Highly intelligent people often experience life differently than most, and this can translate to some odd habits or routines.
Night owls
Being extremely intelligent can alter your circadian rhythm, causing your productive hours to shift to nighttime. While others are sleeping, high-functioning brains have what they need to reach optimum productivity: silence. No more distractions from phone calls, emails, or idle chit-chat.
So night owls are left alone with their thoughts, allowing them to hyperfocus on whatever complex problem they’re trying to solve.
Self talk
When someone is muttering to themselves while pacing back and forth in an empty room or down the aisle at the grocery store, they’re not crazy. They’re thinking really quickly, so vocalizing their thoughts allows them to sort out those scrambled thoughts while also solidifying things in their memory and helping them focus.
Talking to themselves basically gives them an audible scratchpad to work out theories until everything makes sense.
Messy desks
Messy desks covered with papers, books, ongoing projects and other miscellaneous supplies can be characteristic of creative people. Studies have shown that mess helps people to think outside the box and break patterns.
They will go out of their way to find new answers. They get so caught up in the ideas they are working with that cleaning may not even cross their mind as a good use of their energy.
Alone time
While most people unwind by spending time with large groups of friends, many extremely intelligent people need hours of solitude just to function day to day. Being around people is mentally exhausting.
There’s so much processing that goes into body language and small talk. If you have a lot going on in your mind, you can quickly feel depleted. They need time to unpack those big thoughts, read, or just be.
Zoning out
They may seem like they are tuning you out or staring at the wall, but they are actually hard at work inside their own head. This extreme daydreaming occurs when someone has too much working memory for their mind to focus on whatever mundane activity is taking place.
Although they seem far off in their own world, they’re likely making far-off connections or planning future endeavors.
Dark humor
It takes creativity and abstract thinking to laugh at dark, ironic, or ridiculously absurd situations. To understand a dark joke, someone must view a catastrophic or taboo scenario from various emotional and intellectual perspectives, all while maintaining those thoughts at once.
It takes a quick and clever mind to see the art of wording and subtle details within a joke that might make others cringe.
Casual swearing
It’s a popular misconception that people only resort to curse words when they don’t know how to express themselves any other way. Research in language proficiency, on the other hand, has found that heavy profanity use correlates with greater verbal fluency and extensive vocabulary.
Knowing exactly which sharp, taboo word to use for maximum emotional impact requires a sophisticated grasp of language.
Strategic delay
Waiting until the last minute isn’t always due to sheer laziness or carelessness for smart people. Often, it’s strategic. Highly intelligent people often wait until the last minute to do work because their brains focus best under pressure.
The adrenaline created by a looming deadline allows them to hyper-focus and do their best work in a limited amount of time.
Hyper focus
When they become fascinated by a topic or complex problem, everything else in the physical world around them disappears. They can become so obsessed that they forget to have lunch, read text messages, or realize how long they’ve been working because they are on a roll trying to solve the problem.
Their obsession grants them the ability to pick up difficult topics in a short amount of time.
Constant doodling
Drawing stick figures and random patterns in the margins of a notebook during a mind-numbing lecture seems like the universal hallmark of someone who’s bored.
In fact, that little movement provides a release, occupying just enough of the idle brain to keep a person focused. Redirecting a little of their attention actually stops them from zoning out altogether and helps them pay attention to what’s being said.
Sources: Please see here for a complete listing of all sources that were consulted in the preparation of this article.
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