You know that person at work who dominates every meeting but somehow never tells you anything real about themselves?
They’ll spend twenty minutes describing their weekend plans in exhaustive detail—the restaurant reservations, the traffic patterns, the weather forecast—but ask them how they’re actually doing with the restructuring announcement, and suddenly they need to check their phone.
I used to think these people were just naturally private. Then I started noticing the pattern everywhere: The gym regular who narrates his entire workout philosophy but deflects when you ask about his goals.
The friend who texts paragraphs about TV shows but goes silent when the conversation turns personal.
After years of managing teams and watching high performers sabotage themselves with this exact behavior, I’ve realized something: Excessive talking without substance isn’t just a quirky personality trait. It’s armor.
Psychology research backs this up. Studies on self-disclosure and defensive communication show that people who fill silence with surface-level chatter are often running sophisticated protection programs.
They’ve learned that if they keep talking about nothing, nobody asks about something.
Here are the five core fears driving this behavior—and what to do if you recognize yourself in these patterns.
1) Fear of being truly seen (and rejected for it)
The first time I caught myself doing this, I’d just spent fifteen minutes explaining my new workout split to someone who asked how my day was.
The real answer? I was struggling with a work situation that had me questioning my entire approach to leadership. But discussing German Volume Training felt safer than admitting uncertainty.
People who fear authentic visibility have usually learned that being fully seen equals being judged. Maybe they shared something vulnerable once and got burned.
Maybe they grew up in families where emotional exposure was treated as weakness.
So they develop this talk-but-don’t-reveal strategy. They become masters of the redirect—ask about their divorce, and suddenly they’re explaining cryptocurrency. Ask about their health scare, and you’re getting a dissertation on insurance policies.
The protection works, but at a cost. Relationships stay surface-level. Connection becomes performance. And the fear of rejection becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because nobody can accept or reject someone they never really meet.
Here’s what helps: Start with one low-stakes admission per conversation.
Not your deepest trauma—just something real. “Actually, that meeting stressed me out” instead of “The meeting was fine, but let me tell you about the traffic getting there.”
2) Fear of losing control of the narrative
Watch someone who talks constantly but reveals nothing, and you’ll notice something: They’re always the narrator, never the subject.
They’ll tell you about other people’s problems, analyze situations they’re not part of, offer commentary on everything except their own experience.
This isn’t accidental. When you control the narrative, you control what people think about you. You can present the edited version, the highlight reel, the carefully curated story where you’re never caught off guard or unsure.
I spent years doing this in relationships. I’d analyze relationship dynamics like a sports commentator—everyone else’s relationship, that is.
Meanwhile, my own patterns of fixing and rescuing went unexamined because examining them meant admitting I didn’t have it all figured out.
The problem with narrative control is that it’s exhausting. You’re constantly managing, editing, redirecting. One genuine question can send you into a ten-minute monologue about something tangentially related, just to avoid answering.
Breaking this pattern starts with allowing incomplete stories.
You don’t need to explain every decision or justify every feeling. “I’m not sure why, but that situation bothers me” is a complete sentence. So is “I’m still figuring that out.”
3) Fear that silence reveals incompetence
There’s a specific type of talker who treats every pause like an emergency. They fill silence the way others fill empty walls—compulsively, anxiously, with whatever’s available.
Ask them one question, and you’ll get forty minutes of loosely connected thoughts.
This usually stems from equating silence with not knowing, and not knowing with failure. Somewhere along the line, they learned that smart people always have something to say.
That competent people never pause to think. That successful people operate at the speed of immediate answers.
So they talk. And talk. And talk. Creating this verbal smoke screen that says, “See? I’m knowledgeable.
I’m engaged. I’m contributing.” Meanwhile, they’re revealing nothing of substance because substance requires thought, and thought requires silence.
In my team-building days, the highest performers were often the quietest in meetings. They’d ask one precise question while others filled the room with nervous energy.
But the compulsive talkers couldn’t see this. They were too busy performing competence to demonstrate it.
The antidote is surprisingly simple: Count to three before responding. Just three seconds of silence to formulate an actual thought rather than a knee-jerk word salad. It feels like eternity at first. Then it feels like power.
4) Fear of conflict or disagreement
Some people talk excessively about nothing because they’ve discovered the perfect conflict avoidance strategy: If you never take a real position, nobody can disagree with you. If you never share a genuine opinion, you never have to defend it.
They’ll spend an hour discussing the weather, logistics, other people’s drama—anything to avoid the topics that might generate friction.
Ask their opinion on the new policy, and suddenly they need to explain the entire history of company policies since 1987.
I recognize this one intimately. Growing up in a “don’t complain, handle it” environment taught me that stating needs or boundaries invited conflict.
Better to talk around the issue, fill the space with safer topics, keep everyone comfortable even if it meant replaying conversations for hours afterward, cataloguing everything I didn’t say.
But conflict avoidance through verbal flooding creates its own problems. People sense the deflection. They feel the wall you’re building with words. And ironically, this often creates the very tension you were trying to avoid.
Start small: State one preference clearly per day. Not a complaint or criticism—just a preference. “I’d prefer to meet in the morning” instead of a five-minute explanation about schedule flexibility. Notice that the world doesn’t end.
5) Fear of emotional overwhelm
Sometimes the wall of words is holding back a flood. People talk about surface things because the real things feel too big, too much, too likely to break something open that they’re not ready to handle.
They’ve learned to stay in the shallows because the deep end feels dangerous. So they narrate the logistics of life—errands, schedules, tasks—because feeling requires stillness, and stillness might mean drowning.
This protection mechanism often develops after emotional trauma or during overwhelming life periods. The constant chatter becomes a regulatory strategy, a way to stay functional when stopping to feel seems impossible.
The tricky part is that emotional avoidance through excessive talking works—temporarily. You can outrun feelings for a while. You can stay busy enough, distracted enough, verbal enough to keep the overwhelm at bay. Until you can’t.
The path forward isn’t to dive into the deep end immediately. It’s to let small feelings exist without immediately talking over them.
Feel mildly frustrated without launching into a story. Feel slightly sad without redirecting to safer ground. Build tolerance for emotional presence in small doses.
Bottom line
If you recognize yourself in these patterns, you’re not broken. You’re protected. And that protection made sense at some point. Maybe it still does in certain situations.
But here’s what I’ve learned from years of watching people (including myself) hide behind walls of words: The protection eventually becomes the prison. The thing that keeps you safe also keeps you alone. The strategy that prevents judgment also prevents connection.
Start with one small experiment: In your next conversation, say one true thing. Not a fact about your schedule or an opinion about the weather—something real about your internal experience. “I’m nervous about this.” “That hurt my feelings.” “I don’t actually know.”
Notice what happens. Notice who stays, who goes, who moves closer. Notice that vulnerability isn’t the catastrophe your protection program predicted.
The goal isn’t to become someone who overshares or has no boundaries. It’s to become someone who can choose—choose when to reveal, what to share, how to connect. Someone who uses words to build bridges, not walls.
Because ultimately, the people worth keeping around don’t need your performance. They need your presence. And presence requires fewer words than you think.
