Although being intelligent — both in a traditional sense and an emotional one — can make life easier in many ways, it can also make life much lonelier.
High-IQ people often experience social isolation, which can lead to depression or make them act more introverted than is their nature.
Loners are smart.
Loners spend less time with others and more time on their own learning and pursuing their own interests. The Washington Post spoke with Carol Graham, a Brookings Institute researcher who studies the economics of happiness, about the fact that smarter people spend more time alone.
Highly intelligent people are exceptionally responsive to their environment and this hyper-reactivity can cause depression and anxiety disorders. Their habit of overanalyzing and self-reflecting on the purpose of life can also lead to mental health issues and prevent them from being happy.
The reason that most people are more satisfied and happier when with people is because of the needs that friends fulfil such as the need to be needed, reliability and the feeling of relatedness. People that are highly intelligent, however, are happier when on their own.
Throw social commitments into the mix, and there's limited time to be alone and be still with your thoughts and creative process. It's common for people with genius qualities to seek out isolation at times, due to a social anxiety and an excessive need for “me” time, in order to practice mindfulness..
Takeaway: Emotionally intelligent people cry. And they cry a lot more than other people. They cry because they feel bad, they cry because life is hard, they cry without knowing the reason.
While they might have high standards and big picture concerns, research shows that people with high IQs are actually more likely to be happy; data from the research showed that people with the highest IQs were much happier than those with the lowest IQs.
Highly intelligent people are at increased risk of mental illness, according to research. This is because the brains of intelligent people are hyperexcitable, the researchers think. A higher IQ leads to a greater awareness of their surroundings and what is going on.
Most independent people enjoy independence. It is a source of strength for them. However, this trait can make it difficult for intelligent people to fall in love. Since they are incredibly independent, they see a partner not as someone who “completes” them but rather as a person to share moments with.
Key points
Smart people tend to be liked better than their peers, a new study focusing on adolescents found. Smart people tend to like fewer people than less intelligent people, and have a tendency to only like other intelligent people.
The reason that smart people with a high IQ are sometimes more anxious may have an evolutionary explanation. Intelligence and anxiety may have evolved together as mutually beneficial traits, research finds. This may help to explain why people with a high IQ also tend to have higher levels of anxiety.
Highly Intelligent People Often Feel They Don't Fit In
Being highly intelligent means you have a degree of overexcitabilities, especially intellectual overexcitability. Through life experience, you have learned that you must edit yourself and not express your innermost thoughts blatantly.
Intelligent people tend to appear quiet because they are natural observers. They are listening and watching what's going on around them.
Highly intelligent individuals may be raised to be more individualistic than others, therefore would have less social experience. Highly intelligent individuals may be traumatized, envied for their intellectual gifts, during childhood and thus resented by their peers.
Talking to yourself, it turns out, is a sign of genius. The smartest people on earth talk to themselves. Look at the inner monologues of the greatest thinkers. Look at poetry!
They're open-minded
Psychologists say that open-minded people — those who seek out alternate viewpoints and weigh the evidence fairly — tend to score higher on the SAT and on intelligence tests. At the same time, smart people are careful about which ideas and perspectives they adopt.
Adaptability: High IQ people are flexible and willing to try new things and explore different ways of approaching a problem. Curiosity: Highly intelligent People are curious about the world and want to learn more about how it works.
The very intelligent know they're intelligent, so they're prone to setting lofty expectations for themselves that too often they can't meet. Thus, they're frequently disappointed (at times depressed) by their level of accomplishment falling substantially below their ideals.
Some studies show that speaking more rapidly makes you seem more intelligent, possibly because speed implies certainty. So what should you do? There's a better approach than simply speaking quickly or slowly, because how quickly you should speak can depend on the situation you're in.
People with high intelligence tend to share this quality. Intelligent people tend to be better behaved and less aggressive, research reveals. Both boys and girls with higher IQs are less likely to be antisocial than those with lower IQs.
Via The Intelligence Paradox: Why the Intelligent Choice Isn't Always the Smart One: Intelligent people, however, have a tendency to overapply their analytical and logical reasoning abilities derived from their general intelligence incorrectly to such evolutionarily familiar domains and, as a result, get things wrong.
Research has shown that there is a high correlation between being intelligent and socially anxious.
People who have genius traits tend to think about problems and concepts in a much more dynamic way. As a result, they are unlikely to accept information and facts on face value. Instead, they will want to defy and test conventional thinking.