The Real Reason You Talk Too Much When You’re Nervous

Do you ever walk away from a conversation feeling exhausted because you said way more than you meant to?

In this episode of Speak Honest, we unpack the real reason you talk too much when you’re nervous. This isn’t about learning to “say less” or fixing your communication. It’s about understanding the story underneath your urge to overexplain, the fear of being misunderstood, and the quiet self judgment that kicks in when connection feels shaky. I’ll walk you through why overexplaining is actually a nervous system protection strategy and how to shift it by questioning the story instead of performing for understanding.

You might want to listen if:

• You replay conversations in your head wondering why you said so much
 • You overexplain when you’re late, emotional, or afraid of being judged
 • You feel a surge of panic when silence shows up in conversations
 • You struggle to trust that your words can be simple and still be enough
 • You want to communicate calmly without feeling exposed or unsafe

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DISCLAIMER: Speak Honest podcast content is informational, not professional or medical advice. Jenn is an ICF relationship coach, not a licensed therapist. Consult health professionals for specific concerns. Client opinions do not reflect Speak Honest’s stance. We aim for accuracy but are not liable for errors or outcomes from ...

Chapters

• 0:05 Welcome And Episode Focus
• 0:38 The Exhaustion Of Saying Too Much
• 1:26 Membership Invitation And Support
• 2:01 Overexplaining As Perception Management
• 3:53 The Trigger: Tiny Cues, Big Panic
• 5:20 Performing Versus Connecting
• 7:00 Naming The Underlying Story
• 8:44 A Simple Replacement Script
• 10:30 Tolerating Discomfort And Silence
• 12:24 Practicing Secure, Clean Communication
• 14:12 Closing Reflections And Next Steps
• 15:21 Resources, Gratitude, And CTA

