The “INFP meme thinking about doing it” captures something painfully real: the gap between a rich inner world full of ideas, intentions, and genuine desire, and the actual moment of beginning. INFPs don’t lack motivation or creativity. What they often lack is a bridge between their deeply felt inner experience and the external world where things actually happen.
If you’ve ever spent three hours mentally rehearsing a project, felt completely drained by the rehearsal, and then done nothing, you’re not broken. You’re wired differently, and that wiring deserves a real explanation, not just a funny meme.
Our INFP Personality Type hub covers the full landscape of what it means to live and work as an INFP, but the “thinking about doing it” phenomenon deserves its own focused look. Because underneath the humor of that meme lives a genuine psychological pattern worth understanding.
Why Does the INFP “Thinking About Doing It” Meme Hit So Hard?
Memes work when they compress a shared experience into something instantly recognizable. The reason this particular one resonates so widely among INFPs is that it names something they’ve felt but rarely heard articulated: the experience of living so fully inside an idea that starting it almost feels redundant.
I’ve watched this pattern play out in people I’ve worked with over the years. Running advertising agencies meant I hired for creative talent constantly, and the most imaginative people on my teams, the ones with the richest conceptual thinking, were often the ones who needed the most runway before anything landed on a page. That wasn’t laziness. It was a different relationship with the creative process entirely.
For INFPs specifically, this pattern connects directly to how their cognitive functions operate. The dominant function in the INFP stack is Fi, introverted feeling. Fi doesn’t process emotion outward for others to see. It processes inward, building an intricate internal value system that filters every experience, every idea, every potential action through a deeply personal lens. Before an INFP does anything, Fi has already asked: does this align with who I am? Does it matter? Is it authentic?
That’s a lot of filtering before a single word gets typed.
What’s Actually Happening Inside the INFP Mind Before Action
The auxiliary function in the INFP stack is Ne, extraverted intuition. Where Fi asks “does this matter to me,” Ne asks “what else could this become?” Ne is expansive, associative, and genuinely excited by possibility. It sees ten directions from any starting point and finds all of them interesting.
Put dominant Fi and auxiliary Ne together and you get a mind that cares deeply about meaning AND sees infinite possibility in every direction. That combination produces extraordinary creative depth. It also produces the exact experience the meme describes: you’re thinking about doing it, thinking about all the ways it could go, feeling the weight of whether it’s worth doing at all, and somehow the afternoon disappears.
There’s nothing pathological about this. Research published in PubMed Central on personality and cognitive processing styles points to meaningful individual differences in how people approach planning versus action. Some minds are genuinely wired to spend longer in the conceptual phase, and that extended internal processing often produces better outcomes when action finally does happen.
The tertiary function in the INFP stack is Si, introverted sensing. Si compares present experience to past experience, drawing on what has felt meaningful or safe before. When an INFP considers starting something new, Si quietly surfaces memories of past attempts, past failures, past moments where beginning something felt vulnerable. That’s not pessimism. It’s the Si function doing its job, trying to inform the decision with accumulated personal history.
And then there’s the inferior function: Te, extraverted thinking. Te governs external organization, systematic execution, and measurable output. As the inferior function, it’s the least developed and most energy-intensive for INFPs to access. Starting things, especially structured or logistically complex things, requires Te. And reaching for your weakest function while your strongest functions are busy processing meaning and possibility is genuinely exhausting.
Is This an INFP Problem or a Human Problem With an INFP Flavor?
Worth asking honestly. Procrastination and the gap between intention and action are widely documented human experiences, not exclusive to any personality type. A PubMed Central review on self-regulation and task initiation notes that difficulty beginning tasks correlates with factors like emotional stakes, perfectionism, and ambiguity tolerance, all of which show up across many personality profiles.
What makes the INFP version distinctive isn’t the delay itself. It’s the quality of what’s happening during the delay. An INFP isn’t scrolling mindlessly or avoiding discomfort through distraction (though that happens too). They’re often genuinely engaged in a rich internal process: imagining, feeling, considering, connecting ideas, questioning whether the thing is worth doing at all.
That’s different from avoidance. It’s also different from productive planning. It exists in its own category, and recognizing that distinction matters.
I think about a copywriter I worked with at one of my agencies who fit this pattern exactly. She’d take twice as long as anyone else to start a brief, and when she finally did, her work was consistently the most original in the room. Her “thinking about doing it” phase wasn’t wasted time. It was load-bearing. The problem was that deadlines don’t care about internal processing cycles, and she spent years feeling like something was wrong with her rather than understanding her actual creative rhythm.
