Noise at cocktail parties

I, too, suffer from this kind of distraction...at work! A lovely group of people, but they have loud voices and an endless supply of chitchat.

In your case, when you are with one person, try staring at his nose, or the space between his eyebrows. It's not as intimidating as staring into his eyes, but it helps to give you something to focus on and shut out the others.

Otherwise, it's almost impossible without earphones, which your hostess will frown on, and you might as well go into the kitchen and help with the dishes.

This works for me, and I'm glad to share.

Problem: Loud voices, many voices, irritating voices that bring on anxiety for reasons we don't fully understand

Solution: Block one ear.

Interestlingly, even when the voices aren't particularly loud, they can be irritating, and sometimes, there need not be more than one speaker, given enough background noise. Even more interestingly, I find that blocking one ear often helps a lot (casually using my hand to hold up my other arm by the elbow and placing the other hand on the side of my face as though I am merely in "a casual position" while blocking the ear with my fingers). For some reason, receiving auditory stimulus from one ear only makes things much better (for me, it's usually the left ear that remains unblocked).

I hope this helps someone else. Good luck!