You’re in the middle of explaining your idea during a team meeting when your manager cuts you off mid-sentence: “Actually, what we should do is…” Your words hang in the air, unfinished. Everyone’s attention shifts to them. You sit back in your chair, that familiar knot forming in your stomach.
Or maybe it’s dinner with friends. You start telling a story about something that happened to you, and before you reach the punchline, someone jumps in with their own experience. Then someone else. Then someone else. Twenty minutes later, your story is still untold, and you’re wondering why you even bother speaking.
Sound familiar?
Being interrupted isn’t just annoying—it’s information. When someone consistently talks over you, they’re communicating something beyond the words they’re using to cut you off. Sometimes what they’re signaling is about power. Sometimes it’s about anxiety. Sometimes it’s about you, but often it’s entirely about them.
The fascinating part? Most people who interrupt don’t realize what they’re actually revealing about themselves and the relationship dynamic. They’re usually not rubbing their hands together thinking, “How can I assert dominance today?” They’re operating on autopilot, acting out patterns they may not even recognize.
Why This Matters More Than Manners
We tend to think of interruptions as simple etiquette violations—someone forgot their conversational manners, didn’t they? But decades of research tell a different story. Linguists and psychologists have studied interruption patterns extensively, and what they’ve discovered is that interruptions map almost perfectly onto existing power structures in the room.
Who interrupts whom reveals who feels entitled to speak, who believes their contribution matters more, and who unconsciously sees themselves as having conversational priority. These aren’t just individual quirks—they’re windows into relationship dynamics, organizational hierarchies, and social conditioning that most of us absorb without questioning.
A 2025 study published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior examined workplace interruptions from the interrupter’s perspective and found something telling: many people who interrupt genuinely don’t realize they’re doing it, or if they do, they minimize its impact. They see themselves as enthusiastic contributors, not conversation dominators.
Meanwhile, the person being interrupted often internalizes the experience differently. You start second-guessing yourself: “Maybe my point wasn’t important. Maybe I’m talking too much. Maybe I’m boring people.” Over time, repeated interruptions can actually change how you show up in conversations—you become more hesitant, less confident, quieter.
Understanding what interruptions signal helps you respond appropriately rather than just feeling frustrated or diminished. It gives you back your power by helping you see the pattern for what it actually is.
The 6 Signals Behind Being Talked Over
1. They’re Asserting Status and Power (Whether They Know It or Not)
Let’s start with the most documented signal: interruptions as power moves. Research consistently shows that people with higher perceived status interrupt more often and get interrupted less frequently. This isn’t coincidental.
A Stanford study by doctoral candidate Katherine Hilton surveyed 5,000 American English speakers and found that perceptions of interruptions vary based on power dynamics. When someone in a position of authority interrupts you, they’re often reinforcing a hierarchy—reminding everyone (including themselves) about who holds conversational control.
This happens constantly in workplace settings. Recent research on power dynamics in meetings found that senior leaders often speak first, talk more, and are more likely to interrupt—frequently without realizing it. The data shows leaders often dominate airtime by speaking quickly, interrupting, or unintentionally shutting down contributions from people closest to the work.
What makes this particularly insidious is that it creates a self-reinforcing cycle. When senior people interrupt with impunity, junior people learn to self-censor. They wait too long to speak, or they stop contributing altogether. This reinforces the leader’s belief that they have the best ideas, which leads to more interrupting, which further silences others.
Sometimes this is conscious. The boss who consistently cuts off their team members knows exactly what they’re doing—maintaining control, projecting authority, keeping subordinates in check. But often, it’s unconscious habitual behavior born from being in positions of power for so long that they’ve forgotten what it feels like to be interrupted.
Pay attention to patterns: Does this person interrupt everyone, or just people they perceive as “beneath” them in some hierarchy? Do they interrupt the CEO as readily as they interrupt the intern? The answer reveals whether this is about general communication style or specifically about asserting dominance over certain people.
2. They View the Conversation as Competition, Not Collaboration
Some people treat every conversation like a zero-sum game. If you’re talking, they’re losing. If they’re talking, they’re winning. For them, interrupting isn’t rude—it’s strategic.
This shows up most clearly in what researchers call “conversational narcissism.” A 1990 study published in Communication Monographs by Vangelisti, Knapp, and Daly identified behavioral markers of conversational narcissism: boasting, refocusing topics back to oneself, exaggerating gestures, using a loud tone, and—crucially—”glazing over” when others speak.
