What Waves Taught Me About Moving Through Change

A wave needs something to travel through. Solid, liquid, or gas, it doesn’t matter which medium carries the energy, what matters is that without a medium, the wave simply cannot move. Sound disappears in a vacuum. Vibration needs resistance to become something real. That physics principle stuck with me long after I left school, because I’ve watched it play out in every major transition of my adult life.

The medium a wave travels through determines everything about how that wave behaves. Speed, amplitude, direction, the way energy spreads or concentrates. Change works the same way. The environment you’re moving through during a life transition shapes how you experience that change, how fast it moves, how much it costs you, and whether the energy transforms into something useful or just dissipates into noise.

For introverts, that medium is rarely neutral. We process transitions differently than our extroverted counterparts, and the conditions around us either amplify or absorb what we’re trying to work through.

If you’re in the middle of a significant life shift right now, or preparing for one, you might find the broader collection of resources in our Life Transitions and Major Changes hub useful alongside this piece. There’s a lot of territory to cover when it comes to how introverts handle upheaval, and this article focuses on one specific angle: the medium you’re moving through, and why it matters more than most people realize.

Why Does the Medium Matter So Much During Change?

In physics, when a wave moves from one medium to another, something interesting happens. The wave refracts. It bends. Its speed changes. Some of its energy reflects back, and some pushes forward in a new direction. Anyone who has watched light bend through water, or noticed how sound carries differently across a lake compared to a crowded room, has seen this in action.

I think about this constantly when I reflect on the major transitions I’ve moved through in my career. Selling my first agency felt nothing like selling my second, even though the mechanics were similar. The medium was different. The people around me, my mental state, my support structures, the organizational culture I was embedded in, all of it changed how the energy of that transition traveled through my life.

As an INTJ, I process change internally first. I need time to model the situation, run through scenarios, identify risks, and build a mental framework before I can act with any confidence. When the medium around me is dense and chaotic, full of competing demands, emotional noise, and constant interruption, that internal processing gets disrupted. The wave of change can’t travel cleanly. It scatters.

What I’ve come to understand, slowly and sometimes painfully, is that introverts aren’t just sensitive to change itself. We’re exquisitely sensitive to the conditions surrounding change. The medium we’re in either supports our processing or fragments it.

A piece worth reading on this topic comes from Psychology Today’s exploration of why introverts need deeper conversations, which touches on how surface-level interaction during stressful periods can leave introverts feeling more depleted, not less. That resonated with me. During every major transition in my career, the small talk and surface-level check-ins from colleagues did almost nothing to help. What actually moved the needle was one honest, substantive conversation with someone who understood what I was working through.

What Happens When You’re Moving Through a Solid?

Sound moves fastest through solids. The particles are tightly packed, and energy transfers efficiently from one to the next. But that speed comes with constraints. You can’t change direction easily. The medium resists deviation.

Some transitions feel exactly like this. You’re inside a rigid structure, a corporate hierarchy, a long-term relationship with established patterns, a family system with decades of momentum. The energy of change moves fast in some ways, because the structure is so interconnected that a shift in one area immediately affects everything else. But you also can’t bend. You can’t refract toward something new without meeting significant resistance.

Early in my agency career, I worked inside a large holding company structure. Every decision moved fast through that organization because the reporting lines were clear and the culture was tightly defined. When I pushed for a different creative direction on a major account, the resistance was immediate and came from every direction at once. The solid medium conducted my proposal quickly, but it also conducted the pushback quickly. I felt the vibration of that conflict in every meeting for weeks.

What I didn’t understand then, but do now, is that my introversion made me particularly sensitive to that conducted resistance. An extroverted colleague would have absorbed it differently, processed it socially, talked it through in real time, and moved on. I took it home with me. I ran the scenarios at 2 AM. I felt the weight of every particle in that solid structure pressing back against the change I was trying to introduce.

Solid-medium transitions aren’t bad. They can be incredibly productive if you understand what you’re working with. The efficiency of transmission means your ideas can spread fast. The structure means you know where the resistance will come from. For an introvert who has done the internal work, who has mapped the landscape before making a move, a solid medium can actually be a good environment for strategic change.

The problem comes when introverts don’t recognize what medium they’re in and try to process change the way they would in open space. You need more time, more quiet, more internal processing when you’re inside a solid structure. The conducted noise of other people’s reactions will reach you faster and hit harder. Building in deliberate recovery time isn’t weakness. It’s physics.

How Does Liquid Change the Way You Move Through Transition?

Liquid mediums are fascinating. Sound moves through water at roughly four times the speed it travels through air, but water also has flow. It shapes itself to its container. It finds the path of least resistance. Energy moving through liquid can travel around obstacles rather than through them.

