The most frustrating thing about it is that very many people take it extremely personally if there's even a whisper of a suggestion that they could eat more quietly. To the extent some people will "revenge chew" to make a point that it could be worse. For some reason, that's a huge taboo, and it seems to cross all cultures. The only relationship I can think of where you can say "close your mouth when chewing" and not risk major offense is a parent-child one.
The only thing I find to improve it is to not be tired or stressed when eating with others, or lively conversation as a distraction. Easy, right?
> So it’s a sensory hypersensitivity, right? Maybe not. There’s increasing evidence - which I learned about from Jake [author of the Asterisk piece], but which didn’t make it into the article - that misophonia is less about sound than it seems.
> Misophoniacs who go deaf report that it doesn’t go away. Now they get triggered if they see someone chewing. It’s the same with other noises. Someone who gets triggered by the sound of forks scraping against a table will eventually get triggered by the sight of the scraping fork. Someone triggered by music will eventually get triggered by someone playing a music video on mute.
> If you trick misophoniacs into thinking their trigger sounds are something else, they won’t get triggered. In this study, scientists played people who hated chewing sounds a video (with audio) of someone chewing; unsurprisingly, they hated it. Then they played them a video of someone walking on squelching snow, but the audio track was secretly actually the same chewing sounds. It looked like the snow was making the noise - now the misophoniacs didn’t hate it!
> some misophoniacs say that they’re only triggered by specific people - usually those close to them. If some rando chews loudly, they’ll be mildly annoyed; if their brother does, they’ll flip out. Probably there’s a reasonable explanation here too, but at this point maybe we should also be considering a larger-scale update.
> even as misophonia makes me miserable - even as I absolutely fail to overcome it - I can’t help feeling like it’s sort of fake. I’d already noticed something like the thing about people close to me. The way I thought of it was something about righteous anger. The sound of the wind in the trees barely bothered me at all, because there was no one to get angry at. Sounds that were natural parts of the social order were nearly as benign - I didn’t like hearing the bus driver announce the next stop, but it was an inevitable part of the bus-riding experience and I was resigned to it. But if a group of gangbangers scared the kids out of the nearby park and put on loud music while smoking drugs, I would go through the roof.
He doesn't actually make the connection, but the way he describes his own experience with misophonia is pretty much identical to the phenomenon of e.g. compulsively checking a Twitter feed from someone you hate.
I have found it useful to put all the emphasis on me. "Sorry, I have this issue with eating noises, so I'm going to step out for a bit". Nice people will generally pick up on this and work with me over time. I don't get so many defensive reactions any more.
I wouldn't dare say that to a colleague or friend, because although they might appear to take it well, I don't think I'd be doing our relationship any favors. I'd step out with an excuse instead.
But given my lifestyle, I almost never have to be around anybody who's eating, except in contexts in which I can't hear them eating (busy brunch, say).
I definitely suffer from this - no other semi-regular occurrence in my life makes me as stressed/irritated.
However, I'm not sure I agree that the taboo you describe is a kind of unreasonable cultural quirk. It is a pretty uncomfortable imposition to be asked to eat more quietly. It's more confrontational by nature than e.g. asking somebody if they wouldn't mind being a little quieter in the theater. And yes, some people surely become too provoked by the request, but also the person making the request could often do a better job with the tone. Either way though, finding a truly non-provocative angle for this request is basically intractable.
> And yes, some people surely become too provoked by the request, but also the person making the request could often do a better job with the tone.
I agree. At a minimum, it needs to clearly come off as a "it's not you or personal, it's this weird condition I have, it's difficult for me to control at this time, and it causes me distress" - which is 100% true.
> Either way though, finding a truly non-provocative angle for this request is basically intractable.
You definitely never know what you're going to get from people! But, I suppose it's good to know if others have room to make space for you.
