Why people who only talk about themselves — and what psychology says about it

The woman at the café never took a breath. At least, that’s how it seemed. Her cappuccino sat untouched, a small moon cooling beneath drifting foam, while she sailed through a monologue: her job, her ex, her new workout plan, the time she almost moved to Bali but didn’t. The man across from her nodded, smiled, laughed in the right places, but his eyes kept drifting toward the window, following a pigeon on the pavement as if it might rescue him. He hadn’t said more than three sentences in twenty minutes. When he finally tried—“That reminds me of when I—” she cut him off, not unkindly, just automatically, re-routing the conversation back to herself like water finding the deepest groove.

You’ve met someone like this. You may have worked with them, dated them, been raised by them, or realized—mid-conversation, mid-sentence—that sometimes you are them. People who only talk about themselves are strangely magnetic and exhausting at once; they draw attention in, soak it up, and leave you feeling as if the air’s been sucked from the room. But beneath the annoyance and the eye-rolls lies something subtler and far more human: a story of how we try to stay safe, seen, and significant in a world that rarely pauses long enough to ask, “And what about you?”

The Sound of a One-Sided Conversation

Listen closely to a one-sided conversation and you can almost hear the imbalance in the air. There’s the overflowing storyteller, words tumbling and stacking, and then there’s the quiet listener, shrinking a little more each time their sentence dies halfway. The rhythm is off. The emotional oxygen in the room is being consumed at twice the rate it’s being replaced.

Psychologists have a term for part of what’s happening: self-focused attention. When we’re locked onto our own thoughts, stories, and emotions, our brain naturally orbits “me”—what I did, how I felt, what that meant for my life. In small doses, this is normal, even helpful. We all talk about ourselves. Neuroscience tells us that self-disclosure—talking about our experiences, feelings, and opinions—activates the same reward centers in the brain that light up with good food or money. Sharing our story literally feels good.

But when the “sharing” never pauses to make space for anyone else, it shifts from a healthy drive to an imbalanced habit. The conversation becomes less like a dance and more like a solo performance with an accidental audience.

From the outside, it can look like arrogance or narcissism: “They’re so full of themselves.” Sometimes, that’s true. Narcissistic traits—grandiosity, entitlement, an excessive need for admiration—do show up in certain chronic self-talkers. But psychology also offers a more complicated picture. People who only talk about themselves may be powered not just by ego, but by fear, loneliness, or the quiet terror of what might surface if the spotlight shifts away, even for a moment.

The Private Reasons People Talk About Themselves So Much

On a park bench, a man scrolls through his phone and launches into a story before the other person finishes their thought: “That reminds me of when I…” It’s almost a reflex. If you slow this moment down, there are several tangled motives that might be at play—many of them invisible, even to the speaker.

1. The Armor of Insecurity

It sounds backwards, but people who dominate conversations with their own stories are often deeply insecure. When you’re unsure of your worth, talking about yourself can become a way of proving—both to you and to the world—that you matter, that you have value, that you’ve done things worth hearing about. Psychology calls this compensatory self-enhancement: when we feel small inside, we sometimes make ourselves big on the outside.

Instead of sitting in that unsettling silence where someone else’s story takes center stage—and your own inadequacy bubbles up—filling the space with your achievements, frustrations, and narratives becomes a shield. If the spotlight never leaves you, it never has the chance to reveal the shadows you’re afraid other people might see.

2. Loneliness in Disguise

Imagine carrying a heavy backpack no one else can see. Years of unshared experiences, thoughts that never leave your own head, feelings that land with a thud inside your chest and go no further. When someone finally offers you an open ear, the dam can crack. Words pour out, sometimes in a torrent. You talk and talk and talk—not because you think you’re more important, but because you haven’t had a safe place to lay anything down in a very long time.

Psychologists recognize this as a symptom of emotional deprivation: when our need for being heard has gone unmet, we may overuse the first available outlet. It’s like overeating after a famine. From the outside, it can look self-absorbed. From the inside, it often feels like survival.

3. Anxious Minds, Fast Mouths

For some people, silence feels less like rest and more like a cliff edge. Social anxiety can twist stillness into threat: What if I say the wrong thing next? What if they see I’m awkward? What if they judge me? Talking about yourself becomes a way to stay on terrain you know—your own life. The more anxious you are, the more your brain may urge you to keep talking, to fill every gap before it swallows you.

In this way, “always talking about yourself” can actually be a form of avoidance. If the conversation never leaves familiar territory, you never have to risk the vulnerability of asking real questions or responding to someone else’s emotions. You are the only landscape on the map, and while it’s tiring, it’s at least predictable.

