Idle chatter: causes and consequences

Talkativeness as a personality quality is the tendency of the mind to subjugate the mind and manifest it in frequent and lengthy conversations about their problems, active participation in them.

A man saw a human skull, yellowed with age, on the seashore. Without expecting anything in response, the man said with a sigh: “I wonder what brought you here.” And suddenly the skull answers: - Chatter. The man was amazed. Where have you seen skulls speak? He ran to the main square of the city and shouted: “Who wants to see a talking skull, pay five coins!” People gathered. Many paid, wanting to see the miracle. The man led them to the sea, brought them to the skull and asked him a question: “What brought you here?” But the skull lies in the sun and is silent. People realized that they were simply laughing at them, and they took the deceiver to the ruler. There, both sides told their truth. And the ruler says to the man: “If the skull really speaks, prove it, but if not, get your head off your shoulders!” We came to the shore. The skull is silent. No matter how much the man begged him, he did not hear a single word. They cut off a man's head, and it rolled straight towards that very skull. And when everyone left, the skull suddenly spoke: “What brings you here?” “Chattering,” the head answered him.

Talkativeness must be considered in the context of gender differences. Men's talkativeness is fundamentally different from women's. A chatterbox and a chatterbox are far from equivalent in essence. A talkative man is a sign of dullness and mediocrity. But first things first. Talkativeness, like talking about your problems, is a manifestation of pride. Good feelings are silent, pride cannot be silent. Just as a strong pressure of water breaks a dam, so pride is broken by the desire to report to everyone about your problems and successes. For example, talkativeness bought new apartment, but can’t show it: “What a pity that you can’t see this beauty.” But the point is not pity, but the inability of pride to scratch its tongue, fully enjoying the joy of the purchase. Pride forces chatter to distract the attention of others. Ten people have given her advice, but she'll go to the eleventh and start an old record. I. A. Krylov in the fable “Two Barrels” writes: “Whoever shouts about his affairs to everyone incessantly, is probably of little use. He who is truly active is often quiet in words. great person only loud in business.”

Talkativeness likes to dump its problems on someone; it does not expect any specific solutions from listeners. Decisions are necessary when the thought has matured to change, develop, or do something. For example, a woman presenting her problem is not waiting for solutions and advice, but active listening. Without the spirit to act, talkativeness, like a vampire, robs others of their energy, attention and time. Talkativeness is the thief of your own and others’ time. If you want to become strong, be silent. Useless chatter carries away mental strength. A chatterbox, in addition to being a boon for a spy, a gossip, a slanderer and a hypocrite, having talked enough, becomes a prey to laziness. There is no strength left after the chatter, and he plunges into laziness or boredom, melancholy and depression. It is not known where it is spent more strength- chat or listen to chatter. Dmitry Yemets noted: “Nothing erodes the will and deprives one of inner peace as quickly as empty chatter. Even the most friendly one. A poet who has unloaded a wagon of televisions can, in theory, recover in about three hours and write an essay. But a poet who has chatted for about forty minutes on the phone is no longer even able to unload the cars.”

Stanislaw Jerzy Lec cleverly joked: “When you see the equation E = mc2, you feel ashamed of your talkativeness.” Silence in any spiritual tradition is defined as gold. When a talkative person talks to a person who has antipathy or hostility towards her, she causes harm to herself - her words only strengthen the unkind attitude towards herself. When talkativeness forces dissatisfaction to listen to itself, it resorts to violence. In a conversation with an ill-wisher, two egos speak, and each proves its significance and importance. In such bellicose chatter the world is seen in black and white colors with a bias towards black. The mind and feelings become polluted and defiled by such chatter. Consciousness degrades because it gradually slides onto the platform of seeing the world in a negative light.

“A short mind has a long tongue,” said Aristophanes. The disadvantage of chatter is that she talks about everything that comes to mind, even about what she herself is completely unsure of. The thought, bypassing the mind, ends up in the language. If talkativeness learned external silence, it would hear and realize what stupidity its inner voice carries. But she is not given this. She chatters, shouting over her mind and reason. Their modest efforts to get at least a word in, no one hears. Stop shouting down at yourself, hear the voice of your mind and reason, learn to control yourself, and talkativeness will go out like a candle in the wind. A reasonable person speaks only about what he is sure of, so his words are believed. Nobody believes the talkativeness’s words; she has devalued them with previous solo monologues.

