If you want to know how to stop talking about yourself in conversations, you’re in the right place. You know the moment. A friend starts telling you about her week, something she says reminds you of your own week, and ninety seconds later you’re deep into your story while she’s nodding politely and waiting.
Nobody plans this. It happens because your own life is the topic you know best, and because sharing it feels good in a way that’s hard to resist. The fix isn’t to go quiet and turn yourself into a human tape recorder. It’s to get better at noticing the moment the spotlight swings toward you, and to learn a few moves that swing it back.
Below are 16 of those moves, each tied to research you can check. Some will feel obvious. A couple might surprise you, including one that says you may actually be talking too little. If you’d like the bigger picture first, our guide on how to have good conversation with anyone covers the basics. This one zooms in on a single habit.
1. Understand why talking about yourself feels so good
Start with some self-forgiveness. Your brain rewards you for this.
In 2012, Harvard psychologists Diana Tamir and Jason Mitchell published five studies in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences looking at what happens when people share their own views. In the brain scanner, talking about themselves lit up the mesolimbic dopamine system, including the nucleus accumbens and the ventral tegmental area. That’s reward circuitry, the same network associated with things like food and money. In a behavioral task, participants even gave up cash to answer questions about themselves instead of about other people, sacrificing around 17% of what they could have earned, according to Scientific American’s coverage of the paper. The authors also cite earlier research estimating that people spend 30 to 40% of their speech telling others about their own experiences.
Two caveats. The study is from 2012 and used lab tasks, not real dinners. And it explains the pull rather than excusing it. Still, knowing there’s a reward signal behind the urge makes it easier to spot, because you stop treating it as a character flaw and start treating it like a sweet tooth. If you notice the urge is less about the story and more about wanting to be seen, our piece on how to stop seeking attention from others digs into that side.
Start small: the next time you feel that little rush of “oh, I have a story about that,” just name it in your head. Don’t act on it yet.
2. Learn to spot the shift response
Sociologist Charles Derber spent years listening to how people talk, and he described two kinds of replies. A shift response moves the topic to you (“I had a terrible week too”). A support response keeps it on the other person (“What happened?”). Journalist Kate Murphy, in her 2020 book on listening, describes how Derber recorded and transcribed more than a hundred informal dinner conversations and found the shift response was the more common of the two.
The mechanism is worth spelling out. When someone tells you something, your memory automatically searches for a similar experience, as journalist Celeste Headlee explained in a 2018 NBC News interview. That memory arrives fast and feels relevant. Your own experience is also the easiest thing to talk about, especially when the other person is upset and you don’t know what to say. So the sequence runs: their story, your matching memory, the urge to share it, and then the floor has moved. Nothing in that chain is malicious. It’s just automatic, which is exactly why it needs catching. Derber’s framework is observational, so treat it as a useful lens, not a proven law.
Support responses are also the backbone of showing empathy to someone, so practicing them pays off twice.
Next time, do this: when a friend shares something, make your first reply a question about their experience, even if your own story is sitting right there.
3. Quit boomerasking
This one has a name now, and once you know it you’ll hear it everywhere. A boomerask is when you ask a question, let the other person answer, then answer it yourself. “How was your weekend?” “Quiet, mostly.” “Mine was amazing, we went hiking…”
Alison Wood Brooks of Harvard Business School and Michael Yeomans of Imperial College London ran eight studies on this, published in early 2025 in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. In the first, 302 online participants were asked about it, and more than 90% said they had both done it and been on the receiving end, according to the British Psychological Society’s Research Digest. Roughly 30% of the examples happened between friends, about a quarter between romantic partners, another quarter between co-workers, and 17% within families. In a final study of live chats between 98 pairs of strangers, people liked a topic less when their partner boomerasked on it.
The core finding is blunt: Brooks and Yeomans’ 2025 boomerasking study found that boomeraskers come across as insincere, and that people actually prefer partners who simply disclose straight out. The trouble is that we don’t see it in ourselves. Yeomans writes that around 83% of respondents expected boomerasking to make a better impression than just launching into what they wanted to say.
Your move: if you want to share your weekend, share it. Say “I had the best weekend” and then ask about theirs, and actually stay with their answer.
4. Ask questions you couldn’t answer yourself
Michael Yeomans, Associate Professor of Behavioural Science at Imperial Business School, offered a neat trick in a March 2026 piece for the school’s IB Knowledge series. If you lead with a question you have no answer to, you can’t boomerang it. His example: ask someone about their pets when you don’t have any. He also frames the problem around what researchers call conversational uptake, the habit of building on what the other person just said through listening, follow-up questions and paraphrasing. Boomerasking gets the first two steps right and then drops the third.
