1WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT OVERTALKING
I got 50 points on the Talkaholic Scale, the highest possible score. My wife, Sasha, gave me the same 50 points and probably wished she could give me more. This was not unexpected, but according to the researchers who developed the test this might be cause for concern. They described talkaholism as an addiction akin to alcoholism and said that while a talkaholic’s gift with words can help them advance in their careers, their inability to rein in their overtalking often leads to personal and professional setbacks. Check, check, and check.
Talkaholics cannot just wake up one day and choose to talk less. Their talking is compulsive. They don’t talk just a little bit more than everyone else, but a lot more, and they do this all the time, in every context or setting, even when they know that other people think they talk too much. And here is the gut punch: Talkaholics continue to talk even when they know that what they are about to say is going to hurt them. They simply cannot stop.
“That’s me,” I said to Sasha. “Right? That’s totally me.”
“I’ve been telling you this for years,” she said.
We were sitting in the kitchen. The kids—twins, a boy and a girl, fifteen years old—weren’t home. Memories flew around in my brain, times when I blurted out something off-color at a party, or embarrassed the kids by talking someone’s ear off, or regaled them with a long story I had told a thousand times before. “Danalogues,” we called them, and we would all laugh and pretend it was funny—“You know how Dad loves to talk!” But now, looking at these test results in black-and-white, I didn’t feel like laughing. I felt embarrassed. And concerned.
I didn’t know how or where to get help, but I decided to begin by tracking down the two researchers who created the Talkaholic Scale, figuring they might have some advice. They were a husband-and-wife team, Virginia Richmond and James C. McCroskey, who had taught at West Virginia University. McCroskey, who was something of a legend in the field of communication studies, died in 2012, but Richmond, who is retired, lives in a little town outside Charleston, West Virginia.
The two got interested in studying talkaholics for one simple reason: “Because my husband was one,” Richmond told me. They were an odd pair. McCroskey was the life of the party, while Richmond was and still is painfully shy—or “communicatively apprehensive,” as researchers say. “We wanted to figure out why some people talk so much and some people talk hardly at all. There was a lot of literature about people who did not talk much, but not much had been done about people at the other end, the compulsive talkers.” Some researchers believed there was no such thing as a person who talks too much, and that when we say that someone talks too much, what we really mean is that they are saying things we don’t want to hear. Richmond and McCroskey insisted that this was ridiculous, that of course there were people who absolutely talked too much—“We knew them,” Richmond says—and that, what’s more, there were some people who were not just talkative but whose compulsion to talk was akin to an addiction. “That’s why we came up with the name ‘talkaholics,’” Richmond told me.
The couple created the Talkaholic Scale to see if talkaholics could be identified. If so, researchers might be able to develop ways to help them. “We didn’t think there would be very many,” Richmond said, but when they gave the Talkaholic Scale to eight hundred students at West Virginia University, they found that 5 percent qualified as talkaholics—which, oddly enough, is about the same percentage as that of alcoholics in the general population.
I explained to Richmond that I had reached out to her because I had scored a 50 on the Talkaholic Scale, and wanted to learn what causes compulsive talking and how it can be fixed. Richmond had bad news and more bad news. First, she and her husband had never figured out what causes talkaholism. Worse, while they had found ways to help communicatively apprehensive people come out of their shell, they had come to believe that talkaholics were beyond help. “We used to joke that you can’t keep a good talkaholic down,” she said with a laugh. “There’s no remedy. You can’t cure a talkaholic.”
Still, she said, she and her husband did their work thirty years ago. Other people have been pursuing the subject since then. The best, she said, was Michael Beatty, a professor who once worked with Richmond and McCroskey and now teaches at the University of Miami. Beatty apparently developed an interest in talkaholics for the same reason McCroskey had: “He’s the biggest talkaholic I’ve ever known,” she told me. “You can tell him I said that. He won’t take it as an insult.”
Beatty is kind of eccentric. He doesn’t own a smartphone and does not keep a personal computer in his home. To reach him, you have to send an email to his university address and wait for him to go into the office to check his mail, which takes as long as it takes. My talk with Richmond left me a little bit disheartened, but I remained hopeful that Beatty might offer some help or advice. So, one day, I wrote him an email, pressed Send, and waited.