I'm friends with somebody who seems to suffer from this. I'm not talking mouth open lip smacking eating or slurping, just noise of using cutlery and chewing something not crunchy and swallowing seems to set them off at times. They've had outbursts at me before. I didn't really take offense, maybe felt embarrassed or defensive but I tried to be quieter. Which actually seemed to make things worse because I was awkwardly trying to be careful, but maybe it was just because I was focusing on it more.
In any case that still wasn't good enough for them, so I proffered some helpful suggestions for alternative solutions to the problem, which was that they take themselves somewhere else, or they could learn to deal with it themselves. Unfortunately this was taken extremely personally and caused great offense, judging by the reaction.
I have even pointed out to them when they are eating loudly and they do the revenge chew thing you're talking about, lol. I don't think the rational part of their brain has reconciled the fact that it's not actually possible for them to eat silently with their unreasonable demands of others.
At some point if your behavior is outside the norm, things are going to go more smoothly for you if you cater to the rest of society and deal rather than the other way around. You can always ask people to eat quieter and maybe they should but you'll certainly annoy and/or embarrass many people by asking, that's the reality.
> The only thing I find to improve it is to not be tired or stressed when eating with others, or lively conversation as a distraction. Easy, right?
That does actually sound easy unless you work at a restaurant or on a submarine or something.
As a sufferer it does need to be a 2-way street. We cannot expect perfection from others, but we can ask people close to us to be mindful and do their best, whatever their best is. On the flip side, sufferers do need to seek out therapy, help, treatment, coping strategies, and anything else to attenuate the issue. Even taking the stress/impact from a 10/10 down to a 6/10 can do wonders for everyone involved.
One thing I've tried it is to phrase it something like ...
"I'm not sure if you're aware, but you are chewing quite loudly"
Tone (neutral) is important. Sometimes they genuinely aren't aware. They know it's theoretically a social faux pas but never thought to check themselves.
I've tried all kinds of approaches. The only ones that ever worked were based purely on the person communicated to, not how I communicated. (ie, the person cared)
I've had nice conversations about it, the person listened, but was only able to be reasonable quiet for a short period of time. And then simply reverted. (they didn't care)
I found the best solution was simply to face this head on and deaden my reactions to it. This reduced my reactions to a living tolerable level.
I regret constantly hitting my little brother when he was chewing with his mouth open at the dinner table. I was about 13 and had developed misophonia, he must have been 5. Our parents didn't understand it. I didn't understand it. I couldn't control myself for years. He was a sweet boy in a poor and dysfunctional family that also fell apart around that time. At the very least, he deserved a better brother.
Decades later, I still get abruptly and irrationally angry when people smack their lips, though I have learnt to suppress the urge to assault the source of the sound.
I can't eat with my Chinese colleagues. I get that more air makes each bite taste better, but it is hard to eat or even focus when your brain is telling you to rip their heads off to stop the sound.
It's an odd curse to live with, as, aside from the situation with my brother, I have otherwise never hurt or assaulted anyone in my life and am generally regarded as a softy. I have to force myself to sit at the dinner table with my mother when she visits, as she still smacks her lips.
Some people smack their lips in quick succession when they taste something new, like how birds drink water, and it drives me up the walls. Slurping is triggering, but not as much. Some people swallow excessively as presenters and will make a "tsk" sound with their tongues before speaking, which is worse than slurping and usually causes me to stop watching the presentation.
I'm glad there is some traction with misophonia research. We need help.
Now imagine marrying a brilliant, gorgeous Chinese woman who slurps and snorts and air-swallows. Drives me & the kids berserk. Her father is even worse. Shudder.
For me and the kids it’s a private joke but the rage part hits when she eats in public. Noiseless! What’re we, chopped liver?
I also have a bunch of other stupid problems like that. Extreme aversion to coffee breath and onion or garlic breath; having to remove shirt tags; inability to sit through out-of-tune musical performers; physical reaction to voices; ability to identify people by smell, etc.
I simply cannot understand why producers of shirts (anything you wear, actually) feel the need to stretch a tak which is rough and creates physical pain for me.