A woman's talkativeness, if she is wrong, is perceived by men ironically and condescendingly, and when she is right - irritably, as they say - with hostility. The wife's silence causes concern and anxiety in the husband. If he’s chatting, it means everything is fine: “Darling, I’m going to see my neighbor for five minutes!” Don’t forget to stir the porridge every half hour.” It is believed that the average man speaks three thousand words a day, and a woman seven thousand. Max Brandt noted: “A man chatters when he’s drunk or tired of being alone. The woman grinds her tongue just for practice.”

In a man, after a busy day at work, the left hemisphere of the brain, which is responsible for human speech functions, switches off, trying to relax. The mind can fully recover between 21 and 24 hours. During these three hours, mental energy is restored; in the following hours, only the body rests. If a man comes home from work during this period of time, and they try to get him to talk, not realizing that his mind is already turned off, then the conversation is, in fact, with a “living corpse”, capable only of reflex actions, such as: feeding, turning on the TV , brush your teeth, and retreat into the arms of Morpheus. “Control shot” - execution marital debt, can also be considered a reflex action.

Women in chatting find a successful way to relieve stress and emotional tension, freeing themselves from internal problems and fears. A man often becomes “woody” when communicating with a woman. Being the embodiment of action and determination, he tries in the very first words of a woman to identify the problem, find an acceptable solution and issue ready-made solution or advice. A woman doesn't need this. The process of establishing relationships during a conversation is important to her, so she comes from afar. The man will not understand what she is driving at, not suspecting that the woman herself does not yet know where she is leading her monologue. She herself has not yet decided whether she will talk about it today or not. Everything is decided by the course of the conversation: if it goes well, he will say, if it goes wrong, he will remain silent. The man understood everything in the first two minutes, gave a recipe for how to act, and, considering the conversation to be exhausted, went home. The woman is shocked. She had not yet had time, in her opinion, to begin, and the curtain had already closed.

Every man should know the rule: you need to be attentive to a woman’s words after about half an hour since she began to speak. There is such a joke. The baby shark asks his mother: “Why do you do so many circles before attacking a person?” The shark replies: “You can attack it head-on, but you’ll eat it with your poop.” The first half hour is a series of gradually narrowing circles before expressing the true purpose of the conversation. Therefore, a man is free to think about his own things at this time, but he must only keep up the conversation, nod, assent, in a word, pretend to be a novice. After half an hour, you should actively listen. This is a technique of love. If a man loves his wife, he loves to listen to her. Her voice is like a bird's chirping to him, like a canary's vocals. When a husband, hearing his wife’s voice, experiences pleasure, therefore, there is complete compatibility in the family. Incompatible people cannot endure the torture of listening. Dissatisfaction with your spouse destroys the opportunity to hear his problems, needs and difficulties. When the family wins perfect compatibility? When spouses can listen to each other with interest.

Petr Kovalev 2013

Time that is wasted is very valuable for any person, both for a school student and for an engineer. Verbosity is often a trait of heads of management departments, consultants and some other specialists. And, as it should be noted, with constant conversations at work, outside of it, this same person will most likely not be silent. So you won’t be able to completely get rid of talkativeness. But self-control must always be present. After all, constant chatter really irritates people around you, and can also distract you from doing anything. Also, many experts believe that sometimes it is simply self-defense against the actions of others.

But still, how to cope with talkativeness or at least learn to control it? To do this, you should listen to some tips:

First you need to realize that this is your shortcoming. The first sign of concern is often the comments of colleagues and friends. After this, you will certainly think about how long it takes you to answer a small question;

To begin, simply record your dialogue on a voice recorder, and then listen to your answers. Then you can write all this down to paper carrier and analyze speech. At the same time, it is necessary to realize that what was unnecessary from the conversation and think about how to say the same thing more briefly next time;

Take any book text, read it, and then try to say its main idea. In this case, it is necessary to fit it into one sentence. This exercise will sometimes help you start thinking about what idea you want to convey to your interlocutor;

Do you want to get rid of talkativeness? Try to solve some of your questions by e-mail, either in in social networks. After all, it is here that you have to think, when formulating your thoughts and forming them into short sentences;

If you have to speak somewhere, be it a school conference or a business meeting, try to think through the essence of the speech. You should also prepare your speech in advance and, if possible, write it down on paper;

We all know how tiresome overly talkative people can be. They chat incessantly, jumping from topic to topic, and sometimes they don’t notice that no one is interested in listening to them. They interrupt the interlocutor without giving him a chance to say a word, listen only to themselves and talk only about what interests them. For unwitting listeners, such communication turns into torture. But knowing some secrets, you can benefit even from such situations.

