After getting a lovely neighbor with a straight piped Dodge Challenger, I completely understand the statement "it’s about feeling trapped or helpless when you can’t get away from these sounds."
Also, if you have a straight piped Dodge Challenger, I assure you your neighbors hate you.
Yeah I have neighbors that have small motorbikes. Here you are limited to 250cc until you get your full license. So there is a market for 250cc bike that rev insanely fast and make a lot of noise. When they leave their culdesac they go full throttle everytime. We are over the road from the culdesac and have a new born. I'm really sick of them waking the baby.
- The Amazon van that beeps every time it goes into park, because it passes by reveres (D -> R -> P) so it beeps. And you think he would park once. But no, every house, 10 houses in a row, break to standstill, put in park, BEEP, stop engine, unbuckle seatbelt, get out, deliver package, get back in, seatbelt, start truck, put it in drive, BEEP, drive 30 feet, ...
- My neighbor downstairs who believes the door MUST be slammed for the lock to work.
I'd love to go and live on a remote patch somewhere. But my employer requires me to be within 30 miles of the office.
Edit: more
- People using speakerphone outside while standing in front of houses
- People (maintenance workers especially) leaving their engine idle for no good reason except AC. That big V8 in that F-350 sounds so low that I can hear it 2 blocks away.
Funny, but dogs barking and children crying (on conference calls and in general) don't really evoke from me a visceral negative reaction, compared to other sounds (e.g. loud motorbikes and 2-stroke leafblowers/lawn mowers)
Oh wow. I didn't know this had a name. I hate hearing someone chewing. It's really distracting and disgusting. And any repetitive clicking. Ugh. But strangely, some other noise is enjoyable and even cathartic, as long as there's variation. I actually like to listen to Merzbow now and then.
The 20% number also aligns with the percentage of highly sensitive persons in the population. Seems like this is a subtrait of HSP.
I wonder if this is why my heart rate goes up and I feel inexplicably enraged when I can slightly, just barely hear my roommate two rooms away watching TV when I'm in bed trying to fall asleep. I ask for things to be turned down and I use a white noise machine (have tried ear plugs, they work but they make my ears hurt), which helps, but sometimes the only effective thing is to pull a pillow over my head. It's even worse with people who snore. I can't imagine how my mother has slept next to my sleep apnea father in the same bed for 40 years and not gone insane.
If you haven't already, try Mack's silicone ear plugs. They are fundamentally different from foam earplugs in that they don't spring back when you press on them, which means they exert almost no force on your ears.
I have a strong, strong, flight or fight aversion to the sounds of people eating with their mouth open. Like, measurably increases my heartrate, adrenaline spike.
It's not rational, it's not something I have control over. It's something I deal with and largely have built techniques to try and lower the stress of.
I'm aware this is fundamentally a "your brain is wired different" issue, and so I'm never sure what the etiquette should be on asking others to chew with the mouths closed.
Many cultures don't have any concerns around slurping/chewing with mouth open, so meal times in mixed company are often quite hard for me. Add on the stress of trying to figure out whether I should even mention something (and make everyone else uncomfortable) is bonus stress on top.
> I have a strong, strong, flight or fight aversion to the sounds of people eating with their mouth open. Like, measurably increases my heartrate, adrenaline spike.
Same, except I can feel hatred bubbling up from the pit of my soul.
Also, when people talk and you hear their tongue moving around, touching the saliva coated interior of their mouths. The old people in Ken Burns' WWII documentary were the worst about it.
This drives me insane to the point of internal anger and disgust, but there's litte I can do about it. Nobody else gets it when I politely ask. I just have to bear the pain.
I'm susceptible to a few types of sounds I loathe:
- food/eating/mouth noises
- off-key singing
- chalkboard scraping (I think most people have an aversion to this)
The strong feeling of displeasure for these sounds has been with me since a very young age and has never gone away.
I had this issue show up suddenly, but atter the past 10 years or so it has gotten a bit better. I know longer am managing rage if I know the person is stuffed up or following their cultural norms.
I think it is very similar to road rage, which can normally be defused by communication or sympathy.
