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The crash of molars against crisp potato chips. The crumple of a bag as fingers meet plastic polymers scientifically engineered to be noisier than necessary. Unless you’re the one crunching and crinkling, these sounds are, objectively, pretty annoying. But for Laura Wallace, who lives in Greencastle, Pennsylvania, repetitive noises like these spark something like fury.
For years, it was just, “Laura has a weird thing about sounds,” and it sometimes seemed to her husband, AJ, like she was picking on him when he was just trying to eat some chips. “I would be like, ‘Well, I can’t hear it,’” AJ said.
But about three years ago, Laura was scrolling TikTok when she happened upon a name for her extreme and debilitating sound intolerance: misophonia. The condition has attracted a lot of attention there and on Instagram lately, particularly after the influencer Alix Earle posted a “life hack” in 2023 for dealing with her own misophonia. “When you have to wear noise cancelling headphones to have dinner with your family bc you have misophonia,” reads the text on a short video of her doing just that. It has been viewed nearly 16 million times.
For Laura, learning the word was a moment of validation. “It was like, this is an actual neurological thing,” she says. “I always felt like I was a jerk for having these feelings.”
Before, it seemed like it was her job to learn to tolerate the sounds she hates: basketballs bouncing, pens clicking, cereal crunching. Now, she said, “it’s no longer me against me. It’s me understanding a condition that I live with.” Occasionally, she leaves the dinner table when she can’t take the crunching noises coming from the mouths of her husband and teenage son. (They miss her, but they understand now.) And sometimes, when AJ wants chips, he ducks outside to eat them.
Yet despite growing online interest in misophonia, it’s still not clear what causes it — or even what misophonia is, exactly. The condition is not currently listed in either the DSM-5 or the ICD-11, the manuals that classify psychiatric conditions for diagnostic and insurance billing purposes (though it’s currently under review for inclusion in the ICD) and its hallmark symptoms overlap with a number of more established diagnoses. Misophonia shares sensory sensitivity with autism, emotional reactivity with anxiety, and auditory issues with tinnitus. Experts who study misophonia don’t agree on a cause for the condition, but theories abound. Maybe it’s a nervous system issue. Maybe it’s an issue of misplaced attention. Others argue it is associated with stress, though not traumatic stress. There also isn’t a cure or even a widely agreed-upon treatment for misophonia, which means it’s largely on those with misophonia to share coping mechanisms with each other, often in addition to seeking empathy and accommodation from those around them.
On the subreddit r/misophonia, sufferers compare strategies for dealing with their noisy, normie loved ones. In one thread, a poster shared, gratefully, that their girlfriend has been looking for two-bedroom apartments, so they can sleep in separate rooms. Many others said they eat separately from their family; a somewhat common refrain is that misophonia is a “me issue,” which means many deal with it by removing themselves from an intolerable situation rather than trying to control their loved ones’ behavior. But absence itself has an impact. One father told me that two years ago, he began feeling triggered by the sound of his own children’s laughter. “They don’t know this and I hope they never have to find out while they are too young to understand,” he said in an email. When they giggle, he leaves the room.
When Laura first told her in-laws that sounds bothered her intensely, they didn’t know what to make of it. But once Laura introduced them to the term misophonia— and explained that she considered it a disorder — they were more receptive. “I was like, ‘I know we’ve joked about how Laura always has the sound thing, but I want you to know it’s actually not a joke anymore,’” she said. “It’s actually a real thing.” She informed them she would no longer stay in the room when their two small dogs began licking something. The wet slurps of dog tongue landing on dog toy (or worse, human skin) were too gross for her to bear, so she no longer does, she says.
“That way, I’m not hiding myself,” she says. “If I go out there, I’m not being rude. I’m just protecting my own energy, my own peace.”
The term misophonia is a modern invention that has only seeped into mainstream consciousness in the last decade or so. (The term itself was invented in 2001.) Heidi Salerno, a deputy attorney general who lives in Pasadena, said she and a handful of others who met in an early 2010s Yahoo forum for misophonics are responsible for the word’s blossoming notoriety. “We decided we had to make misophonia famous,” she recalls.
