Am I talking too much?

First, the answer under the answer: asking this question at all — usually after a comment that stung — puts you ahead of almost everyone who actually does dominate rooms. The people who ask it are, almost without exception, people who care intensely about the humans around them. That caring is not the problem, and nothing below asks you to shrink it.

The honest diagnostic the community settled on isn’t volume — it’s direction. The tell isn’t how much you say; it’s whether you’re talking with people or at them: is your reply built from what they actually said, or was it loaded while they spoke? Do you hand out openings — questions, turns, room? If several different people keep drifting off mid-story, that’s the pattern worth taking gently seriously. One reformed over-talker’s fix was purely additive: keep your stories, and between them, turn the conversation back — what do you think, what’s been going on with you — then genuinely follow what returns.

Two tools carry most of the repair. The pause: one breath between feeling and speaking, where the third unnecessary sentence gets caught before it launches. And the question: “want commentary, or just a listening ear?” — because most of what people share was never a request for solutions, and asking is how you find out which conversation you’re in.

And if the talking comes in floods because connection comes so rarely — the euphoric, month-of-words-at-once pattern — the kindest page below is the one about loneliness, because that loop isn’t a character flaw and shrinking yourself was never its exit. The community’s counterweight belongs here too: your enthusiasm is not a defect, plenty of people love a talker who listens, and the goal of all of this is a two-way valve — not a quieter you.