If I have to hear one more “click-clack-click-clack” of people playing a ping-pong match while I’m trying to get work done, I’m worried I’ll end up in the newspaper the next day.
For me, it's the unnatural sounds of civilization. The beep beep beep of trucks backing up or construction equipment, leaf blowers, or helicopters flying over while I'm on a nature walk.
For me, it's specifically those gasoline leaf blowers. It gives me pretty high anxiety that no other sound does, for reasons I don't understand. The rest of your list can be bothersome to me, but doesn't create the anxiety.
It's funny I rather enjoy hearing city sounds from my apartment. Horns honking, trolly bells, even construction (to an extent...). But if I'm out on the street it's super annoying.
Horn honks while in my apartment: oh my, hear the sounds of life out there!
Horn honks while I'm on the street: did ta really have to honk at that person? Asshole.
It's interesting. I'm the same way but I've had friends from the city who are distracted by the sounds of nature in the southeast. The crickets and birds that are always gabbing. I assume it's just whatever your brain associates with background noise!
It’s been an odd struggle, for the last 20 years or so, to get people to “believe” this is real, too.
I once went so far as to purchase really expensive (for the time) noise cancelling headphones and write them off as a work expense. My boss, in a windowless office directly behind me, would slurp and half stop breathing while eating lunch. It was get headphones or check myself into inpt therapy. This was before “wfh” was allowed, too.
I find as I get older my sensitivity to specific sounds seems to be increasing. In addition to some already mentioned:
- the sharp beeping sound made by my elevator as it passes every floor. Ironically this apparently is an ADA requirement though most elevators I ride have a much more muted sound which doesn’t bother me.
- the beeping sound made by trucks when backing up, esp those that are so loud I can hear it inside my apartment.
I grew up in-town in a city, and I actually like to hear a little city activity in the background. Living out in farm country might drive me crazy.
What baffles me about the in-town residential neighborhood where I now live -- where kinda-rotting old houses sell for a few million dollars, and apartments that would never pass regulations rent for thousands of dollars -- is that people put up with gratuitous racket:
* So many various trucks (e.g., even maintenance worker pickups) with ear-piercing backup beeps. Sometimes I log these, and it can be every few minutes. I'm skeptical that they save anyone -- I'd think more likely they they wake people up and cause fatigue/grogginess accidents that way, cause stress and lost productivity for WFH, and damage hearing of those around them.
* Almost daily early-morning Dumpster trucks working outside my window, making more racket than you'd imagine, when there's a few ways it could be improved dramatically, but regulation enforcement can't even get them to stop breaking the law about how early they wake up people.
* Announcements of the frequent street cleaning here start at 7am, and go for hours. They involve a truck driving through the streets, blaring on a loudspeaker so people can hear inside their homes: "Street cleaning! Cars on the {even|odd} side of the street will be tagged and towed! Street cleaning!" And repeat intermittently for hours. The loudspeaker trucks are a bit like we've been invaded, and are ordered that curfew is in effect. Also note that we're supposed to be walking-friendly, and a lot of residents don't even own cars, so there's also some pandering-to-car-owners resentment on top of the agitation and lost sleep.
* Car horns that honk as people get in and out. My building alone has about 100 people in it, and other apartment buildings and houses surround our parking lot. These frequent car honks wake up people, interrupt and I'd guess background-stress people in their homes, and desensitize people to the car horn sound as an emergency alert that should grab your attention because something life-threatening might need your decision and action in a fraction of a second.
* Leafblowers. So much leafblowers.
I've started to make some effort on these, but with all the crazy-expensive real estate here, and a city government that in some ways is very progressive and very well funded, I can only guess why these problems haven't been solved already. I speculate that part of it might be heavy real estate ownership by investors, serving a market of transient captive university students. For the non-transient residents, like myself, one of the barriers to getting involved is that these aren't the only, nor most important/urgent, problems demanding our time.
The dump drunk, every morning... they raise the dumpster, and do a couple of back-and-forths to get everything out. BANG-BANG-BANG. Then they put them down. BANG. Roll it back. BANG. Back up the truck. BEEP-BEEP-BEEP.
The car-honking is also I find so rude. You get 1 pass. If I'm picking you up and you're not outside, you're walking. I am providing you a curtesy, so you better not waste anymore of MY time.