99% of the time our reactions to stimuli are automatic. This is why we practice mediation sitting still on a hard floor. It is not comfortable, with your legs crossed, your knees hurt, your butt hurts, it makes you feel you want to move, some one is sniffling, a baby is crying somewhere, it MAKES YOU FEEL annoyed,
It is possible to overcome the "MAKES YOU FEEL" part of this. External stimulus will always be there, but with some training, the only thing that "Makes you feel" will be you. You notice the pain in your knees, but it flows over you as water flows past the stone in the river.
This is easy to say but not easy to do. It takes quite a few hours of deliberate practice. Some people never get there. But, I think it is worth a try. Find a mediation class. Go every week.
It's completely psychological for me (as in, not a medical mystery). I have a strong, deep-seated association between loud eating and inconsiderateness, because it's often unnecessary (ostensibly). Grossness is part of it, but that's secondary - more of a multiplier rather than being the core problem. It's about the perceived unnecessary-ness: Chewing with your mouth open, biting the spoon, vocalizing, slurping, talking with your mouth full. However, there are other reasons for these things: Cultural, physiological. One often probably doesn't even notice one is doing it. Also, if it doesn't bother you, you may not even be aware that it bothers somebody else (or have trouble sympathizing).
The trouble is willing myself into accepting these reasons. The thought "Why are you doing that. Don't you notice?" is nigh unavoidable. It takes conscious effort to not show signs of irritation externally. Sometimes I simply have to politely remove myself.
I have a misophonia response to dripping faucets but only if they can be adjusted and turned off. When I spent the night somewhere with a broken faucet, the pain disappeared once I realized it couldn't be fixed.
Ive been turning that over in my mind for years, trying to figure out how to apply the lesson to chewing.
Because at first you thought a person was responsible, and should have turned off the faucet, and you were indignant? Somebody elsewhere in the thread doesn't mind (in fact enjoys) the sounds that pets make when eating, which ties in: animals can't be expected to do better.
Here's a theory. Do you normally have thought processes going on that you enjoy, and that seem fragile, that is to say easily disrupted, so you have a precious attitude when somebody distracts you, like Coleridge's hated Person from Porlock (who ruined Kubla Khan)? I mean that's a shot in the dark, we all have different potential reasons to fall into the same bucket, but this is one of them. So, naturally, what I hate most is if somebody starts some kind of performance, because a performance dominates the attention by design. This could be an inane conversation near me, or at me, or it could be music. Even music I usually love can be deeply aggravating when I was hoping to maintain a different mood.
In your case I suppose you were trying to sleep, which is a similar situation of being precious about mood, detesting being disturbed.
Chatter and music are only the most obviously disruptive forms of noise, the attention-grabbing ones. So what's the connection between other people's irresponsibility, and the irritation cause by more trivial noises, ones that ought to be ignorable?
I think this is a case of feedback. The injustice, and the potential escalation, and the social difficulty in reasoning with the person, all cause cogitation. The cogitation makes the distraction worse! Now it's even more unfair! And so on.
To mention animals again, sometimes the dawn chorus aggravates me: but this is when I've been burning the candle at both ends - in which case the singing birds are reminding me that I've run out of time, and that I've been forced to accept factors in my life that put pressure on my time, and it's so unjust - a thought that irritates me, taking away even more time. And that is disgusting. Those idiot birds!
If I had to list the top 5 problems in my life, misophonia would occupy all 5 slots. It's often unbearable, and at the very best I'm in a consistent but low level state of anxiety. I really hope it gets researched more.
I had a friend in undergrad that couldn’t eat in the dorm cafeteria because everyone around was chewing and chewing and slurping and just eating normally but he found it intolerable. He thought it was the grossest thing possible - so many people eating in public.
He came from a farm in rural farm town. He probably never had been around more than a few people at once, let alone eating together.
Anyway in a few months he was normal and had no problem eating in a crowd.
