Why a partner’s chewing can fill people with rage: Canadian researchers helping unravel ‘misophonia’

For people with misophonia, mealtimes can be particularly dreadful.

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The sound of others chewing, slurping or crunching are so intensely annoying, people have described going from “perfectly happy-go-lucky” to feeling like caged animals.

A once obscure condition, misophonia has a growing presence on social media, “where it is both a source of genuine anguish and an easy punch line,” the Washington Post recently reported.

It shouldn’t be taken lightly, says Nichole Scheerer, a Canadian researcher helping spearhead science into “decreased sound tolerance,” or DST, a family of not-so-rare disorders that includes misophonia and that some are lobbying to have added to psychiatry’s official manual of mental disorders.

Everyday sounds others find entirely “inconsequential” can be intensely bothersome to people with misophonia, Scheerer, an assistant professor in Wilfrid Laurier University’s psychology department, and colleagues recently reported in the journal, Hearing Research. Their study of 2,095 Canadian undergraduate students, one of the largest samples to date, found the worse the symptoms of DST, the worse the symptoms of anxiety and depression.

Trigger sounds can provoke marked changes in physiology, Scheerer said in an interview. People sweat and grow tense. Their heart rate increases. “Just increased autonomic arousal” overall, she said.

Those physical changes pair with emotional responses, like fear, disgust, panic or disdain for whomever is producing the sound.

Chewing, slurping, “breath running” (heavy breathing while running or working out), sniffing, snoring, throat clearing, swallowing, pen clicking and keyboard typing are some of the core, highly unpleasant triggering sounds that separate people with true misophonia from healthy controls.

On Reddit, users have described how the sound of someone vigorously scraping the last bits of yogurt from a carton, idling trucks, the backup alarms of construction equipment, whistling, whispering (especially the “T” and “D” sounds) or lips too close to a podcast microphone can provoke an impulsive flight or fight reaction: Run away or lash out.

“Has anyone else wished at some point they (were) born deaf,” one asked.

It’s not the typical sounds that can make people’s skin crawl, like fingernails on a chalkboard or squeaking Styrofoam. It’s not related to the loudness of the sound. And it isn’t as simple as hypersensitivity to sounds, Scheerer said.

“It’s related to the particular pattern, meaning or sometimes the source or even the context in which it is experienced,” including by whom the sound is being produced.

A paper by pioneers in the field who coined the term misophonia in 2001 — the literal translation is “hatred of sound” — described how a teenager was triggered by the sound of his stepmother’s footsteps “who was purposely following (him) to make his life miserable.”

Scientists who developed a test for psychoacoustic (how the brain perceives sounds) to assess for misophonia say the reactions can be more intense when it’s impossible to escape the situation, such as being on a plane. “Also, eating and chewing sounds are less annoying when originating from babies or animals, as it is ‘not their fault’ if they are generating them,” the authors wrote.

Trigger sounds are often, though not always, human produced. Some are sensitive to the sounds of dogs barking, licking or eating, or the sound of a cat’s claws clicking on a hard surface.

“Often it’s a lot of (human) mouth sounds, so things like family dinners become a problem,” Scheerer said. “You can’t sit with your spouse at dinner because watching or hearing them chew is so distressing.”

One anecdote that has stayed with her is the story of a mother whose autistic daughter ate her lunch in a bathroom stall because she couldn’t tolerate the sounds of other children chewing in the school cafeteria.

Misophonia sometimes co-occurs with autism, as well as obsessive compulsive disorder and anxiety.

Hyperacusis is a sister disorder linked to perceived loudness, “the important part of that being ‘perceived,'” Scheerer said. People have a reduced tolerance to normal sounds at levels most people perceive as perfectly harmless or tolerable. For some, those sounds seem excessively loud or uncomfortable; others experience actual physical pain.

Problematic sounds “can range from distant traffic to nearby electric mixers,” Scheerer and colleagues wrote in the journal article. “Often those with hyperacusis report irritation, annoyance, distraction, stress, fatigue, pain and fear, to name only a few emotions.”

With both forms of DST, people begin avoiding certain places — restaurants, cafeterias. People withdraw from social situations; they experience conflict at work. Noise-cancelling headphones can help, but we live in a sensory-rich world. Sounds are everywhere. “As soon as you completely block out sound, you’re losing all the richness of the environment,” Scheerer said.

The alternative is “tiptoeing around in a world where you don’t know what’s going to set you off next,” she said.

“You could imagine how that could wear on a person over time.”

Scheerer has been doing a lot of university work, in addition to work with children and youth, trying to understand how early it develops. University lecture halls (laptops, cellphones, people drinking, snacking, sniffing), dormitories, dining halls, food courts — all produce elevated levels of triggering sensory stimuli, Scheerer said.

It’s difficult to know how many people are affected, because most studies rely on self-reported questionnaires. Estimates land as high as the one in five range, or 18 per cent of the adult population. Data from Scheerer’s work suggest 12 to 18 per cent of post-secondary students qualify for clinical misophonia. A smaller study out of Dalhousie University of 606 young adults aged 19 to 32 found about nine per cent met the cutoff for significant hyperacusis; a similar proportion met criteria for moderate or greater misophonia severity.

Researchers are still struggling to tease out the underlying mechanisms for both conditions, examining different brain regions and networks, and the extent of dysfunction. “Is it related to attention? Conditioning? Is it more basic, like neural hyper-excitability? We don’t quite know,” Scheerer said. Most research suggests it’s not one thing, but a combination.

Treatments are limited, though cognitive behavioural therapy, with controlled exposure to triggering sounds, has shown some promise.

Misophonia has been written off by skeptics. However, it’s increasingly recognized as a legitimate disorder, and researchers recently reached a consensus definition. Whether it should be added to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, however, is a subject of debate.

Although she’s a basic scientist, and not a clinician, Scheerer said “the research screams” that misophonia is clinically significantly impairing. Scientists are less confident in knowing exactly what diagnostic box it belongs in.

Adding it to the DSM would increase recognition and lead to better diagnostic criteria and agreement on how it should be assessed and treated, she said.

However, it could also lead to overdiagnoses and risks pathologizing normal variations in how people respond to sounds. “Suddenly, everyone is going to think they have misophonia,” she worries.

In the meantime, as the science evolves, decreased sound tolerance is popping up more frequently in popular culture: Misophonia was the answer to a recent question on Jeopardy! The 2025 crime-thriller, Tuner, which premiered at TIFF, features a gifted piano tuner with hyperacusis who becomes a safecracker.

Decreased sound tolerance is consequential, Scheerer said. “People are experiencing high levels of stress and need to be taken seriously,” including by making accommodations, she said, such as limiting eating to a lunch room rather than allowing people to eat at their desks, and not allowing eating in classrooms or lecture halls.

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