Leafblowers are the absolute worst, and I live in SoCal. You're moving DIRT. You're not REMOVING it, you're just MOVING it to the street.
I hate car noises. When I'm at home (working or not), I close my doors and thermopane windows so there's as little noise from outside as possible but still it's not enough. Even though I don't live on a busy street, there's enough traffic around to piss the hell out of me, I get into a visceral state of anxiety and hatred when I hear them passing.
So I'm using an additional trick: a white noise generator, an electric fan room heater ... without the heat. Only the fan which needs to be loud enough so it cancels out outside noise but not so loud to become stressful in it's own way.
I'm so used to this fan noise that I can't even sleep without it.
And don't get me started on ambulance sirens. The physical office where thankfully I don't have to work anymore on a regular basis is right on the way of ambulances going into and out of the city. I've calculated on a statistical base considering the number of people and life/death probability that it's an average of 2 minutes and a maximum of 5 between ambulance passes and reality has proved me correct. Funk ambulances and funk their sirens. I hate them deeply and wish they would all die. I don't care for the people in those ambulances, I cared for about the first 2873 siren passes, afterwards I realized I care more for my own mental/hearing sanity but noone gives a shit about me and sirens keep going.
My stepdad chews with his mouth open. Always has. I had to deal with this living under his roof from the time I was 9 until I was 17. It made dinner an excruciating experience, but I was brought up in an environment which precluded addressing it head-on, so I had to grit my teeth and bear it. When I moved back in with him in 2022 to help him recover from cancer, I was finally mature enough to have a frank conversation with him about it. From then on, we ate separately. All good now.
On another note, I taught English overseas in Shanghai, China from 2007-2013. When I arrived, I learned that in mainland Chinese culture, slurping your noodles is considered a sign of respect to the chef. I somehow made it 6 years there. Not so much because I loved it there, although expat life is fun. It was mostly because I was in a transition period in my life and didn’t know what to do next.
TBH, hearing that 20% of people are similarly afflicted is a relief. Misophonia is an incredibly lonely situation for me. It isn’t talked about much, I’ve never met anyone who also claimed to have it, and when I told my stepdad I suffered from it, he had never heard of it before.
Having gone through therapy for misophonia over the last year, I'm happy that research on the phenomenon has progressed quite a bit since I last gave up on treatment back in the early 2010s. While not 100% gone, I find my misophonia response is nearly gone and I now have skills to deal with it should a response happen. (My therapist's goal was to take misophonia "from the size of an elephant down to a mouse.")
Some interesting things to look for here in the comments of folks describing their own experiences:
- occurrences are often much stronger with family members or friends
- occurrences are often stronger at home or in places that "should" be safe and controllable.
- the content of the sound is what matters (e.g. chewing, engines, tapping, etc), not strictly the quality of the sound (loudness, pitch, etc) -- that's a different thing called hyperacusis
- misophonia often forms in childhood
Anyway, for the many folks here suffering from it: yes, misophonia is real, but also, it is treatable.
I don't know if it qualifies as misophonia but I have a new neighbor that moved in above my apartment and every weekend night they have been hosting parties between 8pm-12am. It's not the general party noise that gets to me, it's the loud bass from the music they play (electronic or hip-hop) that is periodic and has a predictable pattern that causes me drives me nuts. The odd foot stomping, yelling, cheering, etc.. are fine and are to be expected in a crowded city...
I'm not exactly sure how to best deal with this but I'm almost at the point of moving out and breaking my lease. I have no idea how their neighbors on the same floor can deal with it considering it sounds more than twice as loud when in their floor hallway.
On the bright side, I guess I can consider myself lucky in that none of the other triggers in the article like chewing seem to have any effect on me.
My sibling has this and I have a hard time feeling sorry for those with it as a result. When they were younger, they hated loud noises - sounds like fireworks - and that was reasonable.
But as they got older, they got annoyed by more sounds, usually mouth related. My dad's clicking jaw, someone eating chips at a birthday party, a baby talking gibberish at a restaurant, etc. If my sibling hears a sound they find annoying, you'll be sure to get a dirty look, screamed at, or they'll burst into tears. Sometimes it's all the above. I won't visit my sibling anymore because of their problem.