If you’re not sure whether you’re an INFP or another type entirely, our free MBTI personality test is a solid starting point for understanding your cognitive preferences.
When “Thinking About It” Becomes a Way of Avoiding Conflict
Here’s a layer of this that doesn’t get discussed enough. For many INFPs, the “thinking about doing it” pattern isn’t only about creative projects or personal goals. It extends to difficult conversations, relationship repairs, and moments where speaking up feels necessary but terrifying.
INFPs feel things with real intensity. Their dominant Fi means that interpersonal situations carry enormous weight. The prospect of saying something that might rupture a relationship, disappoint someone they care about, or expose their inner world to criticism can be enough to keep them in the “thinking about it” phase indefinitely.
If that resonates, this piece on how INFPs can handle hard talks without losing themselves addresses that specific challenge directly. Because the same Fi-driven depth that makes INFPs such meaningful communicators also makes confrontation feel like it costs something fundamental.
There’s also a conflict dimension worth naming. INFPs don’t just avoid starting projects. They often avoid starting disagreements, even when those disagreements matter. Understanding why INFPs take conflict so personally gets at the root of why “thinking about addressing it” can stretch into weeks of silence and internal processing.
The irony is that the internal processing during that silence is often more emotionally intense than the actual conversation would have been. INFPs rehearse, feel, re-feel, imagine outcomes, feel those too, and exhaust themselves before a single word is spoken to the other person.
What INFJs and INFPs Share Here (And Where They Diverge)
INFJs and INFPs get lumped together frequently because they share the NF temperament, a combination of intuition and feeling that produces deep empathy, idealism, and a strong orientation toward meaning. Both types can get stuck in the “thinking about it” loop. But the mechanism is different.
For INFJs, the dominant function is Ni, introverted intuition, which converges on a singular vision or insight. When an INFJ is “thinking about doing it,” they’re often waiting for that Ni convergence, waiting until the path feels clear and certain before committing to action. The delay is about certainty.
For INFPs, the dominant function is Fi, and the delay is about authenticity and meaning. The INFP isn’t waiting for the path to become clear. They’re waiting to feel sure that the path is theirs, that it matters, that doing it won’t compromise something essential about who they are.
INFJs have their own version of this communication paralysis. The blind spots in INFJ communication often stem from that same Ni-driven certainty-seeking, a reluctance to speak before the insight has fully formed. And when INFJs do face difficult conversations, the cost of keeping peace rather than engaging accumulates quietly over time.
Both types benefit from understanding that waiting for perfect internal alignment before acting is a pattern, not a requirement. The alignment rarely arrives on its own. It gets built through doing.
The Perfectionism Thread Running Through All of This
Perfectionism and the INFP “thinking about doing it” pattern are deeply intertwined, though the INFP version of perfectionism looks different from the stereotypical image of someone endlessly polishing a finished product.
INFP perfectionism often operates at the level of meaning rather than execution. It’s not “this paragraph isn’t polished enough.” It’s “I’m not sure this is actually what I want to say.” Or more precisely: “I’m not sure this is actually true to who I am.”
That’s a much harder standard to meet. You can always revise a paragraph. Achieving perfect authenticity before you begin is an impossible prerequisite.
At one of my agencies, we had a creative director who would describe this feeling as “waiting to feel ready.” She was extraordinarily talented, and she was waiting for a readiness that never quite arrived on its own. What eventually worked for her was a structure that separated the “feeling ready” question from the “starting” question entirely. She’d begin with something she called a “permission draft,” explicitly low-stakes, explicitly not for anyone’s eyes, just to give herself permission to be imperfect in motion.
That small structural shift made a significant difference. Not because it solved the underlying Fi-driven need for authenticity, but because it stopped requiring authenticity as the price of admission for beginning.
The 16Personalities framework describes INFPs as particularly prone to idealism about their own potential, which can paradoxically make starting harder. When you believe you’re capable of something extraordinary, the ordinary first draft feels like a betrayal of that potential.
How INFPs Can Build a Bridge From Thinking to Doing
Practical strategies for INFPs need to work with the cognitive function stack, not against it. Advice that amounts to “just start” misses the point entirely. Fi needs meaning. Ne needs possibility. Si needs safety. Te needs structure. A workable approach addresses all of these, or at least doesn’t actively fight them.
Start with why, not what. INFPs find it significantly easier to begin when they’ve articulated why something matters to them personally. Not why it should matter, not why others think it matters, but the specific personal value it connects to. That’s Fi getting what it needs before Te is asked to do any work.
Contain the Ne expansion phase. Ne will generate ten directions. That’s valuable. The problem is when the expansion phase has no defined endpoint and bleeds into the time meant for execution. Some INFPs find it helpful to give Ne a specific window, say, twenty minutes of free ideation, and then close that window deliberately before beginning the work itself.