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:05

Hello, and welcome to Speak Honest. I am your host and certified relationship coach, Jennifer Noble. It has been my passion for over a decade to help women like you heal. What's been holding you back from having the relationships you deserve? Are you struggling with a relationship where you can't seem to voice your emotions, needs, and boundaries without having it blow up in your face? Then you have found the right podcast, my friend. Get ready for practical tips, empowering truths, and honest conversations. Now let's dive in. Hello, ladies, and welcome back to another episode of Speak Honest. I am Jen Noble, your go-to relationship coach and author of Dance of Attachment. And today we are diving into another big one. Because if you have ever found yourself talking in circles, rambling, repeating the same sentence three different ways, or feeling like you have to defend every inch of your emotional experience, then this episode is for you. As you're listening today, I want you to think about the last time you walked away from a conversation feeling completely wrung out because you said way too much. You gave context, then more context, and then even more context because you wanted so badly to be understood. We're gonna talk about why this happens and what to do instead. And before we jump in, I want to remind you that my Speak Honest membership is open. And if you've been listening and thinking, oh my goodness, Jen, I need this. I need women who get it, then I want you to know you can come and join us at speak-honest.com at any time. It's where I teach you how to regulate your emotions, how to check in before over-explaining yourself, how to understand your attachment patterns, and how to communicate in a way that actually lands. Alright, now let's dive in to the episode. Here's the truth no one really likes talking about. Overexplaining isn't actually about explaining at all. It's about managing someone else's perception of you. It's the quiet panic that says, oh my goodness, please see me the way that I hope that you see me. Please don't get this wrong. Please don't think I'm too much or too sensitive or too confusing. Dear God, please see me the way I hope you see me. Do you hear that? Most women who overexplain, they're not trying to convince the other person. They're trying to rescue their own reputation in real time. It's like this invisible PR team that pops up in your head and goes, wait, wait, wait, let me fix how this sounded. But suddenly, what happens? You're giving extra details. You have extra context. There's extra emotional background, extra everything. And not because it's helpful at all. In fact, oftentimes it does the opposite. But because silence feels unsafe. The moment you stop talking, you lose control of the story. So you talk more. And here's the wildest part. When you overexplain, you're not actually communicating. You're more like you're auditioning. You're trying to get the role of the reasonable one or the calm one or the one who's totally understood, which means the entire time, what are you doing? You're performing instead of connecting. No wonder it's exhausting. Over explaining is the performance you learned to put on so no one could misunderstand you in a way that hurt you. But the cost? It's huge. Because the more you perform, the less present you feel. And the less present you feel, the less connected the other person feels. So now you're explaining even harder to fix the problem that overexplaining created in the first place. And round and round we go. This is why it feels so exhausting. You're not having a conversation. You're basically running a marathon with your words. Now let's go a little deeper because overexplaining isn't random. There is a pattern underneath it. And once you see it, honestly, you can't unsee it. So there's always a moment where it starts, a tiny flicker, something shifts inside of you before a single extra word even comes out. It can be as small as someone pausing too long before responding. Or maybe it's their eyebrows that get pulled together. Or your brain imagining what they might be thinking. It's barely anything on the outside, but inside your body, it feels it like an alarm. And the alarm says, fix it, fix it right now, clarify it, make it make sense. I need to stay safe. And it happens so fast, right? That's that hypervigilance we talk about a lot. It's so fast that you don't even realize you're slipping out of your adult self and into your younger version of you who learned that being misunderstood was dangerous. The version of you who learned that if you didn't explain yourself perfectly, then things would fall apart and they would leave. The love would pull away, someone would shut down, explode, or decide you were the problem. So you learned to preempt the danger with your words. Over explaining became your seatbelt. But I want you to know when you start explaining and explaining and explaining, you're not actually communicating the truth. You're just trying to control the outcome. And we just have to be honest about that. And it's okay if it's hard to hear that right now. Resistance is perfectly normal. But you're trying to prevent a feared version of the story from taking root in their head. Do you see how you're controlling their story, their narrative? It's almost like you're fighting a ghost. Not the person in front of you, but the imagined version of what they might think or feel about you. That's intense. And it's a lot because it's not even real. And that ghost, whoo, she is loud. And that's why over-explaining it feels urgent. And this is why your voice changes. It's why your chest tightens. It's where your words tumble out faster than when you can organize them. You're not reacting to the conversation. You're not present at the moment, connecting with the person across from you. You're reacting to the fear underneath what is being said. And once you understand that, I promise you, things start to change because you stop seeing over-explaining as a communication error that you can fix. And you start seeing it as a protection strategy. And if it's a protection strategy, that means that you can learn a new strategy. So let's talk about how to learn a new strategy. Because the real strategy isn't about talking less. In fact, the more you try to do that, the worse it becomes, trust me. It just ends up barreling out of your mouth like verbal diarrhea. So what we really want to do is about question the story that hijacks your nervous system in the first place. Because every time you overexplain, there is a story underneath it. A story about what you're afraid, they're really thinking about you. But here's the thing, and I really want you to hear this. The thing you're afraid that they are thinking about is almost always the thing you secretly believe about yourself. All right, so let me say that again because I want you to really hear that. The thing you think someone else is thinking about you is what you think about yourself. So