As unpleasant as it sounds, you have to desensitize yourself to these sounds. The more you avoid it, the more intolerable it gets.
This one hits home, but I also am not sure if it lines up neatly with the definition. I only have significant physical reaction to certain sounds when I'm at my place of residence (I've had this for the past five years and have moved around plenty).
Particular triggering noises? Kids playing basketball in the neighbor's yard, kids screaming during play, cars playing music with bass loud enough where you can hear the car rattling, and...coughing / clearing one's throat.
For most of these things, I imagine people also get annoyed with these sounds when trying to focus on work, as I do. But even if I'm doing something that I don't consider important (e.g. cooking, watching TV, etc.), my heart rate goes up and I get irritable. This all only irritates me when I'm at home. Maybe it's the feeling of not being able to change the environment around me (i.e. the feeling of being trapped as mentioned in the article)?
I don't think I have this, but I do have a lower pain threshold for noise than most people… or at least I did as a teenager, I've mostly avoided loud things since then.
Emergency sirens set me on edge, but that's partly because I now live next to a busy crossroads and they're frequent, I don't think it's physiological.
Noise-cancelling headphones have been a game changer for me. I specifically love my AirPods Pro, because beyond the apple integration, I can have them with me in my pocket at all times. Distressing or even mildly unpleasant noise? I can always pop them in and get some relief
On the go: AirPod Pro. On plane: AirPod Max and foam ear plugs. Sleeping: foam ear plugs
For me, it’s critical that foam ear plugs be full size and cylindrical. The kind Tim Ferris recommended in his book work poorly for people with larger ear canals.
Cylindrical foam ear plugs: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B001J4HB1C
I have Airpods Pro and they provide some physical sound dampening, but the noise cancellation only works on rumbly white noise, not things like talking or eating noises. It can actually make talking seem louder by cancelling out the background noise.
For the youngsters out there, the worst sound ever is scraping fingernails on a chalkboard. I do not think anyone can deal with that. Just thinking about it gives me the willies.
I do not remember when chalkboards were phased out to whiteboards, but I have not seen one in quite a while.
The more interesting part of this to me is the fact that just reading the phrase / thinking about "fingernails on chalkboard" causes a very clear physiological reaction.
We can almost feel the chalk powder getting under our fingernails and causing an irritating feeling shuddering through our body.
Why is that I wonder.
What evolutionary past may have contributed to this aversion.
I can imagine for example someone naming their music band "fingernails on chalkboard" and having dismal sales because of this very phenomenon.
I wonder if there is an OPPOSITE example to this. Reading a phrase automatically causes distinct positive response involuntarily?
I can feel the noise in my head. Every small crackle.
All these neuroses popping up everywhere, I wonder if it's just too much sensory input.
When younger I'd dream about living in NY with the 24hr hustle and bustle and getting 3am pizzas.
As an adult it sounds like absolute torture and my dream is living alone in a cabin in the woods with minimal power and internet(and the latter wants fade daily).
Maybe it's all another symptom of slowly becoming the old man who yells at clouds.
[+] [-] tylerag|3 years ago|reply
Also, if you have a straight piped Dodge Challenger, I assure you your neighbors hate you.
[+] [-] xupybd|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ericpauley|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rascul|3 years ago|reply
Are you sure it's straight pipes? An aftermarket exhaust system will not typically remove the cats and mufflers and can still be ridiculously loud.
[+] [-] WirelessGigabit|3 years ago|reply
- Leafblowers. And it feels that their users are the kind that like to rev a 250cc constantly. Not to mention the pollution of a 2stroke engine.
- Trucks backing up. (Newer ones have a much less penetrating noise)
- People honking at all hours of the day
- People closing their car and hitting the close button 23 times as they walk to their apartment, which causes the car to honk every time.
- People who remove straighten parts of their exhaust.
- The guy with the super cool looking Mustang who refuses to put the car in Quiet mode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klS4PFaAUk8
- The Amazon van that beeps every time it goes into park, because it passes by reveres (D -> R -> P) so it beeps. And you think he would park once. But no, every house, 10 houses in a row, break to standstill, put in park, BEEP, stop engine, unbuckle seatbelt, get out, deliver package, get back in, seatbelt, start truck, put it in drive, BEEP, drive 30 feet, ...