Sociologist Charles Derber, whose work on this topic has become foundational, distinguishes between “shift-responses” and “support-responses” in conversation. A support-response keeps attention on the other person’s topic: “That sounds difficult. What happened next?” A shift-response redirects attention to oneself: “That reminds me of when I…”
People who constantly talk over you are often excessive users of shift-responses. They’re not interested in building on your ideas or exploring your experiences—they’re looking for the first opportunity to make the conversation about them again. Your words are merely a launching pad for their next monologue.
This competitive conversational style often stems from what Derber calls “attention-getting psychology”—a cultural conditioning where people compete for limited social attention rather than creating space for mutual exchange. In our highly individualistic, status-driven society, this behavior gets rewarded. The person who talks most confidently and dominates the conversation is often seen as the leader, the expert, the one worth listening to.
When someone interrupts you to immediately redirect to their own experience, they’re signaling: “Your story doesn’t matter as much as mine. Your contribution is valuable only insofar as it reminds me of something about myself.”
3. They’re Drowning in Their Own Anxiety and Can’t Hold Space
Not all interruptions are power plays. Sometimes when people talk over you, it’s actually a signal of their internal discomfort rather than any intentional disrespect toward you.
Some people interrupt because they’re anxious about losing their train of thought. Their working memory feels precarious, so the moment an idea occurs to them, they blurt it out—regardless of whether you’re mid-sentence. For them, the risk of forgetting their thought feels more urgent than the social cost of interrupting.
Others interrupt because silence feels unbearable. The natural pauses in conversation that allow for reflection and response trigger anxiety in them. They fill every gap compulsively, not because they don’t value your contribution, but because stillness makes them deeply uncomfortable.
Then there are people who interrupt as a misguided form of connection. They genuinely think they’re showing engagement by jumping in with related thoughts or finishing your sentences. Research on conversational styles shows that people from “high-intensity” conversational backgrounds—families where everyone talks over each other enthusiastically—often don’t perceive simultaneous speech as interruptive at all. They see it as engaged and friendly.
Katherine Hilton’s Stanford research revealed this fascinating divide: participants with high-intensity conversational styles reported that conversations where people spoke simultaneously when expressing agreement were not interruptive but engaged and friendlier than conversations with pauses between speakers.
The challenge is that anxiety-driven interruptions still have consequences. Even if the intent isn’t to diminish you, the impact is the same: your voice gets silenced, your thoughts go unfinished, and you’re left feeling unheard. Good intentions don’t erase harm, especially when the pattern repeats consistently.
If someone’s interruptions stem from anxiety rather than dominance, they’ll often apologize mid-interruption when they catch themselves, look genuinely distressed about cutting you off, and make efforts to circle back to your point. They’re not trying to take over—they’re just struggling to regulate their own internal experience.
4. They Fundamentally Don’t Respect Your Perspective or Expertise
Sometimes the signal is simple and harsh: they don’t think what you have to say matters.
This often correlates with other markers of disrespect. People who don’t value your input typically also: dismiss your ideas in other ways, fail to make eye contact when you speak, physically turn away from you during conversation, forget or misremember things you’ve told them, or take credit for your contributions while interrupting your explanations.
Gender bias in interruption patterns is particularly well-documented. Hilton’s Stanford research found a striking gender disparity: male listeners were more likely to view women who interrupted another speaker as ruder, less friendly, and less intelligent than men who interrupted. This double standard means women face harsher judgment for the same behavior men regularly get away with—or even get praised for as “assertive.”
The research also showed that women tend to be seen more negatively than men when they speak up or interrupt. This creates a psychological trap: women who stay silent get overlooked, but women who speak up get labeled as interruptive or aggressive.
In professional settings, this manifests as expertise dismissal. Junior people interrupt senior people less because of organizational hierarchy, but there’s often an additional layer where certain identities—women, people of color, younger professionals—get interrupted more regardless of their actual expertise or position.
A 2024 study on workplace psychological safety from the American Psychological Association found that employees who experience higher psychological safety are more likely to report their organizations respect their boundaries. The inverse is also true: in environments where certain people get constantly interrupted and talked over, psychological safety erodes. People stop contributing not because they lack good ideas, but because the social cost of speaking becomes too high.
