Why You Cannot Stand the Sound of Someone Chewing - How Strong Reactions to Specific Sounds Work

That One Sound Is Unbearable

A member of your family is eating beside you. You can hear them chewing. The volume is ordinary and nobody else notices. But to you that sound alone rings out absurdly loud, and discomfort rises to the point where you cannot keep eating.

What is strange is that other sounds at the same volume do not bother you. The television, a car passing outside, plates knocking together. None of them is a problem, and only the chewing pierces through.

Say this out loud and the usual reply is that you are overthinking it, or that you are highly strung. But the fact that a reaction is occurring which volume cannot explain points to a mechanism separate from how sensitive a person is.

Types of Sound and the Strength of the Reaction

Collect the sounds that provoke strong reactions and a shared set of properties becomes visible.

Chewing, sniffing, coughing, cracking knuckles, hitting a keyboard hard, clicking a pen. All are sounds produced by a person, all involve repetition, and all arrive at irregular intervals.

Each of these three properties is a condition that draws attention. Sounds a person makes carry social information, so they get processed with priority. Repetition builds a prediction, but when the intervals are irregular the prediction keeps failing, and attention turns each time it does. Attention turning to unpredictable stimuli is a basic mechanism for detecting danger.

Conversely, the sound of traffic or an air conditioner is continuous and easy to predict, so adaptation works and it drops out of awareness. The same volume gets handled differently because what matters is not the physical quantity of the sound but how easy it is to predict.

Why Disgust and Anger Arrive Together

A distinctive feature of this reaction is that anger mixes in alongside the discomfort. It is not simply that the sound is loud: strong irritation arises toward the person making it.

Two elements are thought to be involved.

One is that sound processing and emotional processing are linked at nearby locations. Sound information is sent, partway along the auditory route, to the regions that generate emotional responses as well. It is wiring for bracing yourself against a dangerous sound before you have thought about it, and when this route works strongly, the sound itself directly triggers an emotional response.

The other is the sense of being unable to escape. A sound you make yourself you can stop, but you cannot control another person's. A situation in which an unpleasant stimulus you cannot control continues generates strong stress in its own right. That your own chewing does not bother you while only another person's is unbearable can be explained by the presence or absence of that control.

A Problem That Gets Filed Away as Nerves

The hardest part of this reaction is not the symptom itself but the failure to be understood by those around you.

A complaint that merely hearing a sound makes you uncomfortable does not carry across to someone without the experience. Advice to just endure it or to just not mind it ignores the mechanism by which attention turns automatically.

And the person feels their own reaction is excessive. They blame themselves for being irritated with their family, and that guilt strengthens the reaction further. The reaction to the sound and the assessment of oneself for reacting are stacked on top of each other.

What helps here is not treating the reaction as a matter of character. A strong response to particular sounds can be understood as individual variation in sensory processing. From there, looking for the parts that can be adjusted on the environmental side actually brings relief.

Arrangements for Sharing a Table With Family

Meals with the people you live with cannot be avoided, so adjustments are made within a realistic range.

• Add sound: In a quiet environment, sounds stand out. Playing music or ambient sound lets chewing dissolve into the background. This works better than creating silence
• Change position: To the side rather than opposite, further away, on the television side. Physical arrangement changes the strength of the reaction
• Protect your ears: Even if using earphones during a meal feels awkward, you can run it as one ear only, or for part of the meal
• Tell the other person: Frame it as your own reaction rather than blaming their sound. Not that you hate the noise, but that you happen to react strongly to particular sounds and are handling it on your side. Put that way, it does not put them on the defensive

What to watch out for is the direction of trying to correct how the other person eats. Demanding that they make no sound leaves them under surveillance at every meal, and the relationship suffers. Adjusting your own reaction on your own side lasts longer.

When It Interferes With Daily Life

In most cases the arrangements above keep daily life running. But the following states mark the stage for considering professional consultation.

You cannot share a table at all in order to avoid the sound; you are avoiding eating out or break times at work; you are going out less because of the possibility of hearing it. If the scope of avoidance is widening, there is a real effect on your quality of life.

Also, if strong reactions occur in other senses too, such as light or touch, understanding progresses better if you frame it as a characteristic of sensory processing as a whole. The perspective of living with a temperament that is sensitive to stimulation leads to a wider set of responses than agonizing over sound alone.

As for where to consult, one route is otolaryngology to check the state of hearing itself, and another is a psychosomatic or psychiatric clinic to address the strength of the reaction. Which is appropriate depends on the content of the symptoms, so starting at whichever door is easiest to reach is fine.

Reacting strongly to a sound is not a defect of character. A mechanism by which attention turns automatically is simply working hard against that particular sound. Once you can see it as a mechanism, you can reduce the share spent blaming yourself and move that effort into adjusting the environment.