The Intensity Dial
How to stay fully yourself without burning the room (or yourself) down
You have probably heard the line by now:
“You’re… intense.”
Not said as a compliment.
More as a diagnosis. A warning label. A gentle nudge to “tone it down.”
At first, that kind of comment stings. You hear: too much, too serious, too deep, too honest. Everyone else seems to skate on small talk and office banter while your mind insists on going straight to the marrow.
The temptation is strong: either slam the dial to zero and pretend to be easy-breezy, or double down and decide that everyone else is shallow, cowardly, or just plain idiotic. Neither move works for long. One kills your spark. The other isolates you.
There is a third option: learning to use your intensity like a dimmer switch rather than a blowtorch.
What intensity really is (and what it isn’t)
You are not “intense” because you frown a lot or because you missed some secret manual on how to relax.
You are intense because:
Your mind rarely idles. It races ahead, connects dots, spots risks, sees patterns.
You care more than you admit. About truth, fairness, competence, the gap between what is said and what is done.
You feel things in high definition. Injustice, hypocrisy, wasted potential, your own mistakes, other people’s pain.
You are wired that way, a beautiful gift in the right settings with the right people, and a curse a lot of other times.
None of that is pathology. That is power without org-chart hierarchy for people like you.
The problem is not that you have too much voltage. The problem is that hardly anyone ever showed you how to handle that voltage without shocking yourself or everyone around you.
So you do what fiercly conscientious people often do: you throw credentials and performance at your discomfort. You overprepare for every meeting. You write 20 pages of PhD-level analysis when three clear paragraphs would do. You answer questions with a full seminar when the room wanted a sentence and a decision.
The brilliance is real. The smoking scorch marks are real too.
When bright minds burn the room
You have seen this from both sides.
You have been in rooms where a highly credentialed colleague walks in, opens their laptop, and floods the table with information: every scenario, every caveat, every footnote. The intention is good: I want to be thorough, I want to be honest, I want to protect us from mistakes.
The unspoken effect on everyone else is closer to:
“I’m lost, I’m tired, and I’m slightly offended that you seem to think we are all idiots.”
You can also feel what happens inside that “intense” person when they sense the room pulling away. They either talk faster, push harder, and double the volume, or they shut down, retreat, and decide never to expose that much thinking again.
Overdrive or the handbrake. Nothing in between.
Underneath, something quieter is happening: a lack of self-acceptance. A part of you still doesn’t quite believe that your way of seeing the world is legitimate, so you over-prove or over-hide. Both are sadly exhausting.
The insult that becomes a truthful clue
Being called “intense” can feel insulting at first, especially when it comes from someone who seems perfectly content with mediocrity.
Later, if you let yourself think instead of just bristle, the comment becomes diagnostic. That feeling can signal at least three pieces of vital information:
You are running at a higher inner speed than the environment expects.
The way you are expressing that speed is not landing in the way you intend.
The person in front of you may not be a suitable audience for your full voltage.
That is very useful information, indeed. Not a verdict. Not a command to be smaller. A prompt to ask:
What is the right level of intensity for this moment?
What does this room actually need from me right now: depth, decision, reassurance, or silence?
Who, if anyone, gets to see the unfiltered version, and when?
Intensity then shifts from a fixed label into something more like a dial.
Finding the dial, not the off switch
The goal is not to become “less intense.” You will never be the person who floats through life on permanent cruise control, and frankly the world has enough of those already.
The goal is to develop range.
High-beam, low-beam. Full analytic floodlight, narrow decision torch. Deep-dive mode, headline mode.
You begin to practice:
Listening first. Instead of arriving like a pre-loaded cannon of thought, you ask two or three questions and actually hear the answers. Amazingly, and with some deliberately repetitive practice, you learn that the room tells you how much intensity it can cope with today.
Choosing depth, not dumping. You still think widely and deeply, but you offer the relevant slice instead of the entire warehouse. If someone wants more, they can ask.
Letting silence carry some weight. Not every insight needs to be voiced in real time. Some thoughts are better as follow-up notes, carefully written, than as live monologues.
Preserving a few relationships where you run at full power. You select, consciously, the tiny handful of people and contexts where you do not filter. You stop asking the whole world to play that role.
This is prized and very rare emotional intelligence in practice, not as a self-help buzzword. You are not dumbing yourself down. You are adjusting your delivery so your message actually lands.
Reading the room without betraying yourself
“Reading the room” gets thrown around as if it means “blend in” or “be bland.” For you, it can mean something different: understanding the emotional and intellectual bandwidth available and choosing wisely where to plug in.
Some rooms genuinely do not deserve your full self. A committee that just wants rubber-stamping. A board that has already decided. A client who wants comfort, not clarity.
In those spaces, you are allowed to:
Keep contributions short, accurate, and unheroic.
Protect your deeper energy for places where it can actually change outcomes.
Notice the mismatch and quietly add that firm, that leader, or that context to your internal “unsuitable” list.
Other rooms will surprise you. You dial back slightly, test with one strong, simple point, and watch people lean in rather than flinch. You realize you are not the only one craving honesty and depth. You were just the only one reckless enough to show it first.
Over time, you develop a kind of situational fluency:
You can sit in a noisy, superficial meeting and offer one sentence or ask the one poignant question that actually moves things forward.
You can walk into a high-stakes presentation and know when to hold your fire and when to let the full pattern-recognition loose.
You can have a hard conversation with someone you care about and choose words that tell the truth without setting the relationship on fire.
The intensity remains. The delivery matures.
Letting your full voltage have somewhere to go
The biggest risk with unhandled intensity is not that you annoy other people. It is that you begin to turn the laser beam inward and burn yourself — ouch!
If there is no healthy outlet, intensity mutates into:
Contempt for everyone “less serious” than you
Cynicism that protects you from disappointment and connection
Absolute perfectionism that never lets you rest
Quiet self-hatred for never being “enough,” no matter what you achieve
That is why you need at least one place in your life where the dial goes to eleven without apology. A craft, a friendship, a practice, a piece of work that actually deserves your full concentration. Somewhere you can stop disguising how much you care.
You might already have a hint of that place. The moments when time disappears. The days when you finish tired but not depleted. The rare conversation where you walk away thinking, I was fully myself and nobody died.
Those are clues. Follow them.
The quiet reversal
One day, you may hear the word “intense” again and notice that your reaction has changed.
You shrug. You agree. You even smile, followed with a sincere “thank you.”
Because by then, you know something that younger you didn’t:
Your intensity is not a flaw to sand down.
Your depth is not an obstacle to leadership.
Your seriousness is not a social disease.
You have learned to choose where, when, and how that wonderful power shows up. You have range. You have a dial.
You no longer need every room to love you. You only need a few right rooms where your presence genuinely helps. You only need a few right people who are relieved that someone finally cares as much as they do.
And in those suitable places, your so-called “too much” stops being a problem and starts becoming exactly what was missing.