THE MAD LIFE OF A TALKAHOLIC
For a long time, I deluded myself into believing that I was just a gregarious, outgoing guy who liked to have great conversations. I talked to anyone and everyone: Uber drivers, strangers on chairlifts, “and every waiter and waitress you ever met,” Sasha says. But eventually I started becoming aware that I had a problem, because even when I tried to talk less, I couldn’t. I dreaded social events. Neighborhood barbecues and birthday parties were excruciating. It was like riding a pogo stick across a minefield. I would try to mingle, the whole time thinking, Don’t talk too much don’t talk too much don’t talk too much. But even when I prepared myself, I sometimes found myself going off the rails, monologuing like Hamlet on crystal meth.
Eventually, in desperation, I resorted to a brute force approach and began pregaming with Ativan, a drug used to treat anxiety. I would arrive to parties in a wonderful, fuzzy benzodiazepine haze and quietly slip away to some nook where I could zone out by myself and watch TV or read my Twitter feed until it was time to go home. The neighbors thought I was rude or weird—or, as one told my wife, “Dan’s a little bit … crazy, you know?” From my perspective, I believed I was doing them a favor by drugging myself into a stupor to avoid annoying them with my overtalking.
The amazing thing is that, even dosed up on benzos, I would sometimes talk too much or say something awkward or stupid. As soon as we left a party I would ask Sasha, “Did I talk too much?” Too often, her answer was yes.
As I became aware of my own problem, I started recognizing it in other people. There was our next-door neighbor, an education consultant who was lively and loud and could take over a room like no one I’d ever met. (I adored her; other neighbors did not.) There was the smartest-person-in-the-room management consultant who loved the sound of his own booming voice. There was the scientist who did not suffer fools gladly, and who paid the price for it. There was the lonely retired financial adviser who would show up around dinnertime, make himself comfortable at the kitchen counter, and settle in for a soliloquy on the latest happenings in the S&P 500. There was the artist who would call and keep me on the phone for an hour or more, telling me the same stories again and again. (As a mutual friend put it, “You don’t talk to him; you listen.”) And there was my mother-in-law, a nonnative English speaker, who machine-gunned us with bad grammar, mutilated sentences, and pronouns unmoored from their antecedents and who never took her finger off the trigger; sometimes we literally had to shout to interrupt her.
We overtalkers seem to be drawn to one another, probably because we’re the only people who can put up with us. In any setting, we are quick to recognize one of our kind, the way vampires and serial killers do. Sometimes two of us will hole up and overtalk together, yapping for hours, never running out of things to say—indulging our addiction, interrupting each other, reveling in the joy of gabbing away with someone who understands us, in a setting where we won’t be judged or punished. It’s our safe space. Pure bliss.
Undertalkers, however, drive us out of our minds. They annoy us as much as we annoy them. We feel about undertalkers the way your dog feels about you when you won’t throw him a tennis ball to fetch. Come on, man! Come on!
One thing compulsive overtalkers have in common is that sooner or later most of us get kneecapped. There is no escaping it. Tony Soprano said guys in his line of work had only two ways out, death or prison. Overtalkers similarly know that, one day, our talking will catch up with us. Some of us become high achievers, but a lot of us become serial screwups, our lives a string of fiascos, disasters, and catastrophes.
A longtime friend is a very bright guy with an Ivy League degree, but compulsive talking has cost him jobs because (a) he could not resist telling his colleagues that they were dimwits; and (b) they usually did not appreciate his candor. “I’ll just snap,” he says. “I’ll be in some dumb meeting, thinking, Why am I in this stupid meeting? Then I’ll flip out and start explaining to all of them why they’re fucking morons, even though I know that the smart move would be to keep quiet. I can always be counted on to say the wrong thing, and the worst part is, I know it even while I’m doing it. And then I immediately regret it. But, at that point, there’s no walking it back.”