- My neighbor downstairs who believes the door MUST be slammed for the lock to work.
I'd love to go and live on a remote patch somewhere. But my employer requires me to be within 30 miles of the office.
Edit: more
- People using speakerphone outside while standing in front of houses
- People (maintenance workers especially) leaving their engine idle for no good reason except AC. That big V8 in that F-350 sounds so low that I can hear it 2 blocks away.
- People
[+] [-] antisthenes|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 4dayworkweek4u|3 years ago|reply
Ice cream trucks with their stupid music
Construction
Buses, trucks, trains, planes
Loud music
Speaker phone conversations in cars, with the cars speakers turned to max
Foot stomping on non-carpet floors (in levels above you)
Cockatoos screaching
[+] [-] lostlogin|3 years ago|reply
- The crazy for mounting stolen school PA megaphones on cars and push bikes, often just to play Celine Dion.
- Flat smoke detector beeps. If I can’t find the damn thing after 20 beeps, please just catch fire. I don’t want the house anymore.
The person who makes a device that mutes noise for your home (or even just bedroom) will transform cities for the better.
[+] [-] tayo42|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dimal|3 years ago|reply
The 20% number also aligns with the percentage of highly sensitive persons in the population. Seems like this is a subtrait of HSP.
[+] [-] toomanyrichies|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jaqalopes|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tuber3|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thefz|3 years ago|reply
Ear plugs.
[+] [-] EngManagerIsMe|3 years ago|reply
It's not rational, it's not something I have control over. It's something I deal with and largely have built techniques to try and lower the stress of.
I'm aware this is fundamentally a "your brain is wired different" issue, and so I'm never sure what the etiquette should be on asking others to chew with the mouths closed.
Many cultures don't have any concerns around slurping/chewing with mouth open, so meal times in mixed company are often quite hard for me. Add on the stress of trying to figure out whether I should even mention something (and make everyone else uncomfortable) is bonus stress on top.
[+] [-] StrangeATractor|3 years ago|reply
Same, except I can feel hatred bubbling up from the pit of my soul.
Also, when people talk and you hear their tongue moving around, touching the saliva coated interior of their mouths. The old people in Ken Burns' WWII documentary were the worst about it.
[+] [-] echelon|3 years ago|reply
This drives me insane to the point of internal anger and disgust, but there's litte I can do about it. Nobody else gets it when I politely ask. I just have to bear the pain.
I'm susceptible to a few types of sounds I loathe:
- food/eating/mouth noises
- off-key singing
- chalkboard scraping (I think most people have an aversion to this)
The strong feeling of displeasure for these sounds has been with me since a very young age and has never gone away.
[+] [-] postsantum|3 years ago|reply
The only exception to this rule is people who snore at hostels. I hate them rationally
[+] [-] antiterra|3 years ago|reply
I think it is very similar to road rage, which can normally be defused by communication or sympathy.
[+] [-] wara23arish|3 years ago|reply
Its exactly how you described
[+] [-] throwaway22032|3 years ago|reply
Is this like one of those "some people go to Walmart in pyjamas" things? That honestly sounds ridiculous to me.
[+] [-] copymoro|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] albert_e|3 years ago|reply
Forced work from office
Coworkers who have insatiable need to socialize, look for opportunities to chit chat, party
Meetings where people talk over each other
People who prefer calling to offline async comms
....
On the other side are us introverts who also have ADHD and misophonia
[+] [-] toomanyrichies|3 years ago|reply
If I have to hear one more “click-clack-click-clack” of people playing a ping-pong match while I’m trying to get work done, I’m worried I’ll end up in the newspaper the next day.
[+] [-] jmugan|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tyingq|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cpuguy83|3 years ago|reply
Horn honks while in my apartment: oh my, hear the sounds of life out there!
Horn honks while I'm on the street: did ta really have to honk at that person? Asshole.