When someone repeatedly interrupts you specifically—but not others in the room—that’s information about how they’ve categorized you in their mental hierarchy. They’ve decided, consciously or not, that your contribution has less value than others’.
5. They’re Operating on Autopilot and Simply Haven’t Learned Better
Not every pattern has a sinister explanation. Sometimes people interrupt because they’ve never been taught conversational skills or they’ve never had anyone hold up a mirror to their behavior.
Research on conversational narcissism points out that these behaviors don’t necessarily indicate narcissistic personality disorder. Many people exhibit conversational narcissism simply because of: poor modeling in their family of origin, cultural conditioning that rewards loudness over listening, lack of feedback about their communication style, or genuine obliviousness to conversational dynamics.
Think about how people learn to have conversations. Mostly, we absorb patterns from the adults around us during childhood and adolescence. If you grew up in a household where everyone interrupted each other constantly, where the loudest voice won, where holding the floor meant never yielding it—you learned that this is how conversation works.
Some people have literally never experienced different conversational dynamics. They’ve never been in spaces where people wait for natural transition points, where listeners ask follow-up questions about the speaker’s topic, where turns are distributed equitably. They’re not being malicious—they’re being unskilled.
The good news about autopilot interruptions: they’re often the most changeable. When someone genuinely doesn’t realize their pattern, direct feedback can create transformation. “Hey, I notice you tend to jump in before I’ve finished my thoughts. It makes me feel like you’re not interested in what I’m saying” can actually land and create awareness.
The bad news: many people react defensively to this feedback. They’ll explain why they had to interrupt, justify their behavior, or minimize the impact. This defensive response often reveals that the interrupting wasn’t entirely unconscious after all.
6. They’re Responding to Your Communication Style (And It’s Inviting Interruption)
This is the hardest signal to acknowledge, but sometimes chronic interruptions are partly a response to how you’re communicating.
Before you get defensive, hear me out: This doesn’t mean interrupting is your fault. People are still responsible for their own behavior. But certain communication patterns do make interruptions more likely, and recognizing that gives you agency to change dynamics you’re unhappy with.
Patterns that can invite more interruptions include: speaking without pause for extended periods, circling back to the same point repeatedly instead of moving forward, speaking in a soft or uncertain tone that signals you’re not confident in your contribution, trailing off at the ends of sentences rather than landing them firmly, or not making eye contact, which can signal to others that you’re finished.
Conversational dynamics are interactive. Research on turn-taking in conversation shows that people use subtle cues to manage who speaks when: pauses, intonation changes, gesture completion, and gaze patterns all signal whether you’re holding the floor or yielding it.
If your speech patterns consistently send “I’m almost done” signals even when you have more to say, people will start talking. If you fill all available conversational space without leaving natural openings for response, people will interrupt because it’s the only way to contribute.
Additionally, if you’ve established a pattern of accepting interruptions without asserting yourself—immediately going silent when someone talks over you, never circling back to finish your point, thanking people for interrupting you—you’ve taught others that interrupting you carries no social cost.
This doesn’t excuse chronic interrupters. But it does mean you have more power to shift these dynamics than you might think. Learning to hold the floor with confidence, to explicitly say “let me finish this thought,” to make eye contact and project vocal authority—these skills can significantly reduce how often people talk over you.
What the Patterns Reveal About Relationships
The most important thing isn’t identifying why one person interrupts you once. It’s recognizing patterns that reveal the true nature of your relationships and environments.
Healthy relationships have conversational reciprocity. Sometimes you speak more, sometimes they speak more, but over time there’s balance. Interruptions are occasional and apologized for. Both people make efforts to ensure the other feels heard.
Unhealthy relationships are marked by consistent imbalances. One person chronically dominates. Interruptions flow in one direction. Certain people’s contributions consistently get more airtime and validation than others.
In workplace contexts, research on organizational hierarchies shows that power dynamics created by formal structures often contribute to conflicts around status, communication, and access to resources. This creates unhealthy competition and eventually conflict. When these patterns aren’t addressed, they lead to toxic environments where certain voices simply stop contributing.
