Why do people hate the sound of their own voice?

You’re not alone if you’ve ever listened to your voice on a recording and absolutely hated it. The physiological reasons for this are relatively straightforward: Voice production starts in the diaphragm when air is pushed from the lungs. This air blows past the vocal cords at high speeds, causing them to vibrate hundreds of times per second. This creates pitches that then move up the throat before being shaped by the tongue and mouth to make a sound. How that sound is perceived then splits into two categories: air conduction and bone conduction.

Air conduction is the way we hear most sounds, including recordings of our voice. The waves travel through the air and enter the ear canal, vibrating the eardrum, which passes those vibrations to the tiny bones in the middle ear. These vibrations are then transmitted to the cochlea in the inner ear, where they are converted into electrical signals sent to the brain. Bone conduction, however–or how we hear our own voice in real time–bypasses the middle ear altogether. It occurs when sound vibrations are transferred to the cochlea through the skull bones.

Still, it’s odd to find your voice unpleasant when it’s an extension of yourself. Research scientists who have investigated this phenomenon believe the reason someone may dislike how they sound is a combination of the physiology behind how our voice is perceived in our hearing organs and psychological and social pressures associated with how someone speaks.

Research has shown that the sound of someone’s active speaking voice, which refers to what other people hear when you talk, influences how they are perceived. This can lead to assumptions as to what specific social attributes someone has or lacks—including intellect, wealth, trustworthiness, agreeableness, emotional stability, and competence.

“Our voices are the way that we express ourselves intrinsically and the way that we present ourselves to the outside world,” said Dr. Brian Nuyen, a board-certified otolaryngologist-head and neck surgeon at Stanford Health Care.

“The stakes are really high,” Nuyen continued. “People can make snap judgments and people do make snap judgments about our voice.”

This can be particularly distressing for some people who are transgender or non-binary and feel that their voice is not aligned with their gender identity. In these instances, vocal congruence can be helpful.

“A big component of that is specialized gender-affirming voice therapy,” said Dr. Libby Smith, division chief of laryngology at the University of Pittsburgh and the director of the UPMC Voice Airway and Swallowing Center. “Sometimes surgery is also required, but oftentimes, the strategies provided by a speech pathologist to help someone identify how to modify what they’re doing in the choice of words, tone, and the choice of prosody (the melody of speech) can also help them achieve that congruence without surgery, which is really nice.”

[ Related: Why do we have earlobes? They make no evolutionary sense. ]

Professional voice users—such as journalists, CEOs, politicians, media personalities, celebrities, or educators—also change their voices for a different reason: to portray themselves in a way that best serves their professional interests.

“It’s not uncommon for people to alter their voice to meet the job demands. So, for female journalists and broadcasters, sometimes lower their pitch a bit,” said Smith. “Oftentimes, it’s through something called glottal fry because, unfortunately, there is a societal idea that lower-pitch voices denote authority. Hopefully, that’s something that we’re working on as a society to change. But that is the reality at the present.”

Changing how the voice sounds can be done in several ways, including by modifying the breath or the way you support it from your diaphragm to altering how you shape sounds with your lips, tongue, palate, and teeth to get a sound that you like.

“A lot of folks can and do change the way that they’ve produced their voice. It’s such a malleable instrument in our body,” said Nuygen. “We can adapt and use feedback to change the way that we perform our bodily functions, including our voice.”

This story is part of Popular Science’s Ask Us Anything series, where we answer your most outlandish, mind-burning questions, from the ordinary to the off-the-wall. Have something you’ve always wanted to know? Ask us.