Some of the most interesting transitions in my career happened in what I’d call liquid environments. The early years of running my own agency had this quality. The structure was loose enough that things could flow, but there was enough substance to conduct energy efficiently. Ideas moved. Feedback arrived quickly. Direction could change without the kind of grinding resistance I’d felt inside larger organizations.

For introverts, liquid environments can be both liberating and disorienting. The flexibility is welcome. There’s room to think, to adjust, to take a different shape as needed. But the lack of fixed structure can also mean the energy of change doesn’t always go where you intend. It finds its own path. And if you’re not paying attention, you end up somewhere you didn’t plan to be.

One of my creative directors during those years was an INFP who thrived in liquid environments. She could hold ambiguity comfortably, shift direction fluidly, and find unexpected solutions by following the natural flow of a project. As an INTJ managing her, I had to consciously resist my tendency to impose more structure than the situation needed. Watching how she worked taught me something about the value of letting energy find its own path, even when my instinct was to channel it more deliberately.

The challenge of liquid transitions is that they require a different kind of attention than solid ones. You’re not tracking fixed resistance points. You’re watching flow, noticing where energy is pooling or dispersing, sensing when the current is moving in a direction you didn’t intend. That kind of observation plays to introvert strengths in some ways. We notice subtle patterns. We track things that others miss.

That capacity for noticing, for picking up on what’s happening beneath the surface, connects to something worth understanding about how sensitivity develops over time. The research on how sensitivity changes across a lifespan suggests that the way we process our environment isn’t static. It shifts with experience, with age, with the transitions we’ve already moved through. What felt overwhelming at 30 might feel navigable at 45, not because the external conditions changed, but because your internal processing capacity developed.

What Does It Mean to Move Through Gas?

Gas is the most permeable medium. Sound moves slowest through air compared to water or solid materials, because the particles are spread far apart. Energy has to travel further between each transfer. But gas also offers the most freedom of movement. There’s space in every direction. The wave can spread widely, even if it dissipates more quickly.

Certain transitions have this quality. The period after leaving a long-term job. The months after a relationship ends. The space between finishing one major chapter and beginning another. Everything feels open, sometimes uncomfortably so. There’s no dense structure conducting your energy forward. You have to generate your own momentum.

I went through a gas-medium transition after stepping back from agency leadership. The structure that had defined my days for two decades was simply gone. No client calls, no team meetings, no quarterly reviews. Just open space. For an extrovert, that openness might have felt energizing, full of possibility. For me, it felt like trying to shout in a vacuum. The energy I was generating wasn’t going anywhere. It was dispersing before it could build into anything.

What saved me, honestly, was solitude. Not the passive, waiting kind, but the intentional kind. I started writing. I started thinking seriously about what I actually believed about leadership, about introversion, about the gap between how I’d been operating for years and how I was actually wired. That internal work gave me something to push against, a medium I was creating myself, since the external one had dissolved.

There’s something deeply important in that experience that I think a lot of introverts miss during open transitions. We tend to wait for the right conditions to appear before we start moving. But in a gas medium, you sometimes have to create your own density. You have to build the structure that lets your energy travel somewhere meaningful.

The practice of embracing solitude as a productive state rather than a default retreat is something I came to understand slowly. There’s a difference between hiding in open space and using open space deliberately. One disperses energy. The other concentrates it.

How Does Your Personality Type Shape Which Medium Feels Natural?

Not every introvert responds the same way to these different transition environments. Personality type matters enormously here, and understanding your specific wiring can help you make better decisions about when to push forward, when to wait, and when to change the medium you’re working in.

As an INTJ, I tend to do my best work in solid or semi-solid environments where I can map the structure, anticipate resistance, and build a strategic path through. Complete openness, the gas-medium transitions, requires me to do extra work to create my own scaffolding. That’s not a weakness, it’s just information about how my particular wiring interacts with different conditions.

INFPs and ISFPs I’ve worked with often seem more comfortable in liquid environments. They can hold ambiguity, follow intuitive currents, and find meaning in the flow itself rather than needing a fixed destination. INTJs and ISTJs frequently prefer more structure, more conductivity, more predictability in how their energy will travel.

Understanding these patterns isn’t about limiting yourself to one kind of environment. It’s about knowing what you’re working with so you can compensate intelligently. A system for thinking about how your type shapes your approach to major decisions, including which environments tend to support your best work, is something I’ve found genuinely useful over the years. The MBTI life planning framework offers a structured way to think about this, connecting personality type to the practical choices that shape how transitions unfold.

The broader point is that self-knowledge isn’t just philosophical. It’s operational. Knowing your type gives you information about which mediums will support your processing and which will work against it. That information is worth something in the middle of a transition, when the temptation is to just push harder rather than to ask whether you’re in the right environment.

Why Do Introverts Often Struggle With Transitions That Extroverts Handle Easily?

