The most pressing reason why smart people struggle to succeed in life is that they don't hold importance to social skills. Hence, they fail to develop crucial social skills like relationship building, active listening, effective communication, and empathy. This alienates them from the people around them.
High-IQ people often experience social isolation, which can lead to depression or make them act more introverted than is their nature. The very intelligent know they're intelligent, so they're prone to setting lofty expectations for themselves that they can't meet.
Studies have also found that higher IQ is associated with more mental illness, including depression, anxiety, and bipolar disorder.
Intelligent people often override common sense with their considerable brain power — but this isn't always a good thing. Smart people think in situations where they should feel, like in relationships. They may avoid the correct response because it doesn't seem rational when we all know that life isn't always rational.
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.
Science supports laziness
The data found that those with a high IQ got bored less easily, leading them to be less active and spend more time engaged in thought.
Research suggests that highly intelligent people get bored easily and spend more time thinking, behaviour that comes across as 'laziness'. A study by the Florida Gulf Coast University looked at a group of 'thinkers' and 'non-thinkers', studying their activity levels over the course of a week.
Faces that are perceived as highly intelligent are rather prolonged with a broader distance between the eyes, a larger nose, a slight upturn to the corners of the mouth, and a sharper, pointing, less rounded chin.
Sensitivity And Emotional Intelligence
The good news is that highly sensitive people aren't more or less emotionally intelligent than others. They just use emotional intelligence differently.
People are not always logical, so their behaviors cannot always be predicted. Social anxiety is born out of this concern for unpredictability. Interacting with other people can be more difficult for smart people because these interactions don't follow a specific set of rules; they just happen.
A popular misconception is that all children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are naturally smarter and have a higher IQ than children without ADHD. However, there is no correlation between this condition and intelligence.
They never stop questioning things
Highly intelligent people know better than to follow groupthink. They don't make assumptions and set out to form their own opinions.
The Intersection of Arrogance and Intelligence
But they're often related. Being smart, bright and clever often leads to business success. But having these intellectual gifts also means that one gets used to being right, being perceived as a good problem-solver and being valued by others. And this leads to arrogance.
They found that 12 risk genes for bipolar disorder were also linked to intelligence. In 75 % of these genes, bipolar disorder risk was associated with higher intelligence. In schizophrenia, there was also a genetic overlap with intelligence, but a higher proportion of the genes was associated with cognitive impairment.
What screams "highly intelligent person"? They will have unusual, deep, or specialized interests and hobbies you don't typically see people having. This is because they are highly curious about how the world works. They may be very quiet, especially if they possess advanced vocabulary.
They inquire about everything, including themselves
Asking questions is a more fundamental aspect of intelligence. A person with intelligence doesn't hesitate to ask questions that others wouldn't even dare to ask or are frightened to doubt a thing.
The larger the pupils, the higher the intelligence, as measured by tests of reasoning, attention and memory.
Ability to learn new topics quickly. Ability to process new and complex information rapidly. Desire to explore specific topics in great depth. Insatiable curiosity, often demonstrated by many questions.
While there are many signs to indicate someone may be highly intelligent, the most common are a pleasant attitude and hardworking nature, excellent memory and recall capacity, good decision-making and problem-solving skills, high curiosity, good language proficiency, and high emotional intelligence.
A study published in the journal Sleep found that sleep is important for cognitive performance and that individuals who have better sleep quality tend to have higher intelligence scores.
Psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa and Study Magazine pinpointed further by saying that individuals in their 20s with a normal IQ tended to go to sleep at around 12:10 a.m., while those with a lower IQ went to bed at 11:41 p.m. Those labeled “very bright” hit the sack at 12:29 a.m.
Can intelligent people be talkative? For people presented as very intelligent, the mean rating of talkativeness was 0.32, which was in the direction of being above average, but not significantly so [t(30) = 1.66, p < . 10].
They also found that highly intelligent people feel they don't benefit as much from friendships, and yet socialize more often than less intelligent people. Highly intelligent people, therefore, use solitude as a way to reset themselves after socializing in highly stressful urban environments.