Back in 2010, the group wrote letters to universities, hospitals, medical professionals and newspapers to attract attention that might eventually lead to development of a treatment. Salerno believes their project led to a 2011 piece in the New York Times (in which Salerno is briefly featured), though the author of that piece, Joyce Cohen, disputes that; she told me she stumbled across the term herself as she was searching online for information on her own auditory condition, hyperacusis.
Either way, it was misophonia’s big break. Soon after the Times story was published, Salerno appeared on the Today show, and in the green room before the segment, she and Cohen say they struck up a conversation with Dr. Roshini Raj, a gastroenterologist and frequent Today contributor. Salerno remembers telling Raj her pet theory of misophonia: that it is, at least in part, an issue with the brain’s limbic system. Later, on the show, Raj explained the limbic system theory to then-host Ann Curry, and as she spoke, Salerno gave a slight smile. Inside, she remembers, “I had a little party in my head. … Thank God I struck up a conversation with her.” (Dr. Raj did not respond to interview requests about the taping.)
From there, things began to change. Misophonia was, if not exactly famous, certainly more widely known than ever before. By the end of the week, Kelly Ripa said on Live With Regis and Kelly that she had the condition. (She would “leave the house” if her husband, the actor Mark Consuelos, ate something slurpy like a “juicy peach.”) Not long after that, Ripa appeared on 20/20 in a segment on misophonia. Meanwhile, more people joined the Yahoo forum and other online message boards in the weeks and months that followed, and by 2013, the first significant research studies of misophonia were published.
After a series of interviews with misophonia patients, Zach Rosenthal, director of the Center for Misophonia & Emotion Regulation at Duke University, has adopted what he calls a biosocial framework for the condition. Some people with misophonia might be more generally “sensory over-responsive” — not just to sounds, but visuals and aromas and physical touch, too, he says. “And then there is this experience we hear over and over again from our research participants and our patients,” he said. “Most of them recall an invalidation of their internal experiences.” In other words: A sensitive little kid is bothered by a noise, like chewing. They tell a parent or caregiver or peer, and get ignored or reprimanded. He says this response can create a feedback loop.
“With enough repetition, it’s likely to make somebody even more attentive to future triggers,” Rosenthal says. “Now, their nervous system is prepared for this adverse environmental reaction when they’re triggered.” The annoying noise becomes more salient, harder to ignore.
Though plenty of individual triggers are esoteric, most people with misophonia are bothered by what could be generalized as “human sounds”: heavy breathing, nose whistling, noisy eating and drinking. And many people with misophonia report being especially agitated by one human’s human sounds, often a close family member or significant other.
Josh Grove, who lives in Portland, Oregon, recalls a childhood that sounds a lot like what Rosenthal might characterize as a prototypical misophonia origin story. A relative would often tell Grove to “get over it,” and that he was being “overly sensitive.” Grove was especially bothered by the way this relative loudly crunched popcorn. Salerno, too, mentions a close family member as someone whose noises really annoyed her. “I’d ask them not to snap their gum. … I begged. I would beg, I would plead, I would cry,” she says.
As adults, it’s common for those with misophonia to blame their significant others for making especially egregious sounds. Grove’s ex had a habit of chewing ice. “And I would just be like, ‘Hey, what the fuck?’ You know, really snap,” he says. In response to a query I posted on r/misophonia, two people responded separately to say they had divorced their exes at least in part over their struggles with sound.
“I couldn’t handle the sounds he made while eating,” one said. “I couldn’t handle the unadulterated disgust and rage that I felt every single day.” A third Redditor with misophonia said she’s seriously considered cutting contact with her ex, the father of her teenage daughter. Their 15-year-old also has misophonia, she said, and her ex is careless about the girl’s aversion to drinking noises.
Jennifer Jo Brout is a psychologist who specializes in misophonia, and particularly in helping families who have a child with the condition. In her initial meetings with patients, Brout often hears people say they believe misophonia is particularly triggered by one person—often the parent who has sought help. But Brout believes misophonia is about the sound, and not the person making it. Many of the common triggers are “human sounds” because they’re biologically unavoidable noises you tend to hear most from the people you’re around most, Rosenthal explained. Brout’s work focuses on finding practical strategies for her clients, as well as helping the family member with misophonia learn to calm their activated nervous system. “It starts with the sound. Does the sound get associated with people you live with? Unfortunately, yes, it does,” Brout said. “But that doesn’t mean it’s about the relationship.”