[+] [-] xeromal|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grapesurgeon|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] flandish|3 years ago|reply
I once went so far as to purchase really expensive (for the time) noise cancelling headphones and write them off as a work expense. My boss, in a windowless office directly behind me, would slurp and half stop breathing while eating lunch. It was get headphones or check myself into inpt therapy. This was before “wfh” was allowed, too.
[+] [-] grapesurgeon|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] andersco|3 years ago|reply
- the sharp beeping sound made by my elevator as it passes every floor. Ironically this apparently is an ADA requirement though most elevators I ride have a much more muted sound which doesn’t bother me. - the beeping sound made by trucks when backing up, esp those that are so loud I can hear it inside my apartment.
[+] [-] neilv|3 years ago|reply
What baffles me about the in-town residential neighborhood where I now live -- where kinda-rotting old houses sell for a few million dollars, and apartments that would never pass regulations rent for thousands of dollars -- is that people put up with gratuitous racket:
* So many various trucks (e.g., even maintenance worker pickups) with ear-piercing backup beeps. Sometimes I log these, and it can be every few minutes. I'm skeptical that they save anyone -- I'd think more likely they they wake people up and cause fatigue/grogginess accidents that way, cause stress and lost productivity for WFH, and damage hearing of those around them.
* Almost daily early-morning Dumpster trucks working outside my window, making more racket than you'd imagine, when there's a few ways it could be improved dramatically, but regulation enforcement can't even get them to stop breaking the law about how early they wake up people.
* Announcements of the frequent street cleaning here start at 7am, and go for hours. They involve a truck driving through the streets, blaring on a loudspeaker so people can hear inside their homes: "Street cleaning! Cars on the {even|odd} side of the street will be tagged and towed! Street cleaning!" And repeat intermittently for hours. The loudspeaker trucks are a bit like we've been invaded, and are ordered that curfew is in effect. Also note that we're supposed to be walking-friendly, and a lot of residents don't even own cars, so there's also some pandering-to-car-owners resentment on top of the agitation and lost sleep.
* Car horns that honk as people get in and out. My building alone has about 100 people in it, and other apartment buildings and houses surround our parking lot. These frequent car honks wake up people, interrupt and I'd guess background-stress people in their homes, and desensitize people to the car horn sound as an emergency alert that should grab your attention because something life-threatening might need your decision and action in a fraction of a second.
* Leafblowers. So much leafblowers.
I've started to make some effort on these, but with all the crazy-expensive real estate here, and a city government that in some ways is very progressive and very well funded, I can only guess why these problems haven't been solved already. I speculate that part of it might be heavy real estate ownership by investors, serving a market of transient captive university students. For the non-transient residents, like myself, one of the barriers to getting involved is that these aren't the only, nor most important/urgent, problems demanding our time.
[+] [-] WirelessGigabit|3 years ago|reply
The dump drunk, every morning... they raise the dumpster, and do a couple of back-and-forths to get everything out. BANG-BANG-BANG. Then they put them down. BANG. Roll it back. BANG. Back up the truck. BEEP-BEEP-BEEP.
The car-honking is also I find so rude. You get 1 pass. If I'm picking you up and you're not outside, you're walking. I am providing you a curtesy, so you better not waste anymore of MY time.
Leafblowers are the absolute worst, and I live in SoCal. You're moving DIRT. You're not REMOVING it, you're just MOVING it to the street.
[+] [-] MichaelRo|3 years ago|reply
So I'm using an additional trick: a white noise generator, an electric fan room heater ... without the heat. Only the fan which needs to be loud enough so it cancels out outside noise but not so loud to become stressful in it's own way.
I'm so used to this fan noise that I can't even sleep without it.
And don't get me started on ambulance sirens. The physical office where thankfully I don't have to work anymore on a regular basis is right on the way of ambulances going into and out of the city. I've calculated on a statistical base considering the number of people and life/death probability that it's an average of 2 minutes and a maximum of 5 between ambulance passes and reality has proved me correct. Funk ambulances and funk their sirens. I hate them deeply and wish they would all die. I don't care for the people in those ambulances, I cared for about the first 2873 siren passes, afterwards I realized I care more for my own mental/hearing sanity but noone gives a shit about me and sirens keep going.
