So you’re caught up in the infamous Ni-Ti loop again.  An endless descending spiral of self-doubt, uncertainty, overthinking and loosening grip on reality… you know the drill.  INFJs are driven to try and understand whatever situation they find themselves in – whether it’s a work issue, a relationship problem, an existential crisis, or just something more prosaic like ‘am I getting fat?’.  By understanding a problem, INFJs think they can master it. 

But once they withdraw into their twin introverted functions of Ni and Ti, they become obsessively focused on seeking a definitive answer.  And this search has its own self-perpetuating energy. The more you overthink a problem, the more gravitational pull that problem has on your focus.  The problem doesn’t get solved, and no definitive answer is ever found.  Instead, a billion different negative possibilities spring into life, each accelerating round your head like asteroids swirling round the event horizon of an enormous black hole.

The magnetic pull these imagined negative possibilities exert is so great that it can be very difficult for an INFJ to claw their way back to reality.  Instead, the INFJ gets further and further away from the truth, and sinks deeper and deeper into the unreal.

The solution to this self-defeating cycle is always for the INFJ to tap back into their two extroverted functions – Fe and Se.  INFJs have a very sophisticated use of their Ni – but Ni doesn’t have all the answers and you can’t rely on it alone (especially not when it’s only backed up by increasingly crazy introverted thinking).  

You need to get back to what’s real, what you actually know, what the facts are.  Not speculation – just the facts.  INFJs gather information about the real world via their Se and Fe.  Extraverted sensation may not be their strongest suit, and indeed the whole world of actual reality is sometimes a bit of a stretch for INFJs to engage with.  But their Fe is strong, and this is the function that will help anchor themselves back in, you know, real life.

So get out there and talk to an actual human being!  If that’s too hard, chat to someone online instead.  Getting an outside perspective on your problems invariably makes them shrink, and INFJs benefit enormously from just ‘talking it out’.  The very act of externalising your feelings (via Fe) brings some order and structure to the chaos inside and makes everything much more manageable.  Even if you don’t talk about the issues at hand, just being social with another person is an invaluable distraction that can bring you back to reality and get you out of that Ni-Ti loop.

The other way to jolt yourself out of the loop is to plunge into Se by doing something active.  It doesn’t really matter what, as long as you just do something – exercising, getting outdoors, going somewhere, even just doing some housework.  Anything that gets you moving is enough to break the Ni-Ti loop and bring you back to the here and now.  It can feel like a Herculean effort is needed to tear yourself away from the lure of the loop, but the certainty and sense of closure that comes from ‘action’ is like a balm to INFJs.  So stop overthinking – and just do it.

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