If it was intolerable due to cultural differences or him perceiving it as rude, that's a different thing than misophonia.
Misophonia is when you have an uncontrollable fight or flight reaction to trigger sounds. You can think of it as a miswired nervous system that reacts to certain sounds with fear and/or anger. In this case it's not about preference ("I find the sound rude") but something deeper and more neurological.
It sounds like your friend probably didn't have misophonia if he was simply able to get used to it after a few months.
It's deeper, but can also appear/disappear and have a cultural component.
My closest mental image is people genuinely enjoying some soup, to immediately puke it out as they hear it's made from crushed bugs, even as it's a lie. The reaction is visceral and uncontrollable, but the cause is not physical and is deeply rooted into their mind.
It sounds like what you describe. He was absolutely disgusted by people eating in public. And he described it as the chewing and swallowing and noises that he couldn’t stand.
I made it a point of going to the cafeteria with him and my friends would join us - usually in a table of 10, mixed sex. In retrospect it was probably torture for him. At the beginning is when he confided with me about his phobia about eating but maybe out of naïveté I didn’t care - he was my friend and he ate with us and eventually it didn’t seem to be the big deal it was when I first met him, especially after he got a bf in the friend group.
I don't normally get annoyed by particular noises... but I've had several middle-ear infections in my life, and I've noticed that every time I get one, I temporarily develop a strong misophonia.
Sometimes, in such infections, particular sounds seem to vibrate my (irritated, inflamed, sensitized) eardrums in a particularly noticeable and distracting way. It's not all sounds, though! Based on the feeling and the triggers, I'd say the feeling is of there being something gummed up right against (the inside side of) my eardrum; where specific frequencies of vibration cause the eardrum to rub itself against this gummy thing.
And other times, in such infections, particular sounds seem to not irritate the eardrum per se, but rather the auditory canal (Eustachian tube). In those cases, it feels like sounds of the right frequency seem to resonate the auditory canal itself (not usually possible due to it being open+connected to your sinuses — but possible when that opening is plugged with gunk!), causing any little dried bits of "stuff" (blood clots, stones from antibody-expunged bacterial biofilms, etc) to "rattle around" inside there. These sensations make me wish I could somehow stick a finger right through my eardrum and down my auditory canal, and itch the spot. (Or get a Eustachian-tube suctioning. Too bad they won't do that to you unless you go deaf from blockage; the one time I did get it, I heard better than I have in years!)
Anyway, this is all enough to make me wonder whether at least some of the people with misophonia (or auditory-hypersensitive sensory processing disorders) just have chronic undiagnosed middle-ear infections (or sequelae of such.)
I've had this since I was a kid. My stepdad is a loud chewer, and when I was younger the chewing was a big source of the resentment I harbored against him (not the only source, but a major one).
Now we have a better relationship, to the point where I felt comfortable discussing my discomfort with his chewing. But rather than frame it as "Can you please chew more quietly", I told him I'd prefer to wear earbuds when we eat dinner together. I also told him about misophonia, which I had learned about in the intervening years since childhood. He was a little confused, but didn't feel like I was criticizing him.
Now when we eat together, we eat without conversation since I'm listening to music during the meal. It can be a bit weird when there are others present, but when it's just the two of us it's fine. It's made mealtime together tolerable, whereas in the past each meal was an excruciating ordeal.
Could this explain the prevalence of louder music in restaurants? Objectively I dislike loud music in such environments, but maybe the fact it hides such chewing noises makes it subtly attractive and I end up being drawn to such places for subconscious reasons, thus unwittingly incentivizing the presence of said loud music.
I ask Alexa to play Spanish guitar music at our family dinner table in an effort to attenuate both the kids "smacking" and my partners reactions to the "smacking". In my testing, it's resulted in less net "smacking" occurrences. So you could be on to something.
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The only thing I find to improve it is to not be tired or stressed when eating with others, or lively conversation as a distraction. Easy, right?
