Talkaholism: What It Is and How to Deal With It

“Don’t surround yourself with yourself.” —John Anderson, lead singer, Yes

On a flight from Tucson to Los Angeles recently, a big fellow sat next to me. He had the body of an ex-football player and a latticework of broken blood vessels on both cheeks, and despite my concerted effort to exude solitary vibes, he wouldn’t stop talking to me. Or, rather, at me.

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First, he looked over my shoulder and asked me what I was reading, then launched into an homage to spy thrillers and detective novels. I tried a trip to the bathroom, but he was waiting for me when I got back. I tried bringing the woman in the aisle seat into the conversation, but she wasn’t interested.

In a momentary lull, I buried myself in a newspaper, holding it up around my head like a Japanese folding screen, but he asked me a question, and I felt compelled to speak when spoken to. I even resorted to subterfuge, pulling out of my briefcase the notes for a lecture I was giving in Los Angeles and telling him I had work to get done, but he said, “You’re not getting rid of me, so you might as well talk to me.”

I’m not ordinarily a curmudgeon, and it isn’t misanthropy that propels me to turn from my fellow man and radiate the warmth of a boarded-up building. It’s a defense mechanism against frequently finding myself in the company of serial talkers.

What is Talkaholism?

Linguists call them conversational narcissists, talkaholics, over-communicators, and high verbalizers, and what they’re verbalizing so highly is largely chitchat, short for chittering and chattering, both synonyms for incessant talk. It’s small talk in large, liquid doses and is sometimes referred to as verbal diarrhea, the technical term for which, in fact, is logorrhea—running off at the mouth.

And it’s not just personal, but cultural. Americans, for instance, live in what sociologists call a “therapeutic culture,” one devoted to personal development and self-help, in which people often confuse conversation and psychoanalysis. Ordinary dialogue becomes the talking cure, the autobiographical impulse gets stuck in the "on" position, and others are cast into the role of spectators.

It’s an inheritance from Freud’s most important insight: that patients already know everything they need to know, but can’t access it without help. The therapist is essential for them to display what they know to themselves. In other words, they need a catalyst, a witness—a role you probably wouldn’t mind filling if they were paying you $150-an-hour for it.

Western civilization, in general, is also full of what linguists call “word cultures” in which the more someone talks, and the faster, the more he or she is perceived as intelligent, credible, and possessed of leadership qualities. Intuition tells me that the more a person listens, the more effective their leadership, and the more intelligent they are, at least if intelligence is judged by its original definition: the capacity to understand.

And it’s probably no coincidence that all cultures have a word for vampire, for a creature so needy it sucks the lifeforce out of others.

Psychologist Sidney Jourard in The Transparent Self refers to talkaholism as “irresponsible self-expressiveness,” in which the hunger to communicate goes into overdrive, and conversation becomes little more than a rampaging monologue. Serial talkers are oblivious to, or ignore, a basic principle of human relations, something that’s really kindergarten stuff: taking turns. They make great use of an attention-getting tactic called shift-response (constantly shifting the focus back to themselves) and minimum use of an attention-giving tactic called support-response (encouraging the other guy to talk).

This goes especially for the evangelists, the people with such an intense wallop about a subject or project or vision that they live only to spread the gospel about it, serenely insensible to the fact that people may be slipping into comas around them.

Talkaholics tend to consider themselves conversationally competent, but usually lack a few of the elemental skills that make for engaging interaction and willing participants. One is an understanding of the basic requirement of a story: something should happen.

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Another is a lack of editing. Stories are told with mind-numbingly inessential details, useless digressions, and self-interruptions to fuss about accuracy. “So I left the house at 4 to make this meeting, or maybe it was 3:30. I think it was 3:30, because I had to factor in traffic. Or maybe it actually was 4 now that I think about it because I was on the phone with the roofers and got a late start...”

Yet another missing quality is an eye for the cues that signal whether people are engaged, and a feel for when to knock off. Astute conversationalists notice when their listeners have left the building—their eyes have a remote look; their nods and uh-huhs are sluggish.

How to Deal with a Talkaholic

A promising bit of research out of MIT might be just the ticket. Folks in the Media Lab there have developed a device—originally designed for people with autism, who have difficulty picking up on social cues—which alerts the user if someone they’re talking to starts showing signs of boredom or annoyance. It consists of a camera small enough to be mounted on a pair of eyeglasses, connected to a hand-held computer that runs image-recognition software. If you fail to engage your listener, the computer vibrates.

Those of us who find ourselves on the receiving end of conversational narcissism, however, also bear responsibility for its proliferation, because we seldom if ever alert talkaholics that we’re bored or disengaged. We opt for avoidance rather than confrontation, with its inevitable awkwardness, so we don’t address the problem head-on and don’t take care of ourselves. We’re afraid it would be rude to call someone out on it, however diplomatically, when actually it’s the talkaholic who’s being rude by monopolizing the conversation.

I can imagine—and have imagined many times—saying, “May I pause you for a moment? I’m noticing that you’re doing most of the talking, and I’m doing most of the listening, and I’m feeling restless because I want to participate more in the conversation. Would you be willing to share it more with me?”

Another tactic might involve inviting other people into the conversation—“John, what do you think about such-and-such?”—to spread the attention around. Or try to change the subject. Or, of course, make an excuse to leave.

Once in a great while, talkaholics themselves will come to the rescue, interrupting their data dump to ask, “Am I talking too much?” It’s a golden opportunity that listeners invariably miss because we're too nice for our own good and say no when we want to say yes. And even when we say no, it’s still an awkward moment. The talkaholic apologizes, admits it’s a problem, asks about us—and five minutes later, they’re talking a blue streak again.

Talk may be for the purpose of establishing a connection, but when it’s excessive, it becomes a barrier rather than a connector, creating the opposite of what we desire. “The single biggest problem in communication,” George Bernard Shaw once said, “is the illusion that it has taken place.” The cruel irony is that over-expressers seldom attain the thing they’re after—receivers—because most people take to their heels, tune them out, or develop covert signaling systems to indicate to others across a room: save me.

Conversation comes from a word meaning something like intimacy, but when abused, it’s antisocial, and talkers wind up constantly sowing seeds that don’t bear fruit. They want to ingratiate themselves but end up annoying people instead. “They don’t have companions,” said Plutarch, “but conscripts.”

It’s easy to dismiss them as merely narcissistic, but this is immensely hard to undo and not necessarily their fault. It’s a holdover from that original egocentric stage around 1 or 2 years old, when children naturally feel grandiose and at the center of the universe. But it’s supposed to be a transitional phase, after which we face the inconvenient realization that the universe includes other people and that if we want our report cards to say, “Gets along well with others,” we have to learn to make the small sacrifices of self that lend themselves to mutuality.

Genuine connection requires a decentralizing of self, an extending of awareness beyond our own borders into the spaces we share with others, into others themselves.

The definition of communicate is “to make something common,” and all communication is predicated on shared understanding, on the answer to the question: Do you read me? It can be anything from a chemical powwow among bacteria to a general assembly meeting of the United Nations. But communication is neither the signal nor the response. It’s the relationship between the two. True dialogue keeps the focus not on one person or the other, but on both, on mutuality.

My brother Ross and I used to play a lot of tennis when we were younger, and we played it the same way we went at most things: competitively. But we also fought a lot, and the competition soured our enthusiasm for the game, if not for each other. At some point during our mid-20s, we stopped keeping score—and stopped fighting—and instead just tried to see how long we could keep the ball in the air.

Maybe communication would benefit from a similar approach. Not who outshines or out-talks the other, but how well two people can keep the thing in the air, sustaining it between them.