The Unbearable Loudness of Chewing
asteriskmag.com
asteriskmag.com
The only thing I find to improve it is to not be tired or stressed when eating with others, or lively conversation as a distraction. Easy, right?
- People don't want to feel judged, and people will assume you are judging them (not the core issue with misophonia)
- It takes energy to change and accommodate and people might rather not
- If you don't have misophonia, it's not very understandable or relatable to others
While I wish I could snap my fingers and have everyone change, I think I'm more of the mindset now of:
- I need to try to get help (therapy) to minimize the impact on myself
- It's worth asking the few people you spend the most time around to meet you halfway on this stuff
- It's probably unreasonable to ask most people to alter their behavior (and tiring to keep asking everyone)
That said… I'd be lying if I didn't often think "OK man it's not that hard to just close your mouth." But that's more of an inside thought.
Really? Scott Alexander had a response to this very article pointing out that judgment does indeed seem to be the core issue with misophonia ( https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/misophonia-beyond-sensory-s... ):
> So it’s a sensory hypersensitivity, right? Maybe not. There’s increasing evidence - which I learned about from Jake [author of the Asterisk piece], but which didn’t make it into the article - that misophonia is less about sound than it seems.
> Misophoniacs who go deaf report that it doesn’t go away. Now they get triggered if they see someone chewing. It’s the same with other noises. Someone who gets triggered by the sound of forks scraping against a table will eventually get triggered by the sight of the scraping fork. Someone triggered by music will eventually get triggered by someone playing a music video on mute.
> If you trick misophoniacs into thinking their trigger sounds are something else, they won’t get triggered. In this study, scientists played people who hated chewing sounds a video (with audio) of someone chewing; unsurprisingly, they hated it. Then they played them a video of someone walking on squelching snow, but the audio track was secretly actually the same chewing sounds. It looked like the snow was making the noise - now the misophoniacs didn’t hate it!
> some misophoniacs say that they’re only triggered by specific people - usually those close to them. If some rando chews loudly, they’ll be mildly annoyed; if their brother does, they’ll flip out. Probably there’s a reasonable explanation here too, but at this point maybe we should also be considering a larger-scale update.
> even as misophonia makes me miserable - even as I absolutely fail to overcome it - I can’t help feeling like it’s sort of fake. I’d already noticed something like the thing about people close to me. The way I thought of it was something about righteous anger. The sound of the wind in the trees barely bothered me at all, because there was no one to get angry at. Sounds that were natural parts of the social order were nearly as benign - I didn’t like hearing the bus driver announce the next stop, but it was an inevitable part of the bus-riding experience and I was resigned to it. But if a group of gangbangers scared the kids out of the nearby park and put on loud music while smoking drugs, I would go through the roof.
He doesn't actually make the connection, but the way he describes his own experience with misophonia is pretty much identical to the phenomenon of e.g. compulsively checking a Twitter feed from someone you hate.
But given my lifestyle, I almost never have to be around anybody who's eating, except in contexts in which I can't hear them eating (busy brunch, say).
However, I'm not sure I agree that the taboo you describe is a kind of unreasonable cultural quirk. It is a pretty uncomfortable imposition to be asked to eat more quietly. It's more confrontational by nature than e.g. asking somebody if they wouldn't mind being a little quieter in the theater. And yes, some people surely become too provoked by the request, but also the person making the request could often do a better job with the tone. Either way though, finding a truly non-provocative angle for this request is basically intractable.
I agree. At a minimum, it needs to clearly come off as a "it's not you or personal, it's this weird condition I have, it's difficult for me to control at this time, and it causes me distress" - which is 100% true.
> Either way though, finding a truly non-provocative angle for this request is basically intractable.
You definitely never know what you're going to get from people! But, I suppose it's good to know if others have room to make space for you.
In any case that still wasn't good enough for them, so I proffered some helpful suggestions for alternative solutions to the problem, which was that they take themselves somewhere else, or they could learn to deal with it themselves. Unfortunately this was taken extremely personally and caused great offense, judging by the reaction.
I have even pointed out to them when they are eating loudly and they do the revenge chew thing you're talking about, lol. I don't think the rational part of their brain has reconciled the fact that it's not actually possible for them to eat silently with their unreasonable demands of others.
At some point if your behavior is outside the norm, things are going to go more smoothly for you if you cater to the rest of society and deal rather than the other way around. You can always ask people to eat quieter and maybe they should but you'll certainly annoy and/or embarrass many people by asking, that's the reality.
> The only thing I find to improve it is to not be tired or stressed when eating with others, or lively conversation as a distraction. Easy, right?
That does actually sound easy unless you work at a restaurant or on a submarine or something.
