Should you overshare more?

3 hours ago 5

Do you recoil at oversharers on social media, or joke among your friends about “TMI”? I know I do. But while mocking public confession comes easy, it’s harder to appreciate the risks of normalising silence: withheld anxieties, unspoken family histories, and the little omissions that make workplaces and relationships brittle. The instinct to pour scorn on “attention seekers” may be masking a deeper public-health problem: chronic concealment.

For much of my career as an academic I made a living scolding people about privacy. I lectured on digital hygiene, warned audiences about the ways social media amplifies folly, and played the role of the wary scientist: don’t put your passwords in a document, don’t take quizzes that leak your intimate preferences, don’t broadcast things you can’t take back. I was a walking contradiction, though. Privately, I did online quizzes for fun. I kept a notepad of passwords on my desktop. I knew the rules and, like many of us, I broke them.

That cognitive dissonance eventually stopped being tolerable. When I stepped back to look at the broader patterns that have emerged from research – not just on privacy but on disclosure, trust and health – I saw something surprising. The consistent signal wasn’t that humans are inveterate oversharers; it was that we are underexposing the things that matter. We were treating silence as a default virtue. But that default has costs.

One set of experiments altered my views in the bluntest possible way. In a study we called What Hiding Reveals, my team and I gave people an awkward but revealing choice: imagine you’re going to date one of two people, but you can ask each a set of questions. One candidate answers frankly (even admitting painful, stigmatised facts, like drug use or cheating on their taxes); the other refuses to answer. Which would you choose? Time and again, across contexts – dating, hiring, sitting next to someone on the subway – people picked the revealer. Not because we like bad news, but because we prefer openness to conspicuous withholding.

Why? Because disclosure, even about flaws, is a social signal. To reveal something sensitive is to take a social risk; that risk-taking signals trustworthiness, and trust begets trust. When someone declines to answer, they aren’t merely protecting some unglamorous fact; they’re withholding the currency of social life. We interpret that omission as contempt, evasiveness, or unreliability – and we respond accordingly.

A second line of evidence raised further doubts. Neuroimaging research shows that answering questions about ourselves – the act of revealing – activates brain regions associated with reward. In lay terms, telling someone about yourself can feel pleasurable in the same way other social rewards do. If evolution wired disclosure to be aversive, it wouldn’t have persisted as a trait; the fact that it can be enjoyable suggests it’s been adaptive. The pleasure isn’t narcissistic vanity so much as the brain’s shorthand for “this behaviour helps you connect, and connection helps you survive”.

And there’s a physiological case, too. In work by developmental researchers the pattern is stark: the more children express how they feel, the less physiologically stressed (measured in terms of arousal, including sweat, and heart rate and so on) they become. Children who mask or suppress their emotions show higher stress markers; those who let feelings surface recover more quickly. Over time, cultural lessons about “don’t be dramatic” can calcify into habits of withholding that raise baseline stress and make emotional life more precarious.

Put together, these findings shifted my understanding. Not towards the idea that confessing everything to everyone is good. There are obvious, important constraints: power asymmetries (what an employee tells a boss can be weaponised), privacy rights, safety concerns, and the moral importance of protecting others’ confidences. The point is narrower and, to my mind, more urgent: we should stop treating silence as the unchallenged baseline.

So what does it look like to loosen the grip of silence, without tipping into indiscriminate confession? The first step is simply noticing how much goes unsaid. When I teach this, I ask people to do a crude audit of their day. Imagine two jars: one labelled “said”, the other “unsaid”. Every time you voice a thought, drop a mental token into the first jar; every time you think something but withhold it, drop one into the second. The exercise is revealing. Most of what ends up in the unsaid jar isn’t scandalous or dangerous – it’s mundane, emotional context: “I didn’t sleep well”; “I’m more overwhelmed than I look”; “That comment meant more to me than you realise”.

The second step is to treat at least a few of those moments as actual decisions, rather than reflexes. When people confront disclosure dilemmas head-on – should I tell my boss I have ADHD and ask for accommodation? Should I admit I’m nervous about this presentation? – they reliably fixate on the risks of revealing. Those risks are real. But we rarely ask the symmetrical question: what are the risks of not telling? Missed opportunities for help. Emotional distance mistaken for indifference. When people are prompted to weigh both sides, their choices become more deliberate and are very often different.

The third step is to go one layer deeper than you ordinarily would. Most everyday conversation stays at the level of commentary: “busy day, great meeting, the kids are having fun”. Calibrated revealing doesn’t mean saying everything. It means occasionally adding what it means to you. “I’m excited about this meeting – and a bit nervous”; “They’re laughing so much – I can’t remember the last time I laughed like that”. That extra layer isn’t cost-free, but it opens up possibilities that pure commentary seldom does: for understanding, coordination, support – and fun.

This matters because revealing is a skill. And like any skill, it improves with practice. As a youngster, I lived in Germany with my family. Despite the immersion, I never became fluent in German, because I was afraid of making mistakes. I tiptoed around verb endings, froze over cases, and treated der, die, das (and their many friends) as high-stakes landmines. My brother took the opposite approach. He spoke constantly, cheerfully mangled the grammar, and kept going. Years later, he’s fluent. I’m not.

We also need better social scaffolding for safe revealing – norms and spaces where people feel permitted to say “this is hard for me” without being judged. That’s partly cultural work (teaching kids to label emotions, modelling admissions of error) and partly structural (privacy protections in workplaces, sensible rules around what managers can ask).

I remain, proudly, a recovering privacy expert. I still worry about data security, and I still cringe at the performative confessions that make parts of the public sphere so offputting. But I’m convinced that our preoccupation with oversharing distracts us from a quieter harm. Oversharing feels dangerous because it is vivid; concealment feels safer because it is invisible. The greater risk, I suspect, isn’t saying too much – it’s saying nothing at all.

Leslie John is a professor at Harvard Business School and author of Revealing (Torva).