Instructions for learning to shut up

Therapy to silence us. Books to convince us that silence is a rising value. Gurus who promise to cure us the urge to tell everything everywhere. After a decade of training and learning to make noise on the internet, we are told, in 2023, that talking less is achieved much more. A book on the subject has been one of the latest best sellers of The New York Times and the subject has been on the cover of Time magazine.

At the beginning of this year there were more than two million podcasts with 40 million episodes produced, more than 3,000 TED talk events, tens of thousands of reels on Instagram, 7,000 million daily audios on WhatsApp and countless autofiction videos, or call it X, where everyone tells their truth. We are experiencing a crisis of global verbal incontinence.

And what are we talking about when we talk too much? Well, almost always of ourselves. And we like it. We enjoy it especially when we have an audience. According to research from Rutgers University, in a conversation we usually spend, on average, 60% of the time telling our things, and this figure can reach 80% in a social network. The reason we do this is simple: when we're the center of the conversation (and control it), we're delighted. A team from the Laboratory of Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience at Harvard University observed through magnetic resonance imaging how, when we talked about ourselves, the reward and motivation circuits were activated in the brain, the same ones that light up with sex, drugs and good food.

The pleasure engages and some people can not dose their speech and are real junkies of the insubstantial talk that almost always ends, oh surprise!, in their person. According to the American writer Dan Lyons, he was one of those. In his best-selling book STFU: The Power of Keeping Your Mouth Shut in an Endlessly Noisy World, he confesses that he was a talkaholic and, as a good junkie, was not able to quit. "I did mansplainig, maninterrupting and dropping manmonologues," he says in his book recently published in the United States.

In 1993 University of Alabama researchers James McCroskey and Virginia P. Richmond coined the term talkaholism to describe addiction to compulsive talking. They also created a diagnostic test to calculate verbal incontinence in which Lyons reached, by the way, 50 points. McCroskey and Richmond described talkaholism as an addiction. "You can't wake up one day and decide to talk less. Nor do they speak a little more than the rest, but much more and in any scenario or context. And worse, they continue to do so even when they know that the next thing they are going to say will sink them. They just can't stop," the researchers describe. In 2010, Michael Beatty, a professor at the University of Miami, discovered that the origin of this compulsion was an imbalance in the waves of both cerebral hemispheres that affected impulse control.

Among the traits that characterize talkaholics is skipping one of the first rules of coexistence that are learned in childhood: waiting for your turn (in general, and to speak, in particular). According to experts, they implement a tactic known as the change response that consists of constantly diverting the focus of any conversation until the talk comes back to them. Most consider themselves good conversationalists. They are delighted, however, lacking the ability to edit their stories which are usually endless and full of minute details, digressions and interruptions.

Anyone, being a normal person almost always, could also be addicted to narcissistic and insubstantial talk on the internet. We talk and count so much that, sometimes, guilt corrodes us. Almost 40% of internet users between 18 and 35 years old have regretted at least once some information published about themselves, and 35%, of having talked more about the account of a friend or a relative, says the study Digital Life of the agency Havas Creative.

Withstanding social pressure and not intervening or getting out of the global chatter requires training. People who have decided to learn to keep quiet sign up for listening courses, which are beginning to be abundant on the internet. Daniel Lyons learned from a California psychologist the techniques they teach inmates to keep their mouths shut during parole hearings.

It is difficult to overcome the horror vacui of our time: that urgency to fill every silence that crosses our path. The result is thunderous noise and endless chatter. If we could at least limit ourselves to opining only on what we know – and that does not include talking about ourselves because it is the subject we master least – it would already be a great relief. Learning to be quiet, enduring with dignity the pressure of telling things is the gold of the XXI century, the new Google, the cryptocurrency that does not vanish. A status symbol that in the best sellers of The New York Times call superpower.

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