- People don't want to feel judged, and people will assume you are judging them (not the core issue with misophonia)
- It takes energy to change and accommodate and people might rather not
- If you don't have misophonia, it's not very understandable or relatable to others
While I wish I could snap my fingers and have everyone change, I think I'm more of the mindset now of:
- I need to try to get help (therapy) to minimize the impact on myself
- It's worth asking the few people you spend the most time around to meet you halfway on this stuff
- It's probably unreasonable to ask most people to alter their behavior (and tiring to keep asking everyone)
That said… I'd be lying if I didn't often think "OK man it's not that hard to just close your mouth." But that's more of an inside thought.
Deleted Comment
Really? Scott Alexander had a response to this very article pointing out that judgment does indeed seem to be the core issue with misophonia ( https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/misophonia-beyond-sensory-s... ):
> So it’s a sensory hypersensitivity, right? Maybe not. There’s increasing evidence - which I learned about from Jake [author of the Asterisk piece], but which didn’t make it into the article - that misophonia is less about sound than it seems.
> Misophoniacs who go deaf report that it doesn’t go away. Now they get triggered if they see someone chewing. It’s the same with other noises. Someone who gets triggered by the sound of forks scraping against a table will eventually get triggered by the sight of the scraping fork. Someone triggered by music will eventually get triggered by someone playing a music video on mute.
> If you trick misophoniacs into thinking their trigger sounds are something else, they won’t get triggered. In this study, scientists played people who hated chewing sounds a video (with audio) of someone chewing; unsurprisingly, they hated it. Then they played them a video of someone walking on squelching snow, but the audio track was secretly actually the same chewing sounds. It looked like the snow was making the noise - now the misophoniacs didn’t hate it!
> some misophoniacs say that they’re only triggered by specific people - usually those close to them. If some rando chews loudly, they’ll be mildly annoyed; if their brother does, they’ll flip out. Probably there’s a reasonable explanation here too, but at this point maybe we should also be considering a larger-scale update.
> even as misophonia makes me miserable - even as I absolutely fail to overcome it - I can’t help feeling like it’s sort of fake. I’d already noticed something like the thing about people close to me. The way I thought of it was something about righteous anger. The sound of the wind in the trees barely bothered me at all, because there was no one to get angry at. Sounds that were natural parts of the social order were nearly as benign - I didn’t like hearing the bus driver announce the next stop, but it was an inevitable part of the bus-riding experience and I was resigned to it. But if a group of gangbangers scared the kids out of the nearby park and put on loud music while smoking drugs, I would go through the roof.
He doesn't actually make the connection, but the way he describes his own experience with misophonia is pretty much identical to the phenomenon of e.g. compulsively checking a Twitter feed from someone you hate.
But given my lifestyle, I almost never have to be around anybody who's eating, except in contexts in which I can't hear them eating (busy brunch, say).
However, I'm not sure I agree that the taboo you describe is a kind of unreasonable cultural quirk. It is a pretty uncomfortable imposition to be asked to eat more quietly. It's more confrontational by nature than e.g. asking somebody if they wouldn't mind being a little quieter in the theater. And yes, some people surely become too provoked by the request, but also the person making the request could often do a better job with the tone. Either way though, finding a truly non-provocative angle for this request is basically intractable.
I agree. At a minimum, it needs to clearly come off as a "it's not you or personal, it's this weird condition I have, it's difficult for me to control at this time, and it causes me distress" - which is 100% true.
> Either way though, finding a truly non-provocative angle for this request is basically intractable.
You definitely never know what you're going to get from people! But, I suppose it's good to know if others have room to make space for you.
In any case that still wasn't good enough for them, so I proffered some helpful suggestions for alternative solutions to the problem, which was that they take themselves somewhere else, or they could learn to deal with it themselves. Unfortunately this was taken extremely personally and caused great offense, judging by the reaction.