"I'm not sure if you're aware, but you are chewing quite loudly"
Tone (neutral) is important. Sometimes they genuinely aren't aware. They know it's theoretically a social faux pas but never thought to check themselves.
I think they've grown up around loud eaters.
I've had nice conversations about it, the person listened, but was only able to be reasonable quiet for a short period of time. And then simply reverted. (they didn't care)
I found the best solution was simply to face this head on and deaden my reactions to it. This reduced my reactions to a living tolerable level.
Well, that's just you not empathizing with them. Chewing is not too different from walking. Imagine if someone told you they think your gait is too short, and could you take longer steps. How long would you be able to hold your affected gait before going back to your optimal gait?
Any subconscious behavior has to be controlled with a lot of effort and focus to change.
Almost no one I have ever met has changed a subconscious behavior, just because I asked in a certain way.
Walking can be met half way, or I can adjust _my_ gait to match there's. There's no equivalent to an irritating behavior.
Decades later, I still get abruptly and irrationally angry when people smack their lips, though I have learnt to suppress the urge to assault the source of the sound.
I can't eat with my Chinese colleagues. I get that more air makes each bite taste better, but it is hard to eat or even focus when your brain is telling you to rip their heads off to stop the sound.
It's an odd curse to live with, as, aside from the situation with my brother, I have otherwise never hurt or assaulted anyone in my life and am generally regarded as a softy. I have to force myself to sit at the dinner table with my mother when she visits, as she still smacks her lips.
Some people smack their lips in quick succession when they taste something new, like how birds drink water, and it drives me up the walls. Slurping is triggering, but not as much. Some people swallow excessively as presenters and will make a "tsk" sound with their tongues before speaking, which is worse than slurping and usually causes me to stop watching the presentation.
I'm glad there is some traction with misophonia research. We need help.
> I can't eat with my Chinese colleagues.
Now imagine marrying a brilliant, gorgeous Chinese woman who slurps and snorts and air-swallows. Drives me & the kids berserk. Her father is even worse. Shudder.
For me and the kids it’s a private joke but the rage part hits when she eats in public. Noiseless! What’re we, chopped liver?
I also have a bunch of other stupid problems like that. Extreme aversion to coffee breath and onion or garlic breath; having to remove shirt tags; inability to sit through out-of-tune musical performers; physical reaction to voices; ability to identify people by smell, etc.
I simply cannot understand why producers of shirts (anything you wear, actually) feel the need to stretch a tak which is rough and creates physical pain for me.
And for one of my sons, but not to the other
It is possible to overcome the "MAKES YOU FEEL" part of this. External stimulus will always be there, but with some training, the only thing that "Makes you feel" will be you. You notice the pain in your knees, but it flows over you as water flows past the stone in the river.
This is easy to say but not easy to do. It takes quite a few hours of deliberate practice. Some people never get there. But, I think it is worth a try. Find a mediation class. Go every week.
Sometimes it turns out that video games really aren't fun, thought loops aren't productive, everything sucks and is boring, and the present experience of breathing on and out is really the best show in town
The trouble is willing myself into accepting these reasons. The thought "Why are you doing that. Don't you notice?" is nigh unavoidable. It takes conscious effort to not show signs of irritation externally. Sometimes I simply have to politely remove myself.
I have a misophonia response to dripping faucets but only if they can be adjusted and turned off. When I spent the night somewhere with a broken faucet, the pain disappeared once I realized it couldn't be fixed.
Ive been turning that over in my mind for years, trying to figure out how to apply the lesson to chewing.
Here's a theory. Do you normally have thought processes going on that you enjoy, and that seem fragile, that is to say easily disrupted, so you have a precious attitude when somebody distracts you, like Coleridge's hated Person from Porlock (who ruined Kubla Khan)? I mean that's a shot in the dark, we all have different potential reasons to fall into the same bucket, but this is one of them. So, naturally, what I hate most is if somebody starts some kind of performance, because a performance dominates the attention by design. This could be an inane conversation near me, or at me, or it could be music. Even music I usually love can be deeply aggravating when I was hoping to maintain a different mood.
In your case I suppose you were trying to sleep, which is a similar situation of being precious about mood, detesting being disturbed.
Chatter and music are only the most obviously disruptive forms of noise, the attention-grabbing ones. So what's the connection between other people's irresponsibility, and the irritation cause by more trivial noises, ones that ought to be ignorable?
I think this is a case of feedback. The injustice, and the potential escalation, and the social difficulty in reasoning with the person, all cause cogitation. The cogitation makes the distraction worse! Now it's even more unfair! And so on.
To mention animals again, sometimes the dawn chorus aggravates me: but this is when I've been burning the candle at both ends - in which case the singing birds are reminding me that I've run out of time, and that I've been forced to accept factors in my life that put pressure on my time, and it's so unjust - a thought that irritates me, taking away even more time. And that is disgusting. Those idiot birds!
He came from a farm in rural farm town. He probably never had been around more than a few people at once, let alone eating together.
Anyway in a few months he was normal and had no problem eating in a crowd.
Misophonia is when you have an uncontrollable fight or flight reaction to trigger sounds. You can think of it as a miswired nervous system that reacts to certain sounds with fear and/or anger. In this case it's not about preference ("I find the sound rude") but something deeper and more neurological.
It sounds like your friend probably didn't have misophonia if he was simply able to get used to it after a few months.
My closest mental image is people genuinely enjoying some soup, to immediately puke it out as they hear it's made from crushed bugs, even as it's a lie. The reaction is visceral and uncontrollable, but the cause is not physical and is deeply rooted into their mind.
I made it a point of going to the cafeteria with him and my friends would join us - usually in a table of 10, mixed sex. In retrospect it was probably torture for him. At the beginning is when he confided with me about his phobia about eating but maybe out of naïveté I didn’t care - he was my friend and he ate with us and eventually it didn’t seem to be the big deal it was when I first met him, especially after he got a bf in the friend group.
Sometimes, in such infections, particular sounds seem to vibrate my (irritated, inflamed, sensitized) eardrums in a particularly noticeable and distracting way. It's not all sounds, though! Based on the feeling and the triggers, I'd say the feeling is of there being something gummed up right against (the inside side of) my eardrum; where specific frequencies of vibration cause the eardrum to rub itself against this gummy thing.
And other times, in such infections, particular sounds seem to not irritate the eardrum per se, but rather the auditory canal (Eustachian tube). In those cases, it feels like sounds of the right frequency seem to resonate the auditory canal itself (not usually possible due to it being open+connected to your sinuses — but possible when that opening is plugged with gunk!), causing any little dried bits of "stuff" (blood clots, stones from antibody-expunged bacterial biofilms, etc) to "rattle around" inside there. These sensations make me wish I could somehow stick a finger right through my eardrum and down my auditory canal, and itch the spot. (Or get a Eustachian-tube suctioning. Too bad they won't do that to you unless you go deaf from blockage; the one time I did get it, I heard better than I have in years!)
Anyway, this is all enough to make me wonder whether at least some of the people with misophonia (or auditory-hypersensitive sensory processing disorders) just have chronic undiagnosed middle-ear infections (or sequelae of such.)
Now we have a better relationship, to the point where I felt comfortable discussing my discomfort with his chewing. But rather than frame it as "Can you please chew more quietly", I told him I'd prefer to wear earbuds when we eat dinner together. I also told him about misophonia, which I had learned about in the intervening years since childhood. He was a little confused, but didn't feel like I was criticizing him.
Now when we eat together, we eat without conversation since I'm listening to music during the meal. It can be a bit weird when there are others present, but when it's just the two of us it's fine. It's made mealtime together tolerable, whereas in the past each meal was an excruciating ordeal.
Or maybe I am just overthinking it.
walk around with some chronic pain, and see how quick everything annoys you and how self righteous that disapproval is.
More like the unbearable displacement of blame
I have to imagine the occurance of eating misophonia is much lower there.
Anecdotes suggest nope, which is a bummer given the cultural norms you mentioned.
My father spent a month in a warzone as a civilian and that necessarily meant he went through a period of hunger. That, combined with two generations before him each suffering a world war made him particularly difficult at the dining table.
Anyway, nowadays I use my oversensitivity to gauge if I have any unspoken, subconscious grudge against a person, because my reactions are amplified by that.
I have a map of sound:person which is not long but surprisingly diverse
I just remove myself from the situation.
I assumed that people who are bothered by chewing noises are bothered because some parent traumatized them for making chewing noises, and that's all there is to it.
Sounds like there's more to it.
Chewing is the worst. Any mouth noises. Throat clearing. Tounge clicking. And on.
Mother had it. Sister has it. Father told off my mother for being so hard on us for our "noises" telling her she was going to give us "a complex". I guess she did. Behavioral + genetic most likely.
It sucks. I'm too hard on my own kids, even after having clear-headed/rational conversations about it. It's not rational. Pure emotion boiling over.
I secretly wish to be deaf. I use headphones all the time. For decades. Too loud.
It's strange. Because I do remember being extremely grossed out by the sound of my father eating cereal at breakfast in the morning before school. I wouldn't be able to eat my own food it disgusted me so much.
- me with misophonia
"Ahhhhh!"
Me: dead