There’s a question I’ve been asked more times than I can count, usually by well-meaning people who watched me struggle through something that seemed to roll off a colleague without a second thought. Why does this bother you so much? Why can’t you just go with it?

Part of the answer is neurological. Introverts tend to process stimuli more deeply and more extensively than extroverts. That’s not a clinical claim, it’s a well-observed pattern. When a wave of change moves through our system, we feel more of it. We notice the harmonics, the overtones, the subtle interference patterns that others don’t register. That depth of processing is genuinely valuable, but it also means transitions cost more energy.

A piece from PubMed Central examining personality and cognitive processing touches on how individual differences in neural sensitivity affect the way people experience and respond to environmental stimulation. The research doesn’t frame depth of processing as a deficit, and neither should we. It’s a feature with real costs and real benefits, and understanding both sides is more useful than pretending one side doesn’t exist.

The other part of the answer is social. Extroverts often process transitions by talking through them, by externalizing the energy and letting other people help carry it. That’s a genuinely effective strategy in many environments. Introverts process internally, which means we need more time and more protected space to do the same work. When transitions happen in environments that don’t provide that space, we fall behind. Not because we’re less capable, but because we’re trying to do internal work in conditions that keep interrupting it.

I managed a team through a significant agency restructuring several years ago. Two of my senior people were extroverts who seemed to process the uncertainty in real time, talking it through in the hallways, visibly working out their feelings in meetings. Two others were introverts who went quiet. Their managers interpreted the quiet as disengagement or resistance. What was actually happening was intensive internal processing. They came back three weeks later with the clearest, most considered perspectives on the restructuring of anyone on the team. But by then, the narrative had already formed around them.

That experience changed how I ran transitions from that point forward. I started building in what I called processing time, structured quiet periods where the expectation was reflection rather than response. The extroverts found it slightly awkward. The introverts did their best work in it.

What Role Does Deep Listening Play in Helping Others Through Change?

One of the underappreciated gifts that introverts bring to transitions, their own and other people’s, is the capacity for genuine listening. Not the kind of listening that’s really just waiting for your turn to speak, but the kind that actually receives what someone is saying and holds it carefully before responding.

During the most difficult transitions I’ve moved through, the people who helped most weren’t the ones with the most advice. They were the ones who listened in a way that made me feel genuinely heard. That experience changed how I approached supporting others through change.

There’s something worth noting here about how this kind of listening functions in professional contexts. The way highly sensitive advisors use deep listening to support students through major transitions offers a model that extends well beyond academic settings. The capacity to hear what someone is actually saying, underneath the words they’re using, is a form of intelligence that introverts often develop naturally. In the context of change, that intelligence is enormously valuable.

What I’ve observed across years of working with people through organizational transitions is that the introverts on my teams were often the ones others sought out for real conversations, not the formal ones, but the honest ones. They created a kind of relational density in the middle of chaotic transitions. A medium that others could move through more cleanly.

That’s worth sitting with. In the physics metaphor, introverts aren’t just passengers moving through mediums. We can become the medium ourselves. We can create the conditions that help others process change more effectively. That’s a form of leadership that doesn’t look like traditional leadership, but it’s real and it matters.

How Do You Choose the Right Medium for Your Next Transition?

Most people don’t get to choose their transition medium. Change arrives in the conditions that exist, not the conditions you’d prefer. But there’s more agency in this than most introverts realize, because you can often influence the medium even when you can’t control the change itself.

During a career transition, you might not be able to control the timeline or the outcome. Yet you can choose who you talk to and how often, how much external stimulation you expose yourself to while you’re processing, whether you try to rush through the open space or allow yourself to move deliberately. Those choices shape the medium you’re actually moving through, even when the broader environment is outside your control.

A few things I’ve learned to do deliberately during major transitions, drawn from years of getting this wrong before I started getting it right:

Identify the density of your current environment before you start moving. Is this a solid structure with clear resistance points? A liquid environment with flow but also unpredictability? An open gas-medium space where you’ll need to create your own scaffolding? Knowing what you’re in changes how you allocate your energy.

Build in refraction points deliberately. When you’re moving from one phase of a transition to another, expect to bend. Speed will change. Direction may shift. That’s not failure. That’s physics. Plan for it rather than being surprised by it.

Protect your processing time ferociously. In dense, noisy environments, the signal of your own internal processing gets drowned out. You need quiet to hear what you actually think. That’s not a preference. It’s a functional requirement.

Find one person who can hold the complexity with you. Not someone who will simplify it, but someone who can sit with the full weight of what you’re working through without needing it to resolve faster than it’s ready to. For introverts, that one relationship often does more work than a dozen casual supportive conversations.

There’s also something to be said for the longer arc. Transitions that feel impossible in a dense, rigid medium often become more workable once you’ve moved into a more fluid environment. Patience isn’t passive here. It’s strategic. Waiting for the right medium isn’t avoidance. It’s reading the conditions accurately.

