Misophonia: the torture of the sound of someone chewing next to you

One in five people suffers from misophonia, a disorder that causes excruciating discomfort as a result of the noises made by other people. In the United Kingdom it affects 20% of the population, according to a recent study, and likewise in Spain, according to the calculations of researcher Antonia Ferrer Torres, who has completed her doctoral thesis on this condition at the Institute of Neurosciences of the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Given the severity of the ordeal faced by a person suffering from this horrible disorder — what researchers call “strong emotional reactions to certain sounds” — it would be more appropriate to describe one’s suffering as torture.

These are individuals who cannot be in the same room as someone eating popcorn. The crunching of their teeth unsettles them, makes them anxious, and they want to smash up everything. Others feel as if their brains would explode if they heard someone repeatedly tapping the lid of the pen, a repetitive action that is relaxing for those who do it. When the upstairs neighbor takes a couple of steps, they feel like they are being dragged along by an iron mass weighing hundreds of kilograms. Some have to switch subway carriages a few times to escape from the noises that drive them crazy. An academic paper on misophonia highlights the story of a boy who, since the age of eight, was systematically punished because he did not want to eat at the family table — the noises of chewing, swallowing and slurping affected him. At 29, when taking part in a clinical trial, he was told that he might be suffering from this hypersensitivity disorder that was virtually unheard of.

In her study, Ferrer defines misophonia as a neuropsychophysiological disorder that causes an abnormal alteration in response to certain gestures and sounds. The researcher lists some of the sounds that usually trigger these exaggerated reactions: the tapping of fingers on a table, the clicking of the tongue, the sound of cutlery scraping against plates and the sound of teeth chewing crunchy food. “It does not depend on the volume, that would be hyperacusis. A person suffering from misophonia could be irritated by a noise of 20 decibels, which is barely perceptible,” explains the researcher.

The British scientists say that during their research, the general population also displayed irritation with some of these sounds, but individuals suffering from misophonia felt helpless when unable to escape back to silence. As the sound was introduced, tension increased and the back of their necks became stiff, and they even experienced the urge to vomit and developed symptoms of anxiety. They also stress that in their sample group, only a small proportion of those affected were aware that they were suffering from a disorder. “This means that most people with misophonia do not really have a name to describe or explain what they are experiencing,” concludes Silia Vitoratou, at King’s College in London, one of the authors of the study recently published in the PLoS ONE journal. In the Spanish sample analyzed by Ferrer, only two individuals knew that they suffered from misophonia — one had self-diagnosed on the Internet, and the other had been diagnosed by a physician who was also misophonic.

Until recently, people with this peculiar sensitivity to sounds and movements were not aware that their condition might have a name. The term was first coined in 2001 by the American research couple Pawel and Margaret Jastreboff. Indeed, most endure their unusual ordeal in silence because expressing displeasure at sounds that are tolerable for the rest of humanity will only cause problems. Until recently, being hypersensitive and different was not something to boast about on social media, and most people just wanted to be normal.

Belén Fernández acknowledges that this is something that has been happening to both her and her partner for some time. She asked her husband to stop eating sunflower seeds when they watched movies at night. Her partner, in turn, feels uncomfortable when Belén chews almonds in the same scenario. “I couldn’t stand my father making noise while he was eating, even though I knew it was inevitable because he was an old man. I think that with people who you have an affective or long-lasting bond with, like family, friends or work, it bothers you much more. It starts as an uncomfortable sound and then becomes unbearable,” she says. And she recalls the scene from The Penguins of Madagascar in which a spy wolf loses its temper because one of the penguins keeps crunching on little worms with its beak while talking to it.

Researcher Jane Gregory, from Oxford University, stresses the complexity of the condition: “It’s about much more than being disturbed by a sound, it’s about feeling that something is wrong inside you because of your disproportionate reaction and inability to do anything about it. It’s about feeling trapped and helpless and missing out on things as a result. For many people, it is a relief to know that they are not alone and that there is a word to define what is happening to them.”

According to Ferrer, these individuals have been told all their lives that they are “weird,” “fussy,” “irritable,” “grumpy” or that they have “double standards” because they are affected by other people’s noises, but not by their own. “In general, they end up believing it and tend to avoid social situations,” explains the Spanish researcher.

However, it is actually more common than you might think. In Vitoratou’s study, they found that the trigger sounds that commonly elicited a negative emotional response were chewing, slurping, snoring and loud breathing. In terms of chewing, displeasure was very frequent among the respondents, according to the study: “This suggests that many of the sounds that trigger misophonia are also aversive to the general population.”

Confinement nightmare

The researcher from the Autonomous University of Barcelona confirms that during the confinement, those with misophonia particularly suffered, perhaps more than the rest of the confined people, because they could not escape from their torture. Part of her doctoral thesis analyzes the disruption in neighborhood communities during the pandemic. In those months, there was a 400% increase in calls for help made to the police from people who could not leave the place where there was a noise they found unbearable. Sometimes the cause of this distress could simply be the neighbor upstairs doing a bit of yoga.

The treatment of misophonia falls within the field of psychology and psychiatry, but there is no therapy for its origin, because it is not well-defined. Only the symptoms of anxiety and other side effects of the syndrome are dealt with.

Some authors — including Dr. Sukhbinder Kumar, senior researcher at the Institute of Neuroscience, Newcastle University (UK) — suggest in their research that misophonia may be deeply connected to traumatic memories from the past. This is because it is often suffered by people who have had unpleasant experiences in childhood. In their studies, the age of the first episode was around 12 years old. “When they hear certain sounds, their attention is completely absorbed, and they cannot do anything else,” explains Kumar in his scientific paper.

“Our team works hard to raise the profile of the condition and supply physicians with the tools they need to fully understand and evaluate misophonia effectively,” points out Vitoratou. An important part of Ferrer’s thesis consists of outlining the social representation of the disorder. To explain that it exists, to describe it, to put it to the public so that those affected can be recognized, so that their environment can understand them better, and they can stop being the freaks or the fussy ones.

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