Do Eating and Breathing Noises Drive You Crazy? There May Be a Reason

You might have Misophonia, or you might be grumpy

It was all I could hear. My head was full of the crackling coming from the person sitting a few seats to my right as he dived into his bag of sweets.

The noise completely drowned out the film’s narrative. Until my partner dropped his drink, and the ice splashed my bare foot. Then the noise disappeared.

Of course, it didn’t really. I couldn’t stop the sweet eater from rustling his bag, but the shock of the icy water diverted my attention away from the noisy neighbour, and the crackling disappeared from my awareness.

Was I being sensitive and grumpy, or do I suffer with misophonia?

Misophonia and Food Noises

When my partner eats crisps, the noise makes my skin prickle.

It isn’t that he’s a particularly loud eater or eats with his mouth open, but a regularity to his munching drives me crazy.

Each mouthful has three chews. You can see that I count them.

If you find it challenging to sit with other people when they eat because of the crunching, slurping, lip-smacking, chewing and swallowing, you may have misophonia.

According to a scientific paper, 18% of people in the UK have this condition.

You may live with particularly noisy eaters, but I’ll bet the farm that it’s you and not them.

But if it feels like them.

Dr Zach Rosenthal, who runs the Centre for Misophonia and Emotion Regulation at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, says,

“These are all relatively ordinary everyday things that people need to do, but in people with misophonia, they are experienced as highly aversive.”

Rosenthal goes on to say that once you’ve noticed a sound,

“It starts to be aversive, and then I pay more attention to it, and then the more attention I pay to it, the more I notice it, and then the more I notice it, the more aversive it becomes …”

Misophonia and Breathing

What do you do if you can’t bear the sound of someone breathing?

Sarah had to leave her husband because she couldn’t stand how loudly he breathed. John, her husband, insisted he didn’t have a medical problem, and Sarah had only become infuriated in the past year.

Her anger towards him was so bad that she couldn’t be in the same room as him even though she knew that not breathing wasn’t an option.

Dr Sukhbinder Kumar, the lead researcher from the Institute of Neuroscience at Newcastle University, suggests that it might not be the person causing the offence that is the culprit. He says,

“We think that misophonia may be heavily connected to recalling past memories because people with misophonia have had very bad experiences.”

Dr Kumar says of sufferers, “They’re triggering a recall.”

Visual Triggers

For some people, visual triggers will have the same effect. You might react to someone jiggling their feet or twisting their hair.

I was at a black-tie Princes Trust concert attended by two members of the Royal family years ago when proceedings were interrupted when one smartly dressed man stood up and attacked the man next to him, smacking him around the head with his programme.

It seemed that the man who’d been attacked had, on this warm evening, been fanning himself with his programme and the attacker, instead of asking the man if he would stop, got angrier and angrier until he lost control.

Misophonia? Or irritation?

How Do You Know If You Have Misophonia?

Are you irritated by your partner’s snoring, or are you filled with rage and have to stop yourself putting a pillow over their head?

Ok, that does sound a little psychopathic. But if you’re so enraged that you feel like that, you might have misophonia.

Researchers devised a study called the MisoQuest to assess whether you have misophonia, and the questions include whether you feel instantly angry when you hear certain sounds, if you start to sweat, feel pain and pressure and whether you have trouble controlling your emotions when you hear these noises.

If you think this is you, you can take the test here.

But if you only want to attack your partner when he chews his food rather than anyone else in a restaurant, I hate to break it to you, but it might not just be chewing that upsets you about them.

If you have a head full of thoughts about how they’re not pulling their weight at home or why they’re not behaving as you think they should, then just about anything they do will annoy you.

And, like the sweet eater in the cinema, if you focus on what is irritating you, that’s all you’ll be aware of.

How to Live with Misophonia

Investing in a pair of noise-cancelling earphones might be a lifesaver.

And if you don’t want to eat your meals wearing these, play white noise or ambient music during your meal times, as this can create enough of a buffer for you to tolerate the noise of someone chewing.

If misophonia is impacting your life in a big way, you can get a hearing aid programmed with white noise to make your auditory system less sensitive to your triggers.

Notice your triggers and when you are most likely to be triggered.

Are you more sensitive to sounds when you’re tired? Experts point out that this is often the case and not to imagine your condition getting worse if this happens.

Anxiety and stress make you extra prone to triggers, too, so do your best to avoid getting sucked into thoughts that worry you, whether that’s thinking about the past, the future or how to get the body out of the house unseen when you’ve bumped off your loudly chewing partner.

This is when most people fall into a stinking thinking trap, so remember not to pay attention to your thoughts when you’re tired, unwell or hungover.

Takeaways

Find other people who have the same condition as misophonia can be isolating.

Remember, this is not who you are. You have this; you don’t have to let it have you.

And it turns out that, rather than having misophonia, I am a little sensitive to the noises around me when I focus on them and think about how insensitive someone is.

And that makes me a bit grumpy.

Thank you for reading my story.