Make the first action absurdly small. The inferior Te function is most accessible when the task feels low-stakes and clearly defined. “Write the novel” is a Te nightmare. “Write one sentence that feels true” is manageable. success doesn’t mean trick yourself into productivity. It’s to give Te a foothold without requiring it to carry the whole weight immediately.
The Frontiers in Psychology research on personality and self-regulation points to the importance of implementation intentions, specific “when-then” plans, for bridging the gap between goal setting and action. For INFPs, framing these intentions around personal meaning rather than external outcomes tends to make them stick better.
What the Meme Gets Right (And What It Gets Wrong)
Memes are reductive by nature. That’s their function. The “INFP thinking about doing it” meme gets something genuinely right: the experience of living so richly inside an idea that the external expression of it feels almost secondary. That’s a real phenomenon, and naming it with humor creates community around a shared experience.
What it gets wrong, or at least incomplete, is the implication that this is a fixed trait rather than a pattern with real variability. INFPs do things. Plenty of INFPs are prolific creators, decisive communicators, and people who act on their values with remarkable consistency. The “thinking about doing it” pattern is a tendency, not a destiny.
There’s also a risk that the meme becomes a comfortable identity rather than a useful observation. “That’s just how INFPs are” can slide into permission to stay stuck, which isn’t actually comfortable for anyone with strong Fi values. INFPs care about living authentically and purposefully. Chronic inaction conflicts with that at a deep level, which is part of why the meme is funny but also a little painful.
The Psychology Today overview on empathy is worth reading in this context because it distinguishes between different forms of empathic processing. INFPs often carry a kind of empathic weight for the world around them, not in the clinical sense, but in the way their Fi function processes the emotional significance of their environment. That weight is real and it costs energy. Some of what looks like “thinking about doing it” is actually emotional recovery time that the INFP hasn’t yet learned to name or account for.
When Quiet Influence Matters More Than Action
Not every “thinking about doing it” moment is a failure of execution. Some of them are exactly right.
INFPs carry real influence in the spaces they inhabit, often without realizing it. Their depth of feeling, their commitment to authenticity, and their ability to hold space for complexity make them the kind of people others turn to when something genuinely matters. That influence doesn’t always require action in the conventional sense. Sometimes it requires presence, reflection, and the kind of slow, careful thinking the meme is poking fun at.
I’ve seen this in practice. Some of the most influential people in my agencies weren’t the loudest voices in the room or the fastest to execute. They were the ones who thought carefully, spoke rarely, and when they did speak, said something that reoriented the entire conversation. Their “thinking about it” phase was doing real work, even when it looked like nothing from the outside.
The concept of quiet influence is something INFJs also grapple with. How INFJs exercise influence through quiet intensity offers a useful parallel, because many of the same principles apply across NF types. Depth, authenticity, and the willingness to sit with complexity before speaking are genuine sources of influence, not substitutes for it.
For INFPs specifically, the internal processing that precedes action often produces a quality of output that faster movers can’t replicate. The meme captures the frustration of that gap. What it doesn’t capture is the value that lives inside it.
The Emotional Cost of the Loop (And How to Interrupt It)
Staying in the “thinking about doing it” loop indefinitely isn’t neutral. For INFPs, whose dominant Fi holds them to a high standard of authentic living, chronic inaction creates a specific kind of internal friction. There’s the idea of who they want to be, the person who creates, communicates, contributes. And there’s the daily reality of another day spent in the thinking phase. That gap accumulates emotional weight over time.
Some INFPs describe this as a low-grade sense of fraudulence, a feeling that they’re not actually the person their inner world suggests they are. That’s a painful place to live, and it’s worth taking seriously rather than resolving with another round of self-deprecating meme sharing.
This PubMed Central resource on emotional regulation addresses the relationship between internal emotional experience and behavioral output in ways that are directly relevant here. The gap between feeling and doing isn’t just a motivation problem. It’s often an emotional regulation challenge, and INFPs with well-developed emotional regulation skills tend to close that gap more effectively than those who haven’t yet built those tools.
INFJs face a version of this too. The INFJ tendency to door slam rather than engage is another manifestation of the same underlying pattern: emotion builds internally, action gets deferred, and eventually the system finds a release valve that isn’t always the healthiest one. Both types benefit from learning to interrupt the loop before it reaches that point.
For INFPs, interrupting the loop usually requires one of two things: either a genuine connection to why the action matters (Fi getting fed), or a structural commitment that makes not-starting more uncomfortable than starting. Neither approach is universally better. What matters is knowing which one your particular version of the pattern responds to.