It works because it removes your own material from the table. Say you’re at a work dinner, seated next to someone who mentions they keep bees. You know nothing about bees. Hypothetically, you couldn’t make that conversation about yourself if you tried, so your only option is curiosity: how did they start, what goes wrong, does it ever get scary. That’s the zone where the other person lights up. Next time you’re unsure where to aim, pick the corner of their life that’s furthest from yours and ask about that.
5. Make follow-up questions your default
Not all questions are equal. The ones that do the heavy lifting are follow-ups, the questions that pick up a thread the other person just handed you.
Karen Huang, Michael Yeomans, Alison Wood Brooks, Julia Minson and Francesca Gino tested this at Harvard in a 2017 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. In live online chats, people told to ask at least nine questions were liked more by their partners than people told to ask four or fewer. The effect ran through responsiveness: question-askers seemed more attentive, understanding and caring. In speed-dating data, people who asked more follow-up questions got more second dates. There’s a twist, though. Outside observers reading the transcripts preferred people who asked fewer questions, so the boost is specific to the person being asked.
This study is from 2017, but Brooks’ 2025 book Talk, as summarized by UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Magazine in July 2025, adds a newer wrinkle: both friends and daters overestimated how many questions they’d asked. You probably ask fewer than you think.
Test it this week: in one conversation, ask at least two follow-ups before you say anything about your own life. Plenty of other social skills tips build on this same muscle.
6. Treat it like a game of catch
Headlee, in that same 2018 interview, compared conversation to a game of catch. You get the ball, you hold it briefly, you throw it back. Hog the ball and the game dies.
The analogy holds in one important way. Every time you speak, you either return the ball or keep it. A short answer that ends with “what about you?” is a throw. A ten-minute monologue is someone standing in the yard holding the ball while the other person waits with their hands out.
Where it breaks down is fairness. Catch is supposed to be even, and conversation isn’t always. A friend who just lost a job doesn’t need a 50/50 split. They need you to hold your throws for a while. And the evidence for returning the ball doesn’t come from the metaphor anyway. It comes from findings like Brooks and Yeomans’ live study, where turning a topic back to yourself made partners like that topic less.
A quick experiment: before you speak, ask yourself whether what you’re about to say throws the ball back or keeps it. If you catch yourself jumping in before they’ve finished, our guide on how to stop interrupting people when they talk is the natural next read.
7. Judge your listening by how heard they feel
Here’s a shift in scorekeeping. Stop measuring a good conversation by how well you came across. Measure it by whether the other person felt listened to.
The biggest review on this so far, led by Avraham Kluger of the Hebrew University with colleagues including Guy Itzchakov of the University of Haifa, was published in the Journal of Business and Psychology in April 2024. They pooled 664 effect sizes from 400,020 observations, mostly from workplaces.
| Link between perceived listening and… | Average correlation (r) |
|---|---|
| Work outcomes overall | .39 |
| Relationship quality | .51 |
| Job performance | .36 |
| Job performance, self-report data removed | .21 |
The strongest link was with relationship quality. The authors are candid about the limits: these are correlations, and about 75% of the studies relied on self-reports. Even with those stripped out, the association held up, just at a smaller size.
What matters here is the word “perceived.” It’s not about whether you think you listened. It’s whether they felt it. Steady, relaxed eye contact helps with that, and our piece on making eye contact without staring covers the details.
Here’s a simple way in: after your next real conversation, ask yourself one question. Would they say I listened? Be honest.
8. Reflect back before you add anything
When someone finishes a thought, resist adding your own. Reflect theirs first. “So the worst part wasn’t the deadline, it was that nobody told you it had moved?”
A registered report by Tia Moin, Netta Weinstein, Guy Itzchakov and colleagues, published in Royal Society Open Science in December 2024, tested what good listening does for both people. Participants were trained through a validated video module to listen either at a high level or at an everyday, moderate level while their partner talked about their character strengths. Moin and colleagues’ 2024 listening study found that high-quality listening produced more positivity resonance, a sense of shared warmth felt by both speaker and listener. People trained to listen well also said they wanted to keep doing it. Some outcomes didn’t move, including the speakers’ feelings of authenticity and anxiety, and the authors call the findings early.
Reflecting back is a practical way to show the attention, understanding and good intent that this research treats as the core of high-quality listening. It also slows you down, which is half the point. You can’t jump to your own story while you’re busy checking you understood theirs. Your face and posture do some of this work too, which is where body language in communication comes in.
Give it a go: once per conversation, summarize what you heard in one sentence and wait for them to correct or confirm it.
9. Prepare topics about them, not you
Preparation sounds stiff. It isn’t, and almost nobody does it.