The first rule: do not offend a person, do not say barbs or nasty things to him, no matter how much he irritates you with his chatter. If a stranger turns out to be excessively talkative, for example, a neighbor in a compartment on a train long distance, you have every right to politely tell him that you are not in the mood to talk. It doesn't hurt to smile and apologize. You can refuse to listen to him in an even softer form: “Excuse me, I want to read (take a nap, listen to music, etc.).” Usually there are no problems - they will stop bothering you when they see that you do not intend to carry on the conversation.

Teach a talkative person to notice the reactions of others

It is somewhat more difficult if a person close and caring to you suffers from the sin of talkativeness, but even here you can find a way to help both him and yourself. When he starts chatting non-stop, don’t try to interrupt him, don’t be rude, don’t protest, especially if everything happens in the company of other people. Your attempts to interrupt his speeches will be perceived as an attempt to humiliate him. Just be patient and calmly listen to whatever he says. And then, left alone with him, try to gently, without accusing him in any way, tell him that sometimes he does not notice that others are not interested in listening to him. But be sure to start this conversation with a positive statement - praise the person for something and tell him how well you treat him. For example, like this: “You are very good man and you know so much... I am very glad that I have such a friend. And if you also learn to notice the moment when others become uninterested in listening to you, there will be no price for you at all.”

He may begin to protest and be indignant, especially if he is sure that everyone is always interested in listening to him. Then invite him to observe the reaction of his interlocutors when he speaks. Explain to him that by facial expression, posture, and some gestures you can understand whether people are interested in listening to us or whether they are doing this only out of politeness. For example, if the interlocutor shifts from foot to foot, impatiently taps his fingers, wrinkles his forehead, turns away every now and then or, on the contrary, looks very intently, but at the same time thinks about something of his own - these are signals that it’s time to end the conversation. If the interlocutor lightly touches your hand when you speak, this is practically a cry for help: let me go, I can’t listen to you anymore! If your friend is man of sense, he will begin to take such things into account and will pay more attention to the reactions of his interlocutors to his conversations.

Several ways to stop the flow of words

What if neither your advice nor hints work and the person continues to pester you with endless conversations? Here, depending on the situation and the nature of your relationship, you can choose one of the options. First: you seize the initiative in the conversation and literally chatter your interlocutor so that now he cannot get a word in and tries to get away from communication as quickly as possible. Second: you listen with exaggerated attention to everything that the interlocutor says, allow him to interrupt you, on occasion demonstratively emphasizing: “Yes, yes, I am listening to you very carefully, speak up, please interrupt me, I am not offended at all.” As you go, ask questions, forcing the interlocutor to express himself more clearly, asking several times whether you understood him correctly. Let him repeat the same thing over and over again while you pretend not to understand. In the end, he himself will get tired of his story. In addition, it is possible that you will be able to confuse him - after all, you listen to him as if his every word is worth its weight in gold to you, as if you are expecting unimaginable revelations from him - but he is not able to say anything more or less significant. And the third option is to simply tell the person: “What do you want from me?” and walk away from communication. This option is indispensable when we are dealing with a real energy vampire, pulling the veins out of us with his endless complaints and lamentations about life.

Workshop

Observe how other people react when you say something to them. Learn to recognize signs in other people's postures, gestures, and facial expressions that they are not interested in the conversation.

If you witness someone pestering others with conversations, and they are unable to do anything, try the following technique. Remaining an outside observer, without giving vent to emotions of irritation, imagine that you are wrapping the speaker in a large thick carpet or wrapping him from head to toe in a thick layer of cotton wool. You need to mentally imagine this picture as best as possible. If you succeed, you may notice that he speaks more and more quietly, his movements become sluggish, and finally he loses the desire to continue talking. This technique will not cause him any harm - just on a subconscious level he will feel resistance from the outside, and his talkativeness will dry up.

If someone attacks you with their talkativeness, imagine that a powerful waterfall has arisen between you and the overly talkative person. Focus your attention on the sound of imaginary water, the glare of light in its streams. The interlocutor will feel that his words do not find any response from you, and he himself will lose interest in communication.

Avoid the pronouns “I”, “me”, “mine”. Personal experiences are often uninteresting to others, and besides, they take up a lot of other people’s time. Talkativeness is a tendency that can turn into a bad habit. Breaking bad habits is very difficult. Tell only stories that are relevant to the topic of conversation.

• If you do decide to tell a story, make sure it is funny. If a person is bored and doesn't respond to what you're saying, they likely feel from the bottom of their hearts that what you said wasn't worth their time and/or communication.
• Talking about oneself is inherent in a person on a subconscious level. The less you talk about yourself, the more distracted you become from such conversations. It's better to talk about other people.