For Rosenthal, misophonia research is personal: His wife has the condition. “That’s part of why I’m in this field,” he said. They’ve been together 27 years and raised a family together. “But yeah, it wasn’t easy. It’s not been easy.”
Early on, while dating, Rosenthal says his relationship with his wife used to be rocky. “It was like — ‘Don’t eat that way. Stop doing that. Do it this way. Do it that way.” But now that they have a word for her preferences, there’s little need for her to verbalize them. “I’ve just adjusted,” he says. When he’s in the mood for a crunchy snack, he’ll walk outside with it or eat in the basement. He says their marriage is a happy and healthy one.
Living with a partner with misophonia presents a heightened version of a question facing anyone who lives with someone else: To what lengths should you go to accommodate your loved one?
Since learning about his wife’s misophonia, AJ Wallace has focused on fixing noisy things around the house. He makes sure to dust the ceiling fans regularly, which seems to stop them from creaking; he keeps the refrigerator filter clean, which seems to stop it from whirring. It’s a lot. It’s not for everybody. But also, he loves Laura. “I’ll do anything I can to take care of her,” he says.
Labeling a set of symptoms makes discussing it — and accommodating it — somewhat easier. But does it always make life better?
In 2023, Lucy Foulkes and Jack Andrews published a paper outlining their “prevalence inflation hypothesis,” which theorized a downside to mental health awareness campaigns: For some people, learning about a condition might exacerbate their symptoms.
“When you teach someone about a mental-health problem — or anything like misophonia — you can make them hyper-vigilant to it,” said Foulkes, who has an appointment at the University of Oxford. “You’re giving them a framework for interpreting their experiences through that lens.”
Foulkes herself has misophonia. As a child, she knew, vaguely, that she hated the sounds of her family eating. Movement seemed to help: After she was finished, she’d leap up to put the kettle on or start washing up. “But it wasn’t something I was particularly conscious of doing,” she recalls. Learning the term “confirmed it as being a real entity — it gave it edges and made it solid,” she says. “There was an element of, ‘Well, this is not my fault. This is a thing that I have, that has a name.’”
For many with misophonia, that clarity is a godsend. Before Josh Grove knew the word “misophonia,” his hatred of chewing sounds caused some embarrassing outbursts. “I would say to people in public, ‘Hey, can you just eat with your mouth closed?’” he said. But learning that misophonia is “a thing” made him realize there must be a way to cope with it. Meditation helps, he says.
For others, self-knowledge helps them outline what they can and cannot tolerate — and, sometimes, drives them to a life of greater isolation and avoidance. Movie theaters are hit-and-miss for Grayson Smith of Austin, Texas. Last year, she had to leave in the middle of Poor Things; someone near her was crunching too loudly on popcorn. She says her tolerance has gotten worse as she’s gotten older. “At this point, I know what triggers me, and so I think subconsciously I’m always on the lookout for those noises. And then I like, hyperfixate on it, hyperfocus on it, and it’s all I can think about — this noise, over and over and over again,” she says.
Some time after learning there was a word for her sensory issues, Shaylynn Hayes-Raymond, a therapist and director of the nonprofit the International Misophonia Foundation, decided that most funerals and weddings were too triggering. “We stay at home a lot,” she says of herself and her husband.
Foulkes, too, has somewhat shaped her life to accommodate her misophonia. She’ll only live in a home with good soundproofing. She wears noise-canceling headphones on the train, even if she’s with her partner. And if her partner is eating something — and she isn’t — the noises are often too much to bear, and she leaves the room. Before, there was a lot of grinning and bearing it, which wasn’t pleasant, but it also meant a life less limited.
“Some people will find it incredibly helpful to have a label, even if it doesn’t lead to treatment or any kind of change. It’s just that I also think there’s some negative consequences for some people,” Foulkes says. “I sometimes wonder if I’d be better off not having the word.”