The Dangers of Social Media and Digital Communication

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"My whole business is online. So I get a lot of people talking back to me," she says. "I usually ignore it, but every now and then I'll respond to an email where it's just like someone's just really angry." If you don't respond with anger, in other words, if you would come back at him, that just escalates. But somehow, like you're taking that energy that he's pushing toward you,. And what like absorbing it?"

We live in a chatter-filled world. People will talk your ear off when you see them in person and everyone is constantly sharing their thoughts online. But my guest would say that all this chatter may be hurting us more than we know, and it would be better to close our pieholes and sit on our typing fingers a lot more often than we do.

His name is Dan Lyons, and he's the author of STFU: The Power of Keeping Your Mouth Shut in an Endlessly Noisy World. Today on the show, Dan unpacks how being quiet and speaking with greater intention can improve your life. We discuss why some people tend to overtalk more than others and the six types of overtalkers out there, from the blurter to the most extreme case, the talkaholic, for whom overtalking is practically an addiction. We then discuss not getting sucked into spouting off online, avoiding conversational narcissism, the argument for spending less time working on your personal brand and more time doing quality work, how silence is power, how the best way to deal with issues in a marriage may be by not talking about them, and more.