4. Scripts We Inherited

Sometimes the pattern is simply learned. Maybe you grew up in a family where everyone talked over each other, where storytelling was a competition and the loudest voice always won. Or maybe you watched a parent narrate their life endlessly, and you absorbed that this is just how people “do conversation.”

Our early environments teach us subtle rules: who gets to speak, how long, about what, and with how much enthusiasm. If curiosity about others was never modeled for you, you may not even realize it’s missing. You aren’t intentionally selfish; you’re following an old script no one told you you could revise.

Psychological Driver	How It Shows Up in Conversation	What They Often Need
Insecurity	Frequent bragging, defensiveness, steering topics back to their achievements	Validation, a sense of competence, gentle reality checks
Loneliness	Long, detailed stories, emotional oversharing, difficulty stopping once they start	Consistent listening, boundaries, safe spaces to share
Anxiety	Fast talking, filling silences, circling back to familiar themes	Reassurance, slower pacing, tolerance for silence
Narcissistic Traits	Dismissive of others’ stories, little genuine curiosity, domination of topics	Firm boundaries, consequences, sometimes professional help

When Talking About Yourself Turns into a Personality Pattern

Not every self-focused talker is the same. On a quiet evening, scroll through your mental list of people-who-never-stop-talking-about-themselves, and you may notice different flavors. Psychology sees them too.

There are those who lean toward narcissistic traits. They may genuinely believe their experiences are more valuable, their stories more interesting, their feelings more important. When you speak, they may barely hide their boredom, waiting only for the moment they can redirect the spotlight. In conversations, they often interrupt, one-up, or steer everything toward their preferred topics—like they’re curating a museum dedicated exclusively to Me.

Others fall into the category of histrionic or dramatizing styles. For them, every story is a performance, and every silence is a dropped curtain. Life becomes content, and you, by proximity, become an audience. Their constant self-talk isn’t so much about superiority as it is about craving attention and emotional intensity. They may not be interested in your story because, deep down, they fear it won’t keep the energy high enough.

Then, there are people whose self-centered conversation style masks something more fragile: avoidant or fearful patterns. Asking about your life, sitting with your pain, or sharing in deep mutual vulnerability can feel terrifying. It is far safer—emotionally, psychologically—to keep everything on their turf. They talk about themselves because the alternative is an intimacy they don’t know how to handle.

Psychologists don’t reduce people to labels, but these patterns help explain why some people seem almost unable to share conversational space. It’s not always a choice in the moment; it can be the visible surface of deeper traits and longstanding ways of relating to the world.

How It Feels on the Other Side of the Table

There’s a special kind of tired that comes from being someone else’s audience for too long. You walk away from lunch or a phone call, and the fatigue lands in your shoulders first—then your chest. Your own stories feel like they’ve been shoved to the back of a closet. You replay the conversation and realize you never finished a single sentence that began with “I.”

Being with someone who only talks about themselves often stirs a cocktail of emotions: irritation, boredom, guilt (for feeling irritated), and a quiet kind of grief. Grief for the connection you could have had if both lives were allowed into the room.

Over time, this imbalance can erode relationships. Research on close bonds—friendships, romantic partnerships, family ties—shows that mutual self-disclosure is one of the strongest predictors of intimacy. That mutuality matters. If one person is always the speaker and the other is always the container, resentment seeps in. You stop reaching out. You become vague, busy, “slammed with work this week.” Relationships decay not with a dramatic break, but with a slow, steady thinning of contact.

Some people adjust by shrinking. They become the “good listener,” the supportive one, the reliable shoulder. They pretend they don’t need reciprocal space. But psychology is clear: humans are wired for recognition. We need to feel seen, not just useful. If you never get to bring your full self to a conversation, you eventually start leaving pieces of that self at home.

Learning to Share the Air: Small Shifts with Big Impact

If you recognize yourself in all this—if you often leave conversations thinking, I talked about myself the whole time—there’s both challenge and hope here. Changing conversational habits is entirely possible. It just requires a kind of inner reorientation: from proving to connecting, from performing to exchanging.

Notice Your Ratios

Start by paying quiet attention. In your next few conversations, mentally track the ratio: How much time are you speaking versus listening? It doesn’t need to be perfectly equal; some days, one person truly needs more space. But if, across many interactions, you realize you’re consistently taking up most of the oxygen, that’s data.

You can even set a gentle intention: for every story you tell, invite one from the other person. “That reminds me of when I moved cities… but I’m curious, have you ever made a big move like that?” This tiny pivot turns a monologue into a bridge.

