Let someone else carry the conversation for once. You don’t have to rescue every pause.

Silence in a conversation feels like a job that has landed on you, and it rarely is. If you always fill the pause, you train everyone, including yourself, into a shape where talking is your task and listening is theirs. The lull is also where the other person was about to say the real thing. Rescuing it stops that before it starts.

Try letting the next quiet stretch go three seconds longer than is comfortable. Count if you need to. Most of the time somebody else picks it up, and often they say something better than what you were about to.