Silence is the Best Antidote to Oversharing

Oversharing is when you speak more than is necessary for a particular circumstance or to a particular person.

Signs you are oversharing:

You expose your suffering to elicit sympathy,
Without developing trust, you blurt out private details to feel more intimate,
When pain is acute, it may seem that everyone can see something wrong with you. That often causes anxiety in people. By exposing their suffering, oversharers find relief from their anxieties.

Why do we overshare?

desire to build deep relationships, we believe that by sharing personal information, we might build intimacy sooner,
because silence feels awkward,
because we lack social awareness and might have a hard time judging what to share with whom,
because we use it as a tool to relieve social anxiety.

ANTIDOTE

Ask your why

When you feel the urge to share something about yourself, pause and question your why. Is it because the information will help the other person or the conversation, or are you anxious and want to build a relationship with the other person? Control your instincts to blurt everything about yourself if it is the latter.

SILENCE

It is weird how people reveal the most intimate details about themselves to avoid silence. The solution is to face the silence, it might feel dreadful, but once you experience it, you will learn that silence is beautiful.

Just sit there and let the other person talk. Ask Questions. But be mindful of not prompting the other person to overshare.

Just be there. Quiet. (Blissful, it is.)

Change the topic

Change the subject if you feel the conversation is going in a direction you don’t want to speak too much about. You can accomplish this by being humorous or by posing a query.

For instance, what if someone awkwardly inquires, “How much did you pay for your house?” Oh, just a little more than my morning cup of coffee, you could reply. Or, you may try saying, “Definitely no sooner than nine months from now,” if a family member asks when you and your partner intend to begin having children.

Self-awareness

Lastly, having the awareness that you tend to overshare will help you work proactively towards finding a solution. Sit with yourself to analyze the situations where you feel you overshared, and you will discover patterns. For example, I learned that I overshared in two situations: