The Unbearable Loudness of Chewing

> People don't want to feel judged, and people will assume you are judging them (not the core issue with misophonia)

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.

I wouldn't dare say that to a colleague or friend, because although they might appear to take it well, I don't think I'd be doing our relationship any favors. I'd step out with an excuse instead.

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).

> 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.

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.

As a sufferer it does need to be a 2-way street. We cannot expect perfection from others, but we can ask people close to us to be mindful and do their best, whatever their best is. On the flip side, sufferers do need to seek out therapy, help, treatment, coping strategies, and anything else to attenuate the issue. Even taking the stress/impact from a 10/10 down to a 6/10 can do wonders for everyone involved.

I've tried all kinds of approaches. The only ones that ever worked were based purely on the person communicated to, not how I communicated. (ie, the person cared)

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.

> having to remove shirt tags

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

99% of the time our reactions to stimuli are automatic. This is why we practice mediation sitting still on a hard floor. It is not comfortable, with your legs crossed, your knees hurt, your butt hurts, it makes you feel you want to move, some one is sniffling, a baby is crying somewhere, it MAKES YOU FEEL annoyed,

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.

Because at first you thought a person was responsible, and should have turned off the faucet, and you were indignant? Somebody elsewhere in the thread doesn't mind (in fact enjoys) the sounds that pets make when eating, which ties in: animals can't be expected to do better.

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!

It's deeper, but can also appear/disappear and have a cultural component.

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.

It sounds like what you describe. He was absolutely disgusted by people eating in public. And he described it as the chewing and swallowing and noises that he couldn’t stand.

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.

I spoke with a Chinese man from the mainland who went to Europe to study in his 30s and by his account it's a low-class thing really. It's just that there's a lot of new money in China.

I have had it since early childhood and the parent connection is pretty clear in my case:

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.

Not at all in my case.

I have a map of sound:person which is not long but surprisingly diverse

Def. related to my parents. I cured it by exposure aka living in Asia