Oversharing Isn't the Problem. Not Being in Your Own Life Is.
Updated: 5 days ago
I was at the Los Gatos farmers market with my orange sign, "Free One-Minute Coaching," when a woman in her 40s sat down. She didn't ask about coaching. She just started talking. Her neighbor's divorce. A colleague who got passed over for a promotion. Her best friend's husband who drinks too much.
Ten minutes in, I asked her one question: what's going on in your life right now?
She stopped mid-sentence. Looked at me like I'd asked something strange. And then said, "I don't know. That's a good question."
She hadn't overshared a single thing about herself. She'd shared plenty about everyone else. And that's the version of oversharing most people miss. Not the kind where you dump your life story on a stranger at a dinner party, but the kind where you fill every conversation with other people's problems so you never have to sit with your own.
What Oversharing Actually Looks Like
Most articles about oversharing describe it as saying too much too fast. Telling your date about your childhood on the first meeting. Getting too personal in a work meeting. That version is real, and I've seen it plenty of times doing street coaching around Palo Alto and the Bay Area.
But the quieter version is more common and harder to spot. Researchers have a name for it: "externally oriented thinking," a facet of alexithymia. It describes people whose attention stays locked on external events and other people's situations while their own inner experience goes unexamined. It looks like someone who always has a story about a friend or a coworker, and who somehow never runs out of things to say about other people's lives. They're not being nosy. They're avoiding something.
We all talk about other people. Research from the University of California found that the average person spends about 52 minutes a day talking about people who aren't in the room, and most of it is neutral. Talking about others is normal. It becomes a problem when it reliably replaces any conversation about yourself.
Both versions come from the same place.
Where the Pattern Starts
Oversharing almost always traces back to something that happened early.
The first root is growing up without being seen. A meta-analysis pooling over 59,000 people estimated that roughly 1 in 5 adults report childhood emotional neglect. And in a separate 33-study review, the belief that neglect most strongly predicts is called "Emotional Deprivation," the deep sense that your need to be cared for will simply not be met.
If that sounds familiar, if you can recognize what childhood emotional neglect looks like in adults, then you already know the hunger I'm describing. People who carry that history often disclose intensely and quickly, as if pouring everything out will finally produce the feeling of being truly known. What they're sharing is genuine. But it doesn't build closeness, because it's coming from one person's urgency, not from mutual trust.
The second root is anxious attachment. A 2024 study in Personal Relationships surveyed 444 adults about how they share negative experiences. People with higher attachment anxiety shared more and amplified their distress while doing it. The part that stuck with me: the oversharing got worse when the listener seemed unresponsive. When people felt heard, the anxious overdisclosure dropped away. This isn't a fixed personality trait. It spikes when you feel like nobody is listening.
As Psychology Today reports, when oversharing stems from childhood experiences, willpower and social awareness alone don't change it. The pattern lives deeper than that.
And then there's the version I saw at the farmers market. Not too much disclosure, but none at all. Hiding behind everyone else's stories because being present in your own life feels like too much. Psychologists have a term for this too: "compulsive caregiving," first described by John Bowlby himself as care given as a substitute for seeking care. Same root, different move.
What It Actually Costs You
The social cost is the one people notice first. Someone pulls back mid-conversation. A new relationship stalls because you went too deep too fast. A colleague changes the subject and you realize you made them uncomfortable.
But the deeper cost is that oversharing works against its own goal. Real closeness develops slowly. Two people open up a little at a time, test whether it's safe, go deeper when it is. When one person floods the space early, the other person doesn't match it. They retreat. The oversharer reads that as rejection, and the hunger that caused the oversharing gets louder. Same conversation, different week.
A meta-analysis of 38 studies on excessive reassurance-seeking found exactly this: the more people seek reassurance, the more likely they are to be rejected. The move that's supposed to bring people closer pushes them out.
And the version where you never talk about yourself at all? That costs you differently. You end up with relationships where people think they know you, but they don't. Because you never let them in. You just kept them busy with someone else's story.
How to Know If This Is You
Maybe you share personal details with people you've barely met, not because it came up naturally, but because silence felt unbearable. Or you walk away from conversations replaying what you said, wondering if it was too much.
Maybe it's the opposite. You fill quiet moments by talking about other people's situations because your own feel too small or too messy to bring up. You've got a story for every occasion, and none of them are about you.
Either way, there's usually a gap between how much you share and how much the people around you share back. You can feel the imbalance even if you can't name it.
What Actually Changes It
You won't fix this by trying harder to keep your mouth shut. A well-known study on emotional suppression found that people who bottled things up didn't just feel worse. Their conversation partners liked them less and felt less connected to them. Clamping down on oversharing doesn't solve the problem; it trades one relational cost for another.
And the popular idea that self-control is like a fuel tank that runs dry? A replication attempt across 23 labs with over 2,000 participants found an effect near zero. "Just use more willpower" is barely even a theory at this point.
What does work is getting honest about what the oversharing, or the constant deflecting, is actually for. Before your next conversation where this pattern tends to show up, ask yourself: what am I hoping for here? What would it feel like to be actually seen by this person? And what am I afraid will happen if I just sit here and don't fill the space?
There's a reason this is hard to resist. Brain imaging research found that talking about yourself activates the same reward circuitry involved in food and money. Participants in one study gave up earnings for the chance to talk about themselves. If you grew up without being heard, that pull is even stronger. You're not undisciplined. Your brain is chasing something it was starved of.
Most people already know the answer when they slow down long enough to hear it. The fear underneath is usually about not being enough. That fear is old, much older than whatever conversation triggered it, and it's connected to the feeling that you're never quite good enough, no matter what you do.
The woman at the farmers market talked for ten minutes and never mentioned herself. She wasn't avoiding me. She was avoiding her. And the only reason I recognized it is because I've done some version of the same thing, filling the air so I wouldn't have to sit with what was actually going on inside me.
The fix isn't to talk less. It's to figure out why being in your own life feels so uncomfortable, and to build a relationship with yourself that doesn't depend on someone else making you feel seen first.
That's the work I do with people. The part underneath the pattern, where it started and why it's still running.
Steffen Moessner is a life coach based in Palo Alto who works with people ready to stop repeating the same patterns and start making decisions that actually feel like theirs. He trained at the Co-Active Training Institute and believes that real change starts with understanding what's been running the show all along.