Overtalkers are universally hated. Look at the words used to describe us: gasbag, windbag, motormouth, prattler, blatherskite. We say someone has “verbal diarrhea” or “talks a lot of shit.” In the United Kingdom and Ireland, they call you a “gobshite” (which combines gob, “mouth,” and shite, “shit”) or a “shitehawk,” someone who rains down shit from above. In Italy, they say that someone attacca un bottone—that is, talks so long you could sew on a button. Or, mi ha attaccato un pippone—which translates roughly as doing something gross into someone’s ear. Italians might call you a trombone, which sounds really cool with an Italian accent, or a quaquaraquà, an onomatopoeic Sicilian slang word for someone who talks a lot but is an idiot. In Brazil, they say fala mais que o homem do rádio—“he talks more than the man on the radio.” In Spain, you’re a bocachancla, a “flip-flop mouth”; and in the Spanish province of Catalonia, you’re a bocamoll, a “loose mouth.” In Germany, overtalkers are Plappermäuler, which combines plapper, “to babble,” and maul, a coarse term describing an animal’s mouth. Russians, who can always be relied upon to deliver the filthiest way to say anything, call overtalkers pizdaboly, a nasty term that combines pizda, an extremely obscene word for female genitalia, and bol, the root for the verb “to flap.” Ugh.
The Japanese, who treasure silence and can’t stand noisy people, have a proverb: “If the bird had not sung, it would not have been shot.” In India, they tell a children’s story about a batuni kachua (talkative tortoise) whose overtalking leads to ruin. When a drought strikes and the pond dries up, two geese offer to carry the talkative tortoise to another lake. The geese carry a stick between them, and the tortoise hangs on to it by his mouth. Of course, the tortoise can’t resist the urge to talk, and as soon as he opens his mouth, he loses his grip and hurtles to earth, where he gets smashed to death on some rocks and/or eaten by villagers.
This is how people view overtalkers. They fantasize about our deaths.
SIX KINDS OF OVERTALKERS
After talking to Richmond, I began diving into the research about compulsive speech, and discovered that there are different kinds of overtalking. There’s hyperverbal speech, where you can’t help interrupting people (your brain is revved up, and you’re talking a mile a minute); disorganized speech, where you leap from one unrelated subject to another; and situational overtalking, which pretty much everyone has experienced at one time or another. I’m sure you can look back, usually with a cringe, and remember times when you should have talked less. Have you ever blurted out something that hurt someone’s feelings? Told a joke that offended someone? Last time you bought a car, when the salesperson stopped talking and let an awkward silence hang in the air, did you rush in to fill the void? I’ll bet you did—and it cost you money. Maybe you talked too much in a sales call and lost the deal—and your commission along with it. Maybe you interrupted someone in a meeting, and your boss, down at the other end of the table, noticed this and began to form a poor impression of you. She might not even have realized that her perception of you shifted, but eight months later, the promotion you were hoping to win went to someone else.
Just as there are different kinds of overtalking, there are different kinds of overtalkers. I put them into six categories:
Ego Talkers are the loud-voiced, know-it-all guys (and, yes, they’re almost always guys) who interrupt people and dominate conversations because they honestly believe their ideas are better than everyone else’s, even when they don’t know what they’re talking about. Silicon Valley, where I’ve spent a lot of my career, teems with guys (and they are always guys) who have made a fortune in software and now know everything about everything. Climate change? Heart surgery? Bitcoin Man knows more than the experts.Nervous Talkers struggle with social anxiety and babble to self-soothe.Ruminators do their thinking out loud—they talk to themselves, basically—and annoy everyone around them.Blurters are highly verbal and quick thinkers, but they lack a filter.Blabbers spout nonsense, tell the same stories over and over, and keep going even when you try to interrupt them, like a car with no brakes hurtling down a hill.Talkaholics, the most extreme offenders, are compulsive and self-destructive.In the past decade or so, researchers have started to get a handle on the causes of overtalking—some of them psychological and some biological. Some overtalkers are just extroverts; it’s their innate personality type. Sometimes overtalking is caused by social anxiety. (That’s often the case with Blurters, Blabbers, and Nervous Talkers.) But extreme, compulsive talking—the kind that makes you a talkaholic—can indicate deeper psychological issues, like narcissistic personality disorder. So-called pressured speech—loud, rapid, unstoppable—can be caused by hypomania, which is an indication of bipolar II, the milder form of the disorder. Overtalking may also indicate someone has attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
If you scored high on the Talkaholic Scale, consider seeing a professional to get an evaluation. The good news is that, these days, things like ADHD and bipolar II disorder can be treated with meds and therapy. The meds don’t cure you, but they can tamp down the noise in your brain so that you can work on your issues in therapy. For what it’s worth, overtalkers love therapy.