Brooks’ research, as described in Greater Good Magazine’s July 2025 summary of her book, suggests only about 18% of people prepare topics before a conversation, and half believe that doing so would make the chat less enjoyable. Yet even 30 seconds of planning led to smoother conversations with fewer awkward pauses, and people felt less anxious. One caveat: this comes from a summary of the book, and I couldn’t open the underlying study to check its sample.
The self-talk angle matters here. When you walk in with nothing prepared, the easiest material in a pause is your own life. So prepare material about the other person. Remember that your colleague’s daughter just started university. Recall that your neighbor mentioned a trip. One or two of those in your pocket and the dead air gets filled with them, not you. It’s a big part of what makes people seem charming everywhere they go.
Before your next dinner or meeting, spend 30 seconds jotting down two things you’d like to ask the other person about, and let that list do the work.
10. Go deeper instead of hopping back to yourself
A lot of self-talk happens when a topic feels used up. The conversation stalls, and you fill the gap with your own news. Often the better move is to go one level deeper on their topic.
Michael Kardas, Amit Kumar and Nicholas Epley tested this in “Overly Shallow?”, published online in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in September 2021 and printed in the 2022 volume. Across 12 experiments with more than 1,800 participants, people expected deep conversations with strangers to be more awkward and less enjoyable than they turned out to be. A big reason was that people underestimated how interested their partner would be in going deeper. When participants had both a shallow and a deep conversation, they ended up preferring the deep one.
Not every comparison in the paper showed a clear difference, and the lab setting involved people who had agreed to talk. So this isn’t permission to ask a stranger in a queue about their deepest fear. It does suggest that “What did that feel like?” lands better than you’d guess. That kind of question is a large part of being an understanding person.
Start small: when a topic stalls, ask one “why” or “how did that feel” question before you even think about changing the subject.
11. Count your I’s, but read the result kindly
The reference article suggests watching how often you say “I,” “me” and “my.” It’s a decent mirror. Just know what it actually shows.
Allison Tackman, Matthias Mehl and colleagues at the University of Arizona pooled data from 4,754 people across six labs in two countries, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2019. Using “I” and “me” a lot had a small but reliable link with depression (r = .10), and more broadly with negative emotionality, the tendency to get upset, anxious or worried. “My” wasn’t linked at all. It wasn’t a sign of narcissism. In a 2018 university press release, Mehl estimated that the average person speaks about 16,000 words a day, roughly 1,400 of them first-person singular pronouns. He also put it memorably: stress can leave you “caught in the metaphorical ‘I’ of the storm.”
Two cautions. The link is correlational and small. And this study is from 2019, so treat it as foundational rather than the last word. The practical lesson is that heavy self-talk is sometimes a stress signal, not an ego problem. If you’re running hot on “I,” it might be worth asking what’s weighing on you, a useful habit for building emotional intelligence too.
A quick experiment: record yourself telling a friend about your day (with their permission), then play it back and tally the I’s. If the count is high, ask what’s going on with you.
12. Share a similar story only when it serves them
Sometimes your own experience really helps. The question is whether it helps them or just you.
Here the mechanism cuts both ways. In a 2020 paper in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Jacob Israelashvili, Disa Sauter and Agneta Fischer of the University of Amsterdam reported four studies with 803 participants who watched people describe real negative experiences. Those who had been through something similar felt more personal distress, and that distress partly explained why they were worse at reading the speaker’s emotions. In other words: their story triggers your memory, your memory triggers your feelings, and your feelings crowd out theirs. On the other side, Sara Hodges and colleagues at the University of Oregon found in a 2010 study, published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, that new mothers with closer experience to the speakers expressed more empathic concern, and the speakers felt more understood.
So similar experience isn’t the problem. Letting it take over is. A short “I went through something like that, so I have some idea” can signal understanding. Ten minutes on your version doesn’t. Watch your word choice here, too, because “I know exactly how you feel” often lands badly. Our guide on being more careful about what you say has more on that. Keep your own version to a sentence or two, then hand it back with “but what was it like for you?”
13. If you’re going to brag, just brag
Some self-talk is disguised. “Ugh, I’ve been so busy since the promotion.” “It’s so hard choosing between these two job offers.” That’s a humblebrag, and it’s worse than plain bragging.
Ovul Sezer, Francesca Gino and Michael Norton tested this across nine studies in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2018. Humblebraggers were liked less and seen as less competent than people who bragged straight out, because they came across as insincere. In a field test, a researcher asked 113 college students to sign a petition. More than 85% signed after hearing a straightforward brag, compared with 65% after a humblebrag. The study is from 2018, but it lines up neatly with the 2025 boomerasking finding: disguised self-promotion, whether as a complaint or as a question, seems to cost more than honest self-promotion.