I have even pointed out to them when they are eating loudly and they do the revenge chew thing you're talking about, lol. I don't think the rational part of their brain has reconciled the fact that it's not actually possible for them to eat silently with their unreasonable demands of others.
At some point if your behavior is outside the norm, things are going to go more smoothly for you if you cater to the rest of society and deal rather than the other way around. You can always ask people to eat quieter and maybe they should but you'll certainly annoy and/or embarrass many people by asking, that's the reality.
> The only thing I find to improve it is to not be tired or stressed when eating with others, or lively conversation as a distraction. Easy, right?
That does actually sound easy unless you work at a restaurant or on a submarine or something.
"I'm not sure if you're aware, but you are chewing quite loudly"
Tone (neutral) is important. Sometimes they genuinely aren't aware. They know it's theoretically a social faux pas but never thought to check themselves.
I think they've grown up around loud eaters.
I've had nice conversations about it, the person listened, but was only able to be reasonable quiet for a short period of time. And then simply reverted. (they didn't care)
I found the best solution was simply to face this head on and deaden my reactions to it. This reduced my reactions to a living tolerable level.
Decades later, I still get abruptly and irrationally angry when people smack their lips, though I have learnt to suppress the urge to assault the source of the sound.
I can't eat with my Chinese colleagues. I get that more air makes each bite taste better, but it is hard to eat or even focus when your brain is telling you to rip their heads off to stop the sound.
It's an odd curse to live with, as, aside from the situation with my brother, I have otherwise never hurt or assaulted anyone in my life and am generally regarded as a softy. I have to force myself to sit at the dinner table with my mother when she visits, as she still smacks her lips.
Some people smack their lips in quick succession when they taste something new, like how birds drink water, and it drives me up the walls. Slurping is triggering, but not as much. Some people swallow excessively as presenters and will make a "tsk" sound with their tongues before speaking, which is worse than slurping and usually causes me to stop watching the presentation.
I'm glad there is some traction with misophonia research. We need help.
> I can't eat with my Chinese colleagues.
Now imagine marrying a brilliant, gorgeous Chinese woman who slurps and snorts and air-swallows. Drives me & the kids berserk. Her father is even worse. Shudder.
For me and the kids it’s a private joke but the rage part hits when she eats in public. Noiseless! What’re we, chopped liver?
I also have a bunch of other stupid problems like that. Extreme aversion to coffee breath and onion or garlic breath; having to remove shirt tags; inability to sit through out-of-tune musical performers; physical reaction to voices; ability to identify people by smell, etc.
I simply cannot understand why producers of shirts (anything you wear, actually) feel the need to stretch a tak which is rough and creates physical pain for me.
And for one of my sons, but not to the other
It is possible to overcome the "MAKES YOU FEEL" part of this. External stimulus will always be there, but with some training, the only thing that "Makes you feel" will be you. You notice the pain in your knees, but it flows over you as water flows past the stone in the river.
This is easy to say but not easy to do. It takes quite a few hours of deliberate practice. Some people never get there. But, I think it is worth a try. Find a mediation class. Go every week.
The trouble is willing myself into accepting these reasons. The thought "Why are you doing that. Don't you notice?" is nigh unavoidable. It takes conscious effort to not show signs of irritation externally. Sometimes I simply have to politely remove myself.
I have a misophonia response to dripping faucets but only if they can be adjusted and turned off. When I spent the night somewhere with a broken faucet, the pain disappeared once I realized it couldn't be fixed.
Ive been turning that over in my mind for years, trying to figure out how to apply the lesson to chewing.
Here's a theory. Do you normally have thought processes going on that you enjoy, and that seem fragile, that is to say easily disrupted, so you have a precious attitude when somebody distracts you, like Coleridge's hated Person from Porlock (who ruined Kubla Khan)? I mean that's a shot in the dark, we all have different potential reasons to fall into the same bucket, but this is one of them. So, naturally, what I hate most is if somebody starts some kind of performance, because a performance dominates the attention by design. This could be an inane conversation near me, or at me, or it could be music. Even music I usually love can be deeply aggravating when I was hoping to maintain a different mood.
