Living with the hell of misophonia

My daily train ride to and from work fills me with fear. I’m not worried about delays, being crushed up against strangers or even the prospect of having to stand when I’ve paid a small fortune for a seat.

No, I’m absolutely terrified that someone in my carriage might start to eat or drink.

I know that many people find the sound of over-enthusiastic chomping and slurping mildly irritating, but for me, the volume on eating noises is turned up really, really high.

Crunching, lip-smacking, packet-rustling and glugging are, to me, like nails being dragged down a blackboard, the ear-splitting whine of a dentist’s drill, or a highly distressed baby’s wail. These trigger what I can only describe as a visceral reaction that makes me want to either run away or lash out.

I’m now 56, but for most of my life I thought everyone experienced this reaction to the sound of other people eating.

For misophonia sufferer, Claire Cisotti, 56, the volume on eating noises is turned up painfully high

My husband, Max, and our two children, Mimi, 19, and Zac, 22, would roll their eyes at my insistence that any crisps which did make their way into our home (I refuse to buy them) had to be decanted out of their noisy packets and into cereal bowls, and only eaten after I’d left the room.

The kids grew up thinking every mother teaches their offspring that crisps should be licked and sucked, and never crunched in public.

But about ten years ago, a good friend, who is a child psychiatrist, heard me moaning about the proliferation of eaters on my commuter train and told me I was suffering from a condition called misophonia.

The word translates from the ancient Greek as ‘hatred of sound’ and is defined as having a strong emotional response to certain noises. Misophonia used to be thought of as very rare, but new research from King’s College London and Oxford University, published last month, has found that 18.4 per cent of the UK population suffer from it.

That’s nearly one in five of us. Trigger sounds can include snoring, sniffing, coughing, teeth sucking, keyboard tapping, loud breathing and joint cracking, but for me and millions of others it’s the unbelievably noisy way people go about eating their food that causes problems.

We don’t just feel that nagging sense of annoyance you might experience when someone is talking too loudly on their mobile phone. This is a proper neurological reaction which causes our brain to misinterpret certain sounds as toxic or threatening, and sets off the fight-or-flight survival response.

I’m not normally a highly sensitive person, and when I talk about this problem people often think I’m exaggerating, but misophonia really does present a significant burden on my life.

At the first sound of crunching my heart rate will escalate, I’ll find it difficult to breathe properly, and a strong sense of panic starts to rise up through my body.

The noise becomes all-consuming and it fills my head so I just can’t think properly.

When the panic is really bad (Kettle Chips, for instance, sound to me like a dinosaur chewing an oak tree) I have learned to use breathing exercises to calm myself down. I’ve never actually been trapped in a room with a noisy eater, but I have no doubt that if I couldn’t escape for some reason, the feeling of panic would rise to the point where I’d vomit.

I listened to a podcast recently where the actor, Richard E. Grant, confessed to having misophonia. One big trigger for him is poppadoms — he considers that crunch to be ‘unacceptable’ and it results in a ‘red mist of rage’.

TV star Kelly Osbourne (daughter of Ozzy and Sharon) has also revealed that the sound of chewing — particularly men chewing — makes her knees buckle and causes her to break out in a sweat. She has admitted to walking up to people she doesn’t know and ripping the gum out of their mouths.

When Kelly told her mother about her misophonia, Sharon said she suffered from it, too, and I have read about a possible hereditary link.

I think my father, Charlie, had it. He had an unbreakable rule that no one was allowed to chew gum in his car. If he heard the slightest sound of chomping, or the crack of a bubblegum bubble, he would pull over into the nearest layby and pockets would be turned out. If anyone walked into our house chewing, he’d send them straight back out again. The rage was real.

My psychiatrist friend told me that her misophonia sometimes makes her so angry that she wants to punch the perpetrator, and every so often my condition will trigger feelings of fury.

I feel awful to admit it, but the thought of my husband noisily ‘sipping’ Lemsip when he’s bunged up with cold brings on the kind of rage that makes me want to throw his precious hot drink in his face.

Thankfully, I’m usually not quite so confrontational, but I do seem to spend an extraordinary amount of my time walking away — moving to another carriage, getting up from my desk, exiting the room. At parties I have a radar sensor for the crunchy snacks and I’ll position myself as far away as possible — or leave.

For decades I thought everyone found eating noises intolerable, but it was only when I identified my misophonia that I realised my entire life was being dominated by my attempts to avoid having to listen to other people eat.

I recognise the ‘anticipatory anxiety’ I get as I walk to the train station at the beginning and end of each day. If I can, I will skulk along the entire length of the platform, scanning the windows until I find a carriage without any sign of a cup or food packaging.

The thought of jumping on a train as it’s leaving the station starts my heart racing because I know I’m going to have to endure the living hell of walking through successive carriages of slurpers and munchers until I can find a place to sit in peace.

I mean, when did it become acceptable to eat a three-course meal on a train? Why does everyone have to carry a takeaway coffee cup that must be noisily drunk from? How can people be so oblivious to the feeding racket they make? Has no one got manners any more?

I’d love to go back to the days when it was unseemly to eat in public and, for me, one ‘pro’ about the pandemic was that wearing masks naturally limited the amount of eating or drinking you could do around other people.

But now the deafening masticators are back. Food is available 24/7 and we seem to have acquired a multi-tasking culture which suggests scoffing on the run is a convenient way to save time that might be squandered when quietly digesting a meal in private.

It’s as if face-pushing fast food on the move comes with a ‘two-in-one’ efficiency bonus which tells the world you’re winning at life. But you’re not. It’s rude!

A chocolate bar is one thing, but a full meal? Why can’t you wait until you get home?

I’m a quiet eater, I sip my drinks silently, I barely make a noise when I’m using a keyboard, I will blow my nose rather than inflict the hell of repeatedly sniffing on anyone else.

Noise nightmare: Claire gets anxious to the point where she wants to run away or even lash out 

Like me, Richard E. Grant says if he’s eating an apple he will go to the far corner of a room so no one has to hear him, and if he nibbles popcorn during a movie, he’ll seat himself in the front row on his own to avoid the possibility of annoying anybody else.

Surely that’s the proper way to behave? I wish I didn’t have misophonia, but equally, I wish other people could learn to eat quietly, as I do. Or, at the very least, pick the sort of snacks that melt in your mouth — such as Wotsits.

Life would be so much better for us misophones if the ‘quiet’ carriages really were quiet and could offer a refuge from the tyranny of food and drink noises.

Nothing would make me happier than to see an outright ban on crisps on public transport, just as cigarettes are forbidden.

In the meantime, I’ll just have to plug in my headphones and turn the music up loud.

As told to LOUISE ATKINSON