Practice Genuine Curiosity

Curiosity is the antidote to chronic self-talk. Instead of waiting for your turn, experiment with letting your interest wander outward. What is it like to be the person in front of you? What might their day feel like from the inside? Ask questions that invite more than yes/no answers, and then—this is the important part—listen without racing ahead to your own version of their story.

Psychologically, this practice builds empathy and weakens the grip of self-focused attention. You train your brain to derive satisfaction not just from being heard, but from hearing.

Make Peace with Silence

If you talk about yourself to outrun anxiety, learn to befriend the spaces between sentences. Let a pause sit, even if your heart taps faster. Notice what happens in your body. What thoughts rush in? Instead of drowning them in more words, breathe through them. In time, you may discover that the world doesn’t end when you’re not the one filling every second.

Address the Deeper Need

If your constant self-talking comes from a history of not being heard, no amount of “tips” will fully satisfy you until you find environments where you are truly listened to. Therapy can offer this—a space where your story is central by design, and where someone’s job is to stay curious about you. Support groups, writing, or even voice notes to yourself can also help hold your narratives so you don’t have to pour them all into every single interaction.

Setting Boundaries When You’re Always the Listener

What if you’re on the other side? What if you love someone who only ever seems interested in their own life? You don’t have to choose between being endlessly drained and abruptly cutting them off. Boundaries, used well, are somewhere in the middle: a way of protecting your energy while still honoring your care.

You might start by gently naming the pattern: “I notice we talk a lot about what’s going on with you, and I’d really love to share some things from my life too.” Not as an accusation, but as an invitation to rebalance. Some people honestly don’t realize what they’re doing and will adjust once it’s brought into awareness.

When gentle nudges aren’t enough—especially with people who have strong narcissistic traits—firmer lines are needed. This might mean limiting the time you spend in one-on-one conversations, steering the context toward group settings, or ending calls when you’re drained instead of pushing through. “Hey, I’ve got about fifteen more minutes to chat,” can be a kindness to both of you: clear, respectful, and honest.

Underneath all this, you have permission to want reciprocity. Wanting to be asked about your day, your heart, your life is not selfish; it’s human. Psychology backs you on that.

In the End, We’re All Just Trying to Be Seen

On another afternoon, in another café, imagine the same woman with the cooling cappuccino catching herself mid-story. She sees the faraway look in her friend’s eyes, the way his mouth has been half-open for the last few seconds, a sentence gathering dust behind his teeth. Something tugs at her—guilt, maybe, or a sudden flash of clarity.

“Wait,” she says, laughter softening her voice. “I’ve been talking about myself this whole time. What’s going on with you?”

It’s a small moment. He blinks, surprised, as if someone just opened a window. Air rushes back into the room. Their conversation shifts, not dramatically, but noticeably. His stories thread into hers, and for the first time all afternoon, the table feels balanced.

This is what psychology, at its best, keeps pointing us back to: behind the behaviors that frustrate us are needs we recognize in ourselves. The need to matter. The need to feel safe. The need to have our inner world witnessed. People who only talk about themselves are not aliens among us; they are us, turned up to an extreme, their coping strategies louder than most.

We can choose how to meet them—and how to meet those parts in ourselves. With boundaries, yes. With honesty, certainly. But also with the understanding that at the core of every overlong story and self-focused tangent is a simple plea: Do I exist for you, too?

And perhaps the most generous answer we can offer, in both directions, is this: Yes—and so do I. Let’s make room in the conversation for both.

FAQ

Is talking about yourself a lot always a bad thing?

No. Sharing about yourself is essential for connection. It becomes a problem when it consistently leaves no space for others, or when people around you feel unseen, drained, or unheard.

Does constantly talking about yourself mean you’re a narcissist?

Not necessarily. While narcissistic traits can cause this pattern, it can also stem from anxiety, insecurity, loneliness, or learned habits. A proper diagnosis requires a professional assessment, not just conversational style.

How can I tell if I dominate conversations?

Notice how often people finish their stories, how many questions you ask about others, and whether people seem energized or exhausted after talking with you. You can also ask a trusted friend for honest feedback.

What can I do if a friend only talks about themselves?

Try gently naming the pattern and expressing your needs: “I’d like to share some things from my life too.” If nothing changes, set time limits, shift to group settings, or create more distance to protect your emotional energy.

Can someone who talks only about themselves really change?

Yes. With self-awareness, willingness, and practice, people can learn to listen more, ask questions, and tolerate sharing the spotlight. Therapy or coaching can accelerate this process, especially when deeper insecurity or anxiety is involved.