In your case I suppose you were trying to sleep, which is a similar situation of being precious about mood, detesting being disturbed.
Chatter and music are only the most obviously disruptive forms of noise, the attention-grabbing ones. So what's the connection between other people's irresponsibility, and the irritation cause by more trivial noises, ones that ought to be ignorable?
I think this is a case of feedback. The injustice, and the potential escalation, and the social difficulty in reasoning with the person, all cause cogitation. The cogitation makes the distraction worse! Now it's even more unfair! And so on.
To mention animals again, sometimes the dawn chorus aggravates me: but this is when I've been burning the candle at both ends - in which case the singing birds are reminding me that I've run out of time, and that I've been forced to accept factors in my life that put pressure on my time, and it's so unjust - a thought that irritates me, taking away even more time. And that is disgusting. Those idiot birds!
Deleted Comment
He came from a farm in rural farm town. He probably never had been around more than a few people at once, let alone eating together.
Anyway in a few months he was normal and had no problem eating in a crowd.
Misophonia is when you have an uncontrollable fight or flight reaction to trigger sounds. You can think of it as a miswired nervous system that reacts to certain sounds with fear and/or anger. In this case it's not about preference ("I find the sound rude") but something deeper and more neurological.
It sounds like your friend probably didn't have misophonia if he was simply able to get used to it after a few months.
My closest mental image is people genuinely enjoying some soup, to immediately puke it out as they hear it's made from crushed bugs, even as it's a lie. The reaction is visceral and uncontrollable, but the cause is not physical and is deeply rooted into their mind.
I made it a point of going to the cafeteria with him and my friends would join us - usually in a table of 10, mixed sex. In retrospect it was probably torture for him. At the beginning is when he confided with me about his phobia about eating but maybe out of naïveté I didn’t care - he was my friend and he ate with us and eventually it didn’t seem to be the big deal it was when I first met him, especially after he got a bf in the friend group.
Sometimes, in such infections, particular sounds seem to vibrate my (irritated, inflamed, sensitized) eardrums in a particularly noticeable and distracting way. It's not all sounds, though! Based on the feeling and the triggers, I'd say the feeling is of there being something gummed up right against (the inside side of) my eardrum; where specific frequencies of vibration cause the eardrum to rub itself against this gummy thing.
And other times, in such infections, particular sounds seem to not irritate the eardrum per se, but rather the auditory canal (Eustachian tube). In those cases, it feels like sounds of the right frequency seem to resonate the auditory canal itself (not usually possible due to it being open+connected to your sinuses — but possible when that opening is plugged with gunk!), causing any little dried bits of "stuff" (blood clots, stones from antibody-expunged bacterial biofilms, etc) to "rattle around" inside there. These sensations make me wish I could somehow stick a finger right through my eardrum and down my auditory canal, and itch the spot. (Or get a Eustachian-tube suctioning. Too bad they won't do that to you unless you go deaf from blockage; the one time I did get it, I heard better than I have in years!)
Anyway, this is all enough to make me wonder whether at least some of the people with misophonia (or auditory-hypersensitive sensory processing disorders) just have chronic undiagnosed middle-ear infections (or sequelae of such.)
Now we have a better relationship, to the point where I felt comfortable discussing my discomfort with his chewing. But rather than frame it as "Can you please chew more quietly", I told him I'd prefer to wear earbuds when we eat dinner together. I also told him about misophonia, which I had learned about in the intervening years since childhood. He was a little confused, but didn't feel like I was criticizing him.
Now when we eat together, we eat without conversation since I'm listening to music during the meal. It can be a bit weird when there are others present, but when it's just the two of us it's fine. It's made mealtime together tolerable, whereas in the past each meal was an excruciating ordeal.
Or maybe I am just overthinking it.