The Frontiers in Psychology research on personality and adaptive functioning supports the idea that how well we move through change is shaped significantly by the fit between our individual characteristics and our environment. It’s not just about resilience as an internal quality. The external conditions matter too.

What Does the Physics Actually Teach Us?

Sound in a vacuum doesn’t exist. Energy without a medium doesn’t travel. Change without context doesn’t land anywhere meaningful. The physics isn’t just a metaphor. It’s pointing at something true about how transformation actually works.

Every major shift in my life has been shaped as much by the medium I was moving through as by the change itself. The transitions that went well weren’t necessarily the ones with the best circumstances. They were the ones where I understood what I was working with, where I had the right density of support, where I protected my processing time, and where I allowed the energy to travel at the speed the medium permitted rather than the speed I wished it would go.

For introverts, that last part is especially important. We often experience the gap between our internal processing speed and the pace of external change as a form of failure. We think we should be further along. We think our need for time and quiet is a liability. Yet what we’re actually doing is matching our wavelength to the medium we’re in. That’s not slow. That’s accurate.

The PubMed Central research on stress response and individual differences offers some context for why introverts often experience transition-related stress differently from extroverts. The physiological patterns are real, and understanding them helps explain why the same external change can feel dramatically different depending on who is moving through it.

What I want you to take from all of this isn’t a formula or a system. It’s a shift in perspective. The next time you’re in the middle of a major transition and it feels harder than it should, before you decide the problem is you, ask what medium you’re moving through. Ask whether the conditions around you are supporting your processing or fragmenting it. Ask whether you’ve given yourself the density, the quiet, the protected space that lets your particular kind of energy travel effectively.

The wave doesn’t fail because the medium is difficult. It adapts. It refracts. It finds a path. So do you.

If this piece connects with something you’re currently working through, the full range of resources in our Life Transitions and Major Changes hub covers everything from career pivots to identity shifts, with the introvert experience at the center of every conversation.

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

What does “solid liquid or gas that a wave travels through” mean in the context of life transitions?

In physics, a wave requires a medium to travel through, whether solid, liquid, or gas, and the properties of that medium determine how the wave behaves. Applied to life transitions, this framework describes the environments and conditions you’re moving through during change. A dense, structured environment like a corporate hierarchy functions like a solid, conducting change energy quickly but with significant resistance. A fluid, flexible environment functions like a liquid. An open, unstructured period functions like a gas. Recognizing which medium you’re in helps you understand why a transition feels the way it does and how to work with the conditions rather than against them.

Why do introverts often find major life transitions more draining than extroverts seem to?

Introverts tend to process experiences more deeply and extensively, which means the energy of change moves through more internal layers before it settles. Where an extrovert might process a transition by talking it through socially and moving on relatively quickly, an introvert typically needs more protected internal processing time to work through the same material. This isn’t a weakness. It often produces more considered, durable outcomes. Yet it does mean transitions cost more energy and require different conditions to go well. Noisy, high-stimulation environments during change are particularly costly for introverts because they interrupt the internal processing that is genuinely necessary.

How does personality type affect which transition environments feel most manageable?

Different introvert types tend to respond differently to transition environments. INTJs and ISTJs often work best in environments with clear structure, defined resistance points, and predictable pathways, what the solid-medium analogy describes. INFPs and ISFPs frequently handle more fluid, open environments with greater ease, finding meaning in the flow itself. Understanding your type gives you useful information about where you’ll need extra support during a transition and where your natural strengths will carry you. The MBTI framework isn’t deterministic, but it offers a useful starting point for understanding your own patterns.

What practical steps can introverts take to move through major transitions more effectively?

Several approaches tend to help consistently. First, identify the density of your current environment before you start moving, since knowing whether you’re in a solid, liquid, or gas-medium situation changes how you should allocate your energy. Second, protect your internal processing time deliberately, because quiet isn’t a luxury during transitions, it’s a functional requirement. Third, find at least one person who can hold the full complexity of what you’re working through without needing it to resolve faster than it’s ready to. Fourth, build in deliberate refraction points, planned moments where you expect your direction or speed to change, so the natural bending of transitions doesn’t feel like failure. Finally, be patient with the gap between your internal processing speed and the external pace of change. That gap is often accurate, not slow.

Can introverts actually become the medium for others during transitions, rather than just moving through them?

Yes, and this is one of the most underappreciated aspects of introvert strengths in organizational and relational contexts. Introverts who have developed their capacity for deep listening and careful observation often become the stable, dense relational presence that others need during chaotic change. They create conditions where other people can process more clearly. In team settings, this shows up as the introvert who becomes the person others seek out for honest, substantive conversations rather than surface-level reassurance. That’s a form of leadership that doesn’t always look like traditional leadership, but it has a real and measurable effect on how groups move through change together.