What Changes When INFPs Stop Waiting to Feel Ready
There’s a version of the INFP story that goes beyond the meme. It’s the version where the rich inner world and the external output start to align, not perfectly, not without friction, but meaningfully.
What tends to shift for INFPs who move through the “thinking about doing it” pattern isn’t that they stop thinking deeply. It’s that they stop requiring the thinking to be complete before the doing begins. They learn to treat the first draft, the first conversation, the first attempt, as part of the thinking rather than the end of it.
That’s a significant cognitive reframe. It honors the Fi need for authenticity while giving Te a workable entry point. It lets Ne continue exploring while Si provides enough grounded history to feel safe from here. The functions don’t stop doing what they do. They just get reorganized around a different sequence.
From my own experience as an INTJ who spent years waiting to feel certain before acting, I recognize something parallel in this. My inferior function is Se, extraverted sensing, which means engaging with the immediate physical world in real time has always felt risky and uncertain. I used to over-prepare as a way of managing that discomfort. What eventually worked was accepting that some of the preparation was actually avoidance, and that acting with 80% certainty produced better outcomes than waiting indefinitely for 100%.
INFPs and INTJs are very different types, but the experience of a strong inner world that sometimes makes external action feel harder than it needs to be is something we share. And the path through it looks similar: not abandoning the inner world, but building a more functional relationship between it and the outer one.
There’s much more to explore about how INFPs process the world, build relationships, and find their footing in work and life. The full INFP Personality Type hub is a good place to continue that exploration with depth and specificity.
About the Author
Keith Lacy is an introvert who’s learned to embrace his true self later in life. After 20 years in advertising and marketing leadership, including running agencies and managing Fortune 500 accounts, Keith now channels his experience into helping fellow introverts understand their strengths and build fulfilling careers. As an INTJ, he brings analytical depth and authentic perspective to every article, drawing from both professional expertise and personal growth.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why do INFPs struggle to start things even when they really want to do them?
INFPs struggle to start because their dominant function, Fi (introverted feeling), requires that an action feel personally meaningful and authentic before it begins. Their auxiliary function, Ne (extraverted intuition), simultaneously generates multiple possible directions, making it hard to commit to one. And their inferior function, Te (extraverted thinking), which governs external execution and organization, is the least developed and most energy-intensive to access. Starting something requires Te, and reaching for your weakest function while your stronger functions are busy processing meaning and possibility creates genuine friction, not laziness.
Is the INFP “thinking about doing it” meme accurate, or is it just a stereotype?
The meme captures a real psychological pattern tied to how the INFP cognitive function stack operates, but it’s incomplete. INFPs absolutely do things, and many are prolific creators and decisive people. The “thinking about doing it” experience is a tendency shaped by dominant Fi and auxiliary Ne, not a fixed characteristic. The risk of the meme is that it becomes a comfortable identity rather than a useful observation. INFPs who understand the underlying mechanism can work with it more effectively than those who simply accept it as an unchangeable trait.
How is INFP procrastination different from other types?
INFP procrastination is distinctive because it often involves genuine internal activity rather than avoidance. While other types might delay tasks through distraction or discomfort avoidance, INFPs are frequently engaged in rich internal processing during the delay: imagining, feeling, connecting ideas, questioning whether the thing is worth doing at all. The delay is also often driven by a Fi-based perfectionism about authenticity rather than quality. An INFP isn’t always asking “is this good enough” but rather “is this true enough to who I am,” which is a much harder standard to satisfy before beginning.
What practical strategies actually help INFPs move from thinking to doing?
Strategies that work with the INFP cognitive stack rather than against it tend to be most effective. Starting with why rather than what gives Fi the meaning it needs before Te is asked to execute. Giving Ne a defined time window for ideation, then closing it deliberately, helps contain the expansion phase. Making the first action very small reduces the demand on inferior Te and lowers the emotional stakes of beginning. Treating the first attempt as part of the thinking process rather than the end of it reframes action as compatible with the INFP’s internal process rather than in competition with it.
Do INFPs and INFJs experience this pattern the same way?
They experience similar patterns but for different reasons. INFJs have dominant Ni (introverted intuition), which converges on a singular vision. When an INFJ delays action, they’re often waiting for that Ni clarity, waiting until the path feels certain. INFPs have dominant Fi, so their delay is about authenticity and personal meaning rather than certainty. The INFJ asks “is the path clear?” The INFP asks “is this path mine?” Both types benefit from understanding that perfect internal alignment rarely arrives on its own and tends to get built through action rather than preceding it.
