how to handle social exhaustion when you have friends

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Today I went to my mental health support group and we had an outing.
Later, went to a childhood friend's house and we went to see the D&D movie. Then ate out afterwards.

By the time that was over, I was ready for alone time. It seems my social battery, while it's never been big, is getting smaller lately. She asked if I was going to stay for a while, but I said I'd go home for now and spend time with her tomorrow.

Is there a way to explain to friends that I have very little social energy?

Oh heavens.
It would take me about a month to recover from something like that.
I'd just be honest.

I'm actually envious that you could do all that in one day.
My energy levels are really limiting nowadays, I could have done one of those things but not the others.

I agree it's hard to explain to people without causing offence.
For some reason, people never understand that it's a genuine limitation and you would spend more time with them if you could.

Sometimes I don't try to explain, just think up an excuse like my dog needing to be fed, as people understand that better. Though I'm a terrible liar so that only really works when the dog actually does need to be fed

It's useful to have a few excuses in store for such times. But I'd always consider telling the truth as a first resort. Difficult with relatively new people because their likely reaction is unknown. It's also useful to issue a compliment or two on the way out, and to allude to a return in the near future. If that little lot isn't good enough for them and they take offense, associating with them might not be such a great idea anyhow.

Blimey that IS a long day! I couldn't do that these days, my social battery is getting much shorter as time goes on.

Can you just say that? I'm sorry but I don't have much social energy? You could say it's part of being an introvert, or something.

It's hard to explain to extroverts. But if they are your true friends, they should understand. You could say, I'd love to see you another day but I'm getting very tired now.

I'm not sure if that is helpful, it's so long since I've had friends.

I think it's best just to be honest and say you don't have much social battery and get overstimulated easily.


I had a 20 minute job interview yesterday and it went really well, but the effort to be in my top-tier highest-effort sociable persona had me so tired I was whining and whimpering all afternoon after that. I'm still exhausted today lol. So tired.

Are you familiar with MBTI? It is a convenient simple way to describe some personality preferences...in this case, "Introversion" vs. "Extraversion". Contrary to what many people first expect, MBTI does not use the terms to describe how well you interact with other people but rather whether interacting with other people energizes you or de-energizes you.

I have a very clear Introversion preference. Dealing with other people tires me. Sometimes at conventions when I mentioned that I was an Introvert someone would argue with me because I was doing a good job interacting with them. What they missed was that interacting with them was tiring for me.

Early in my relationship with the gal I am now married to I had a tiring job. If she and I went anywhere that evening I would want to drive quietly without conversing with her. She tended to assume that I didn't want to talk to here because I was upset with her even though I wasn't upset at all—I just needed to be left alone so I could recharge.

Finally I explained things to her in terms of MBTI. How Introversion vs. Extraversion indicated whether you used energy or gained energy while interacting with people. After I explained it in those terms she understood that I just needed time to recharge...I wasn't mad at her.

I would echo what others have said. That day would have been too much for me. Honesty and being positive in other ways is probably the best bet.

Also think people were right that "introvert" may be a useful approximation in dealing with NTs. Many are not familiar with that either and a few give it negative connotations, but I think it is relatively better understood by the majority of people than autism.

MBT = Meyers-Briggs personality inventory. I took this at age 20 or so, and scored as an extreme introvert. For most of my life, that was the best explanation I had for how I felt different from others. They have pretty decent descriptive material for the various classifications they use. I have a few doubts about the Jungian theoretical framework that underlies it, but it it still valuable.

(Tangent from that last remark -- the Jungian model promotes the idea that certain traits are inversely related to others: introvert and extrovert obviously, but also intuition versus sensing and feeling versus thinking. But then the way the tests are scored is somewhat independent of that. For example, you could have high scores on both feeling and thinking (I did), or you could have low scores on both.)