I was still slogging through piles of research papers, and still not finding any great answers, when one day I checked my email and got a surprise. Michael Beatty from the University of Miami had written back, saying that he would love to talk to me and that, in fact, after many years and countless experiments, he had figured out what causes talkaholism.
THE CALLS ARE COMING FROM INSIDE YOUR BRAIN
“It’s biology,” Beatty told me when we got on the phone. “It’s all nature, not nurture. It starts to develop prenatally.”
Twenty years ago, Beatty pioneered a field called “communibiology,” which studies communication as a biological phenomenon. Instead of teaching courses in journalism and public speaking, the traditional business of a university communication department, he collaborated with neuroscientists, giving study participants EEGs to measure their brain waves and sticking them into fMRI machines to watch their brains light up when they looked at pictures or listened to audio recordings.
A lot of communication researchers thought he was going down a blind alley, but Beatty was sure he was right. “To me, it would be weird if the way we communicate was not related to the brain,” he said. “We just didn’t know how.” In 2011, Beatty and his colleagues at the University of Miami discovered that talkativeness is determined by brain wave imbalances. Specifically, it’s about the balance between neuron activity in the left and right lobes in the anterior region of the prefrontal cortex. Ideally, the left and right lobe should have about the same amount of neuronal activity when a person is at rest. If there’s an asymmetry—if one side lights up more than the other—you end up being an above-average or below-average talker. If your left side is more active than the right, you’re shy. If the right side is more active, you’re talkative. The greater the imbalance, the farther out on the talkativeness spectrum you will be. A talkaholic’s right lobe will fire like crazy while the left side barely flickers.
“It’s all about impulse control,” Beatty told me. Imbalances in the anterior cortex also relate to aggression and to “your ability to assess how a plan might unfold and what the consequences will be.” Extreme right-side activity “shows up a lot in spousal murder,” he said.
I did not mention this to my wife.
The right-dominant lack of impulse control often plays out in the workplace. “If I’m right-side dominant and I’m a CEO, and I’m in a meeting where some employee starts saying dumb things, I’m not going to be polite. I’m going to get angry and tell him to shut up,” Beatty said.
Unfortunately, a talkaholic can’t become a non-talkaholic, Beatty says. After all, you can’t rewire your brain or zap your neurons back into balance. “It’s not completely deterministic, but there’s very little room to change who you are,” he told me.
SI SE PUEDE STFU
For four decades, Joe Biden was the reigning champ of blowing himself up on the campaign trail—newspapers crowned him the King of Gaffes. But somehow in 2020, Biden developed the discipline to STFU. He kept his voice low and his answers short. He paused before speaking. When reporters showed up, he took only a few questions, gave boring answers, and then bolted.
Biden’s story gave me hope. I figured that if he could train himself to STFU, surely I could, too. I had no dreams of running for public office, but I had plenty of motivation. I wanted to be a better spouse, parent, and friend. I wanted to stop dreading social events. There might be no cure for talkaholism, but there’s also no cure for alcoholism, yet some alcoholics develop the discipline to stop drinking.
I couldn’t afford a speech coach. I couldn’t find any online courses that teach you how to STFU. So, after talking to Beatty, I struck out on my own, interviewing dozens of people who, in one way or another, are experts on speech: historians, social scientists, political scientists, communication professors, executive coaches, psychologists. I went forest bathing in the Berkshires with a guide. I took an online listening course, and got tips from a professor who teaches courses in listening. A psychologist in California shared with me the techniques she teaches to prisoners to help them STFU during parole hearings and non-talk their way out of prison—methods that I hoped would help me break free from the metaphorical prison that overtalking had built around me.
Armed with theory, advice, and exercises, I developed my “Five Ways to STFU” and started practicing them. I thought of it as a daily workout. I bailed out of social media almost entirely. I trained myself to become comfortable with uncomfortable silences. Before picking up the phone or getting on a Zoom call, I took deep breaths to slow myself down, using the heart rate monitor on my Apple Watch to see whether this was working. During the call, I would lower my voice and slow my cadence. I asked my kids open-ended questions, then sat back and let them speak. Officially speaking, we were “having a talk,” but in truth, I was having a listen.
Copyright © 2023 by Daniel Lyons