[+] [-] toomanyrichies|3 years ago|reply
On another note, I taught English overseas in Shanghai, China from 2007-2013. When I arrived, I learned that in mainland Chinese culture, slurping your noodles is considered a sign of respect to the chef. I somehow made it 6 years there. Not so much because I loved it there, although expat life is fun. It was mostly because I was in a transition period in my life and didn’t know what to do next.
TBH, hearing that 20% of people are similarly afflicted is a relief. Misophonia is an incredibly lonely situation for me. It isn’t talked about much, I’ve never met anyone who also claimed to have it, and when I told my stepdad I suffered from it, he had never heard of it before.
[+] [-] Balladeer|3 years ago|reply
Some interesting things to look for here in the comments of folks describing their own experiences:
- occurrences are often much stronger with family members or friends
- occurrences are often stronger at home or in places that "should" be safe and controllable.
- the content of the sound is what matters (e.g. chewing, engines, tapping, etc), not strictly the quality of the sound (loudness, pitch, etc) -- that's a different thing called hyperacusis
- misophonia often forms in childhood
Anyway, for the many folks here suffering from it: yes, misophonia is real, but also, it is treatable.
[+] [-] hyperpl|3 years ago|reply
I'm not exactly sure how to best deal with this but I'm almost at the point of moving out and breaking my lease. I have no idea how their neighbors on the same floor can deal with it considering it sounds more than twice as loud when in their floor hallway.
On the bright side, I guess I can consider myself lucky in that none of the other triggers in the article like chewing seem to have any effect on me.
EDIT: in case it matters: jurisdiction is NYC
[+] [-] punyearthling|3 years ago|reply
But as they got older, they got annoyed by more sounds, usually mouth related. My dad's clicking jaw, someone eating chips at a birthday party, a baby talking gibberish at a restaurant, etc. If my sibling hears a sound they find annoying, you'll be sure to get a dirty look, screamed at, or they'll burst into tears. Sometimes it's all the above. I won't visit my sibling anymore because of their problem.
As unpleasant as it sounds, you have to desensitize yourself to these sounds. The more you avoid it, the more intolerable it gets.
[+] [-] cjdoc29|3 years ago|reply
Particular triggering noises? Kids playing basketball in the neighbor's yard, kids screaming during play, cars playing music with bass loud enough where you can hear the car rattling, and...coughing / clearing one's throat.
For most of these things, I imagine people also get annoyed with these sounds when trying to focus on work, as I do. But even if I'm doing something that I don't consider important (e.g. cooking, watching TV, etc.), my heart rate goes up and I get irritable. This all only irritates me when I'm at home. Maybe it's the feeling of not being able to change the environment around me (i.e. the feeling of being trapped as mentioned in the article)?
[+] [-] ben_w|3 years ago|reply
Emergency sirens set me on edge, but that's partly because I now live next to a busy crossroads and they're frequent, I don't think it's physiological.
[+] [-] brundolf|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nealmueller|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] antiterra|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmclnx|3 years ago|reply
I do not remember when chalkboards were phased out to whiteboards, but I have not seen one in quite a while.
edit: spelling
[+] [-] albert_e|3 years ago|reply
We can almost feel the chalk powder getting under our fingernails and causing an irritating feeling shuddering through our body.
Why is that I wonder.
What evolutionary past may have contributed to this aversion.
I can imagine for example someone naming their music band "fingernails on chalkboard" and having dismal sales because of this very phenomenon.
I wonder if there is an OPPOSITE example to this. Reading a phrase automatically causes distinct positive response involuntarily?
[+] [-] iancmceachern|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] harperlee|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] effingwewt|3 years ago|reply
Velcro gets me. It sends a shiver down my spine, it's worse for me than nails on a chalkboard.
Slowly pulling velcro feels physically uncomfortable.
I can feel the noise in my head. Every small crackle.
All these neuroses popping up everywhere, I wonder if it's just too much sensory input.
When younger I'd dream about living in NY with the 24hr hustle and bustle and getting 3am pizzas.
As an adult it sounds like absolute torture and my dream is living alone in a cabin in the woods with minimal power and internet(and the latter wants fade daily).
Maybe it's all another symptom of slowly becoming the old man who yells at clouds.