Pay attention to who interrupts whom and in what contexts:
- If you get interrupted constantly at work but not in your friend group, that’s information about the workplace power dynamics or how you’re perceived professionally
- If one specific person always interrupts you but not others, that’s information about how they view your relationship or your relative status
- If everyone interrupts everyone in your family, that might be cultural style rather than disrespect—but it’s worth evaluating whether that style actually serves everyone’s needs
Reclaiming Your Voice in the Conversation
Understanding what interruptions signal gives you options for responding. You’re no longer just a passive recipient of other people’s conversational habits—you can actively shape the dynamics.
For power-based interruptions: Don’t cede the floor. Continue speaking, raise your volume slightly, use a hand gesture to signal you’re not done. Say explicitly: “I wasn’t finished” or “Let me complete this thought.” After the interruption, circle back: “As I was saying before…” This communicates that your contributions have value and won’t be dismissed.
For competitive/narcissistic interruptions: Recognize that you’re dealing with someone who views conversations as performances, not exchanges. Limit what you share with them. When you do speak, keep it concise and land your points firmly before they can redirect. Consider whether this relationship serves you if there’s never genuine mutual exchange.
For anxiety-driven interruptions: Address it directly with compassion: “I notice you often jump in mid-sentence. I assume you’re not trying to cut me off, but it has that effect. Can you work on letting me finish my thoughts?” Many anxious interrupters will genuinely try to change once they’re aware of the pattern.
For disrespect-based interruptions: This is the hardest to address because the problem is the relationship itself, not just the communication style. Document the pattern, bring in witnesses if it’s in professional contexts, and seriously evaluate whether this person deserves continued access to you. You cannot logic someone into respecting you if they’ve decided you don’t warrant it.
For autopilot interruptions: Clear, kind feedback works best. “When you interrupt me, I feel like my thoughts don’t matter to you. Can you let me finish before jumping in with your response?” Give them time to change the pattern, but hold firm boundaries if the behavior continues.
For interruptions you’re inadvertently inviting: Work on your own communication skills. Practice speaking with authority, making clear statements rather than hedging, pausing intentionally rather than trailing off, and explicitly asserting your right to the floor when someone interrupts.
The Conversation About Conversations
Here’s what many people miss: you can actually talk about how you talk to each other. Meta-conversations about communication patterns are some of the most valuable discussions you can have in any relationship.
“I’ve noticed I get interrupted a lot in our team meetings. I’m wondering if others have noticed that too, and whether we can establish a norm where people finish their thoughts before others jump in.”
“I feel like our conversations often end up being about you. I love hearing about your life, but I also need space to share what’s going on with me. Can we work on more balance?”
These conversations feel risky because they make the invisible visible. But avoiding them means accepting dynamics that diminish you. Sometimes the discomfort of addressing the pattern is far less costly than the accumulated harm of enduring it.
In professional contexts, establishing explicit norms can help: “In this meeting, let’s use hand-raising so everyone gets heard” or “Let’s implement a no-interruption rule for the person presenting.” These structures level the playing field and make power dynamics less determinative of who speaks.
Moving Forward With Clearer Eyes
You probably won’t stop being interrupted entirely—conversation is messy, humans are imperfect, and sometimes people talk over each other without meaning harm. That’s normal.
But chronic patterns of being talked over aren’t something you need to accept as inevitable. They’re information about relationships, power structures, respect levels, and communication skills. Once you see these signals clearly, you can decide how to respond.
Maybe you realize your workplace culture systematically silences certain voices, and you advocate for changes. Maybe you recognize that a friend has anxiety-driven interrupting patterns and you address it compassionately. Maybe you discover your own communication style inadvertently invites interruption and you work on speaking with more authority.
Or maybe you simply stop wasting energy on people who consistently demonstrate they don’t value your voice. That’s information worth having, too.
The people who genuinely care about you will make efforts to hear you when you tell them their interruptions hurt. The people who respect your expertise will make space for your contributions. The people who view you as an equal will engage in conversational reciprocity rather than dominance.
Everyone else? They’re showing you exactly how they see you. Believe them, and act accordingly.
What’s been your experience with being talked over? Have you noticed patterns in who interrupts you and when? I’d love to hear your observations in the comments—your experiences might help someone else recognize dynamics they’ve been struggling to name.
If this resonated with you, share it with someone who might benefit from understanding what interruptions actually signal. Sometimes just knowing we’re not imagining things—that these patterns are real and documented—makes all the difference.