Ask questions and find out information. If you talked about an event in your life, ask a question or find out information about the interlocutor so that your communication does not seem like a waste of time to him. They may tell you uninteresting facts from a person’s life, and thereby discourage you from asking questions.

• When you end a conversation, you may feel like you're talking about yourself and ignoring others. Take turns asking questions and be interested in your interlocutor. Make it a goal to talk to people rather than dump a ton of information on them.

The ability to communicate is a quality, at different poles of which there are extreme sociability and shyness. A shy person, avoiding communication, has a rather limited, small circle of acquaintances; he has difficulty making contact. Talkative people are sometimes unprincipled, and in their outburst of sociability, without difficulty, sometimes unceremoniously, they can stop a stranger on the street and quench their thirst for talkativeness.
Of course, talkativeness and talkativeness, which are no signs of a sociable person, however, such people are often perceived as arrogant and annoying. They just need to find their ears and talk, talk and talk... Talkative people completely lack the ability to listen to their interlocutor, they do not know how to keep secrets. This leads them to the fact that the number of people willing to communicate and work with them decreases.
Often, excessive talkativeness leads to erroneous actions, which you later regret. Analyzing these incorrect actions, we have to admit that they are connected in one way or another with our speech. He said the wrong thing, blurted out without thinking, was in a hurry with the answer, could not remain silent, interrupted, criticized, made an irrelevant joke, blabbed... And every time in these cases I remember: “Language is given to man in order to hide his thoughts,” “Language yours is your enemy”, “The word is silver, silence is gold”...
And it’s one thing when you, a lover of conversation, show your skill in this matter outside of work, another when a colleague or, even worse, a manager says to you: “Could you get back to the point?”, “Can you get to the point?”, “ What exactly did you want to say? If you often hear questions like this addressed to you, it’s time to think about your verbosity.
People trying to get rid of excessive talkativeness should:
Learn to answer briefly and concisely;
Before answering a question or address to you, he will learn without thinking twice (otherwise they will decide that you are either slow-witted or ignoring the question, showing your disrespect) to compose short but succinct phrases in your mind;
Set a maximum time for talking on the phone;
Resolve some work-related issues via email, so you will think twice about how to formulate your thoughts and focus on the essentials;
If you have to speak (not necessarily at a speech or meeting, it could be a business proposal, a request for an increase, an interview, a toast during a feast), think over the text in advance. You shouldn’t memorize it; the main thing is to understand its structure, in this case there will be less chance that you will go far from the topic of conversation;
Do not get involved in every conversation that does not concern you;
Immediately shut up, noticing that they have stopped listening to you or are listening out of politeness;
Work on yourself by not doing difficult exercise- try to retell the text you read, conveying only the essence, main idea in a few sentences. The fewer words the better. This way you will learn to think about what you want to say to your interlocutor.
Remember that in society it is customary to consider talkativeness a sign of stupidity.
Verbosity is inherent in most people, both young and old, men and women... You need to understand the difference between empty chatter (but even it can be useful - she spoke out, and she feels good, calmed down, splashed out excess energy, just know the time and place and find the ears that they won’t mind listening to you) and an interesting conversation. When talking, a person uses both his tongue and his head; when he chats, he uses only his tongue.
However, people chatter various reasons. Sometimes even a taciturn person, say, when meeting a childhood friend whom he has not seen for a hundred years and is glad to meet again, can break through and you cannot close your mouth. What's wrong is that he is happy to see his comrade and they have something to talk about. Talkativeness helps us pass the time. It can be useful in developing communication skills and increasing vocabulary. However, it is best for development to choose a topic of conversation, for example, a book read or a movie watched, then communication will really be beneficial and enjoyable.
Along with the obvious disadvantages of human talkativeness, there are also important advantages. Chatterboxes know how to communicate (they have practiced this thoroughly throughout their lives), easily expand their personal circle of acquaintances (and even if not everyone trusts them with their secrets) and develop the necessary connections, most of them are excellent storytellers, in the end they act as psychologists in a conversation with people who have no one else to talk to, becoming for them a real salvation from melancholy and loneliness))).
If you are a fan of talking with or without reason, you should not eradicate this character trait in yourself entirely; know the limit, time and place, and remember the possible harm that lies in excessive chatter and talkativeness.
Interesting fact about female talkativeness
Scientists have found that women, unlike men, have more vocabulary. The average woman has 23,000 words in her diet, while men use half that number. And if we also take into account the fact that in the evening the part of a man’s brain responsible for speech functions slows down, it becomes clear why he is unable to hold a conversation with his talkative wife.