Hiding the brag doesn’t make it smaller. It just makes it harder to trust. If you live or work with someone who humblebrags constantly, our piece on dealing with egomaniacs may help you keep your patience.
Your move: when you have good news, say it plainly in one sentence, enjoy the reaction, then turn back to them.
14. Don’t overcorrect into silence
This is the twist. The goal isn’t to stop talking. It’s to stop hijacking.
Quinn Hirschi, Timothy Wilson and Daniel Gilbert, writing in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin in 2022, found what they called a reticence bias. When asked, people thought they should talk a bit less than half the time, about 45%, to be liked by someone new. But in experiments where speaking time was assigned anywhere from 30% to 70%, the more people spoke, the more their partners liked them. Part of the reason seems to be that hearing more about someone helps you find what you have in common.
There are limits. Speaking time was assigned, not chosen, and topped out at 70%. So this doesn’t mean monologues win. It means that if you’ve read this far and you’re planning to sit through your next dinner saying nothing, don’t. People want to know you. They just want to know you in turns.
Next time, do this: aim for roughly balanced airtime, and when you do talk about yourself, make it a story that invites theirs.
15. Share the floor in groups, too
One-on-one is hard enough. Groups make it worse, because a dominant talker can take over without anyone pushing back.
Google ran an internal project from 2012, codenamed Project Aristotle, to work out why some teams did better than others. As The New York Times reported in 2016, the researchers drew on work by Anita Woolley and colleagues showing that good teams shared one behavior: members spoke in roughly the same proportion over time, which the researchers called “equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking.” Woolley put it plainly in that report: when everyone got a chance to talk, the team did well, but when one person or a small group spoke all the time, collective intelligence declined.
This case is dated, and I worked from secondary accounts of the Times article rather than the original. Still, the principle carries over to dinners, group chats and especially meetings, where the cost of one person talking about themselves is multiplied by every silent attendee. If you run meetings, our guide to conducting effective meetings in the workplace has structures that help.
Test it this week: at your next group gathering, quietly note who hasn’t spoken yet and ask that person a direct question.
16. Give credit and compliments freely
Few moves shift the spotlight faster than pointing it at someone else.
Xuan Zhao and Nicholas Epley showed in a 2021 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that people underestimate how good a compliment makes the other person feel, and overestimate how awkward it will be. Recipients cared about the sentiment, not perfect phrasing. A separate 2021 set of studies by Erica Boothby and Vanessa Bohns in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin found the same miscalibration with strangers, and noted that the people giving compliments felt better afterwards. Boothby and Bohns studied brief, genuine compliments mostly between strangers on campus, and they warn the pattern doesn’t extend to remarks about appearance or anything that could feel inappropriate.
Credit works the same way. “Sam found this place” or “That was Dana’s idea” moves attention off you without any effort.
Try it tomorrow: give one specific compliment about something someone did, not how they look, and let it stand without adding anything about yourself.
What to do when you slip
You will slip. You’ll be halfway through a story about your car before you realize your friend was telling you about her mother’s surgery. That’s normal, and the recovery matters more than the slip.
First, repair it on the spot. Something simple works: “Sorry, I took over there. You were saying about your mum?” It takes five seconds and shows the other person you noticed.
Second, go easy on yourself afterwards. After conversations, most of us replay the awkward bits and assume the other person liked us less than they did. Erica Boothby, Gus Cooney, Gillian Sandstrom and Margaret Clark called this the liking gap in a 2018 paper in Psychological Science, and it showed up with lab strangers, college roommates and workshop participants. So one bad moment probably hurt less than you think.
Self-compassion also turns out to be more useful than self-criticism. In four experiments published in 2012 in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Juliana Breines and Serena Chen found that people encouraged to treat a mistake with understanding were more motivated to fix it, and in one study they spent longer studying after failing a test, than people in comparison groups. That study is older, but its message holds: beating yourself up doesn’t make you a better listener.
Third, be patient with the timeline. A December 2024 systematic review in Healthcare by Ben Singh and colleagues at the University of South Australia covered 20 studies and 2,601 adults. In the four studies that measured timing directly, habits took a median of 59 to 66 days to form, with individual estimates ranging from 4 to 335 days. Those studies looked at health habits, not conversation, so treat the numbers as a rough guide. One of the underlying studies also found that missing a single opportunity didn’t really derail the process. One hijacked dinner isn’t a relapse. It’s just Tuesday.
Conclusion
Talking about yourself isn’t a crime. Your brain rewards it, and the people around you do want to know you. The problem is only when your stories keep crowding out theirs.
So pick one move from this list, probably follow-up questions or quitting the boomerask, and practice it for a few weeks before adding another. Watch what happens to your conversations when people start feeling heard. Then come back and explore more of our relationships guides for your next step.
