFJs do not create ex nihilo (out of nothing). We need input! We create by re-ordering, reshuffling, re-using, and reframing tens, hundreds, thousands, maybe even millions of bits of information and life experiences we’ve gleaned to form a new thought, a book, a piece of art, music or whatever “creative” thing emerges.
INFJs Need Relaxed Alone Time
It’s very difficult for an INFJ to be creative when they feel mentally or emotionally overwhelmed. Just like Lucy was overwhelmed by all those chocolates coming down the line, we feel overwhelmed by all the data input – the things we’ve heard, felt, learned, and seen that we are designed to file and categorize for later recall, creation, and reorganization.
If we can get a break with some alone time and quiet our minds by meditating, or giving our bodies something to do, or even performing repetitive tasks that become almost meditative, our subconscious mind has a chance to file all that backlogged data.
Once we’re “caught up on our filing” we usually find that something immensely creative will pop out of that stillness. Or some brilliant insight will emerge. It will seemingly come out of nowhere, fully formed. This is because we’ve allowed our conscious minds to rest and let the subconscious do what it does best – organize, aggregate, synthesize and create. Like a mushroom that pops up overnight – Puhpowee!! It’s there!
For example, if I’m stuck on what to write, I’ll often go work outside in the garden and then come back and the words will flow.
Author, Rebecca Clark, who tests out on the line between INFJ or INTJ, had this to share about INFJs and creativity:
“I’m finding that writing books is allowing me to synthesize it all and get it out of my mental hard drive to free up memory space for new!”
Rebecca Clark, Author of
The Nudge Factor: Wielding Influence In Our Human Orbits
I completely agree with her. If I write or produce a video daily, it helps me process my thoughts, aggregate, create and release the thoughts and free up my mind for more.
Meditation Practices that Work for INFJ’s
I have found it helpful to meditate by focusing on my breathing – focusing on the air going in and out of my nose and releasing any thoughts that arise by going back to focusing on the air going in and out of my nose.
Another meditation practice that works for me is to count backwards from 100, seeing the numbers in my mind.
A third practice is to imagine light coming in through the top of my head and seeing that light as it gradually circles through my body, bit by bit from my head to my toes.
These work great if I wake up in the night and my mind starts churning on something. Using these meditation practices can help me shut off my mind so I can get back to sleep.
Spend Time in Nature
Spending time in nature is one of the best ways for an INFJ to process the information that swirls around in our minds. A quiet walk or time spent working in the garden can give the INFJ the respite we need to let our subconscious minds do filing while we soak up the soothing balm of nature. Nature is also a wonderful place for the INFJ to form the correlations, metaphors and find the symbols that give meaning to everything we are processing from our daily lives.
To learn more about how to quiet the mind and use nature as a means for finding peace of mind and creative expression, pick up a copy of my new book, “Finding Peace in a Turbulent World: Living in Sacred Nature.” This is how I connect with my Core Sacred Self which is the mindfully aware part of ourselves that is accepting, nonjudgemental and able to be present to the joys to be found in ordinary moments.
