Emotional switching off after a brief time

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I don't really know how to describe this except as a very short attention span for any sort of situation or emotion before I become exhausted due to the intensity. Today I was in a shop that sold fridge magnets and me and my friend were laughing over a few of them and I was pondering over the "deeper" ones. This lasted for less than two or three minutes when I suddenly "switched off" back inside myself as the energy it took to giggle and share that moment was too strong for me. My friend carried on laughing about the magnets and pointing them out but from them on I had to fake my response as I couldn't find the emotion anymore.

Does anyone else understand or relate to this as I don't know why I do it.

Yes. I often don't feel the flow of a social exchange. I notice it , and sort of get it... but internally I refuse to acknowledge it. Sometimes these moments go on for way to long, and I get almost annoyed that they keep on going. So I just 'switch off' and ignore them...

It often seems that most social things are pulled just by their own energy of the participants, and not due to any worth. Like I've seen people laugh at a joke that really wasn't funny, just because the person saying the joke laughed at it themselves and kind of forced it onto others...

Yes, I have very small windows of open status available (minutes), then I just close the doors and goodbye, if I'm in a social setting and I have to I try to answer in a reasonable way while my mind is somewhere else and emotion is turned off. It's tiring anyway, the best option of course is try to avoid such situations as much as possible.

I have the same thing. Very difficult to keep up with emotional situations, so they eventually just shut down entirely, and I become purely rational. No one ever acknowledges that, however; and they insist that I'm juyst refusing to admit my emotions, or that i'm trying too hard to suppress them. But they're not there, I just don't have any at all for that period of time.

Thanks for replying guys, I'm glad it isn't just me and this makes sense to people. I think I've had this problem all my life as I struggled so badly at school and uni because of it - I always needed to be alone -so now it makes some kind of sense.

We process cognitively and not intuitively. This means it actually takes us much more energy to exchange socially and therefor we get exhausted from it far more easily and readily than ordinary people.
I am the first to leave and I always switch off in interactions as i get too tired trying to keep up with words, phrases, facial expressions, information, gestures and cross-conversation as well.

I do it. Eventually I just retreat back inside myself. Stop interacting unless someone directly engages me.