let me show you how this works. Let's say you show up somewhere late, and instantly your brain goes into, oh no, they're gonna think I don't care, they're gonna think I'm irresponsible, they're gonna think I didn't try hard enough. So what do you do? You launch into all the excuses, the traffic, the parking, the coffee spill, the whole novel. You over-explain everything. Not because they asked. Honestly, they probably don't care, but because you need to tell them. It's not because they needed to hear it. It's because you're trying to outrun the story you're already telling yourself. You're not trying to convince them, you're trying to convince yourself that you're still good, still worthy, and still allowed to be there. Overexplaining is just you trying to cover up your internal fears. It's a self-defense mechanism against your own self-judgment. Are you seeing how this works? So the new strategy is this. Pause before you talk and ask yourself, what am I afraid they think about me right now? And then do I think that about myself? Now, sometimes it's really hard to answer this question. When I talk to my clients, I'll say, okay, well, do you think you're lazy? And they're like, No, I know I work hard. But the truth here is, if you're trying so hard to get someone else to understand that you're not lazy, then you believe it about yourself somewhere, or you believe that laziness is bad, or you believe something bad about the laziness that you believe about yourself. And that's the story we need to watch and we need to catch, and we need to say, you know what? I did try hard to get here. I am useful, I am capable. And yeah, sometimes I'm late, but that's okay. So then you show up, and instead of launching into a million excuses, you say, Thank you for your patience. And in that moment, you reclaim your power. Because once you name the story, it loses its grip. You no longer perform to fix their perception. You're dealing with your own. So instead of spiraling into over-explanation, you can say something like, Hey, I'm late. Thanks. Thanks for waiting. Oh my god, can you believe the traffic out there? It's okay to talk about stuff. But it's about being clean, it's about being grounded, it's about being an adult, right? No story, no panic, no performing. Your new strategy is to catch the story, question it, and refuse to let it run the conversation. Once you shift that, your communication becomes clearer because you aren't fighting your invisible fears anymore. But there is one more part that no one prepares you for. I do want to touch on real quick. When you stop overexplaining and you start actually questioning the story instead, you're going to feel uncomfortable. Like wildly uncomfortable. This isn't easy. There's a reason why we don't do this. Because for the first time, you're not scrambling to manage someone else's perception of you. You're just sitting with it on your own. So when you say, hey, I'm late, thanks for waiting, your brain might actually start panicking. It's gonna whisper, say more, fix this. They're judging you. But that's just the old story trying to drag you back into performance mode. So I just want you to catch it, that's all. This new strategy requires you to hold yourself steady while your nervous system freaks out for just a few more seconds. It requires you to breathe through the silence that used to terrify you. Imagine that. You just say, thank you so much for waiting, and then you just let it sit there, hanging over both of your heads. It requires you to trust that you are still a good person, still worthy, still allowed to take up space, make mistakes, even when you don't present as a perfect person, or you don't have a perfect explanation for everything. And here's what starts to happen over time. You realize the world doesn't fall apart when you don't defend yourself, and people don't react the way your story predicted, and no one is thinking the catastrophic thoughts you convinced yourself they were thinking. You begin to see that most people just accept what you say. They move on. They kind of don't care. They're fine. And because they're fine, your nervous system starts to become fine. You realize, oh, I didn't need all those extra words. I didn't need to justify myself. I didn't need to protect myself from a story that wasn't even mine to begin with. And that's when your communication starts to feel clean. Remember, this takes time, multiple experiences over multiple times. But that's when you start to trust yourself again, and you start to realize you were carrying a weight that you never needed to carry. And the more you practice this, the more your inner world will quiet down. It takes repetition for this to happen. It takes repetition to stop assuming the worst, to stop performing and to stop bracing for imaginary judgments that really you're just judging yourself for. You finally get to show up as the grounded, regulated, beautiful version of you that I know is in there, the one who doesn't need to earn understanding with a five-minute monologue. This is what secure communication actually feels like. Not perfect, not polished, just honest and uncluttered. Alright, my lovelies, this is what I want you to sit with this week. Not the old habit of over-explaining, but the story underneath it, the fear underneath it, and the truth that you are allowed to show up without performing your worth. And if this hit you in the chest today, it's because you are ready for this shift. You are ready to stop carrying stories that were never yours to begin with. You are ready to communicate in a way that feels clean and calm and connected. And I want you to know you do not have to do this alone. Inside of the Speak Honest membership, this is the work that we practice together. How to regulate your body, how to question the story instead of letting it spiral inside of you, how to communicate in a way that creates closeness instead of chaos. The membership is full of women just like you who want real change, real support, and real connection. And if you've been thinking about joining, then consider this your nudge. You can go over to speak-honest.com or you can click on the link in the show notes to learn more. I just want you to know that I appreciate you spending this time with me, especially during the holiday season. I adore you so much. So let's all take a breath, let's question our stories, and let's speak from our truth. All right, everyone, I will speak with you next week. Take care. As we wrap up today's conversation, always remember that healing is a journey, not a destination. And it is an honor to be a part of your healing journey. If you want to dig deeper into the topics we cover today, be sure to head over to our show notes where you can find all of the valuable information mentioned in today's episode right there. And please remember to rate, review, and subscribe if you enjoyed today's podcast. Your feedback means the world to us and helps others discover our podcast. Until next time, remember to speak up and speak honest.