Interrupting while another person is speaking is one of those behaviors that, when repeated, ends up taking its toll. Whoever receives the cut is left with the feeling that they are not allowed to finish, that their story matters less or that the dialogue becomes a competition to place their own sentence. The usual thing is to interpret it as bad manners or a need for prominence, but psychology and the study of conversation suggest that many interruptions do not arise from a conscious intention to impose oneself, but from how the brain manages the turn, attention and urgency to respond.
In a normal conversation, people do not wait for the other person to close with “I’m done” before starting to talk. What actually happens is that you predict when the other person is reaching the end of the turn, and that coordination usually works quite accurately. He classic work of Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson He described this alternation system as a very fine social mechanism, capable of holding fluid conversations without explicit rules.
When that prediction fails, overlap appears. And here an important nuance is appropriate, since not every overlap is experienced as an aggressive interruption. There are entries that sound like support, enthusiasm or “I follow you”, and others that sound like a cut-off. The border, many times, is not marked only by time, but by context.
The mind does not stay still while listening, it also prepares what it is going to say.
From a psychological approach, listening and responding are processes that are stepped on. While one part of the cognitive system interprets what comes to it, another part constructs a possible response. In people with more communicative impulsiveness, anxiety or a fast conversational style, this response “asks for an exit” ahead of time.
The fear of losing the idea also influences. In cognitive psychology, research on interruptions shows that cutting off a task makes it difficult to keep the goal active and get back to it quickly, which helps explain why some people feel the urge to speak “before I forget.” In studies on “resumption lag” the cost of reengaging in what one was doing after an interruption is observed precisely.
What counts as an interruption depends on who perceives it.
Another key point is that “he interrupted me” does not always describe an objective fact, but rather an interpretation. A work published by Stanford Universitybased on an extensive survey and controlled clips, analyzed how the perception of interruption changes depending on the listener’s conversational style and the type of input, even when the overlap is minimal or debatable. In other words, two people can hear the same thing and not agree on whether there has been an interruption or simple conversational coordination.
Therefore, when categorical percentages of interruptions are cited, extreme caution should be exercised. Before quantifying, you must decide what is being measured, and academic literature has been discussing for years precisely how to code and measure interruptions without confusing them with overlaps, supports or topic changes. An example is the article Social Psychology Quarterly which addresses syntactic and contextual methods to encode conversation and focuses on this difficulty of measurement.
It is not just the intention and yes, the relationship
The fact that the interruption is not malicious does not prevent it from having consequences. If it happens regularly, the other person may read it as a lack of interest, impatience, or a need to control the direction of the conversation. That’s where burnout appears, since the conversation stops feeling safe and begins to feel like a battle for the turn.
The output is usually less spectacular than it seems, but it works when practiced: training more conscious listening, giving real space to silences and learning to hold the idea without needing to let it go immediately. It’s not about talking less, but about speaking at the right time so that the other person doesn’t have the feeling that, whatever they say, it will always be left in the middle.