The intensity of my fury at people watching videos with the sound up in public is so consuming that it sometimes feels irrational even to me. It had never crossed my mind to put it in the misophonia category but I relate a lot to your five-pointed diagram – maybe my response is more psychologically fraught than I had realised.
If you define misophonia as "all noises are annoying/rage inducing" then sure, but I'm confident that people playing things out loud on their phones is sufficiently different to be fully justified. I have no real misophonic tendencies and get intensely annoyed by it too. It is a) a new phenomenon (unlike chewing) and b) completely avoidable (unlike chewing).
For the same reason I think Scott's decision to use as an example "gangbangers loudly playing music in a park" muddies the waters between what is and what isn't irrational to dislike.
EDIT: To clarify why I'm confident that my annoyance at people who play videos out loud on public transport is *not* related to misophonia, I've lived with people with the more extreme examples, asking for silence after 10.30pm, reluctance to eat meals in groups, and frankly most of the time it just isn't something I notice. But the music on transport example is often accompanied by an indignation on behalf of *others*. And frankly it also comes accompanied by a whole host of thoughts and worries about changing/declining social norms, decline of politeness and so on.
I also think there is a thread between "you can just learn to not get annoyed by things" and the "but how does this affect you personally?" tone that people who object to general degradation of norms and etiquette will recognise. I recognise that "polite silence" is a temporal and geographic anomaly achieved in just a few societies but I don't think lamenting its loss ought to be solely seen as misophonia!
Yeah I agree that this trend is genuinely bad and correlated with a whole range of other genuinely bad trends – it's just that on top of my perfectly reasonable reaction on those grounds, I am carrying around a further degree of obsession and rage on this subject which just makes my mental life even more unpleasant. I don't want to chill out to the extent that I no longer care about the loss you describe, since the loss you describe is very meaningful to me, I just wish I could put things in proportion a little better moment to moment.
Yeah. I don’t have problems with chewing or the other common misophonia triggers, but where I used to live, our usual mailman had this habit of tunelessly whistling when he came by to deliver the mail, and the sound triggered a feeling of rage in me for whatever reason (and my apartment was right on the other side of the mail room in the building, so I always heard it if I was there).
I also work in a cubicle farm and feel angry when people hum or whistle at their desks. But in that case, it’s more “WE LIVE IN A SOCIETY, PEOPLE!” — don’t they realize there are people around them who they’re disturbing? Anyway, yes, I agree that these are two different feelings.
I worked in a noisy factory while wearing earplugs, and that motherf*cker behind me who wouldn't stop whistling doesn't know how close he came to dying.
The posts on this topic are fascinating. I have many negative emotions and compulsions that can, have, and will continue to lead to bad outcomes but anger isn't generally one of them. Annoyance, sure, but it's been a very long time since I've felt the rich anger that other people are experiencing. Really interesting to hear how that manifests.
Can you imagine a scenario where you snapped and attacked him? Do you think it's something that eventually would have been likely to happen?
I think anger can be fully "justified" without being rational.
If you need to get somewhere, and a crowded bus is the most convenient/efficient way to get there, and someone sits down next to you in the last empty seat and busts out their phone and starts playing some loud music you really dislike.... that's bullshit, I agree. And in that situation, I'm sure I would seethe about it until I got off at my stop. But spending 15 minutes seething in anger is more unpleasant than spending 15 minutes calmly enduring something unpleasant, right? Does it make sense to call the angry seething rational?
I fortunately do not have this about music, I can tune it out. I was on a train a few months ago and a man asked the parents of a toddler to turn the sound off the phone the toddler was watching.
At the time I couldn't comprehend why he'd prefer to hear a toddler caterwauling as the parents obliged, to the tinny sound of a nursery rhyme. Personally my preferences run the opposite way. But I guess he was like you (and Scott).
I guess an ideal scenario is that trains give out free headphones like aeroplanes do (though not all toddlers will wear them, I think it would have worked in this case!)
Or people planning to listen to things on phones bring headphones with them? No need to push this one onto the train operator. (Note that aeroplane headphones deliberately don't work with non-areoplane devices so you leave them behind for the next guy.)
This is tangential to the rest of the argument but it's been a while since airplane headphones were like that in my experience.
(In fact, the last trip I took, the in-flight entertainment system had that weird dual jack, but the headphones they handed out just had the usual single plug.)
I think it's that people cannot easily have a conversation otherwise, but they can usually watch a video with headphones (or wait to watch the video). I think the point of the post is that what seems like a pure sensory annoyance is actually an indirect reaction to discourtesy.
> I closed my eyes and the sounds are quite different.
That's the whole point: that your auditory perception is altered when it co-occurs with a visual perception. If you shut off the visual perception then of course the auditory perception will not be misdirected by the visual countersignal.
I am no native speaker (plus less good in paying attention to faces, maybe), so the effect did not work that much on me (Germans don't do "wa" with the lower lip behind upper teeth).
Prior to undergoing LASIK, my eyesight was pretty bad. As a result, I rely on eyesight a bit less and on hearing a bit more than an average person. That could be it.
Interesting, I think I have the exact same misphonia. Including the part about, putting on headphones and blasting rain + brown noise, but then still just being angry if once a minute I can hear a quarter second thing that maaaybe was the sound of someone talking. And the part about how people who make noise like this need to suffer but hitler doesn't.
That said, I don't think the boxes you put forth capture it.
Intellectualization is something I do about everything. Or, try not to do, but have the urge to do about anything. Like littering, I have the urge to intellectualize, how it represents the day of society, I generally don't like it. Still, I don't have anywhere near the aversion I do to certain sounds for littering though it ticks the boxes you listen..
Seems to me a sixth component has to do with attention. My mind is always just passively listening and scanning for sounds. But my vision isn't always scanning for trash-like objects. This makes bad visual stimuli of most forms far less intrusive.
EDIT: I also just realized, I stim a lot, and it doesn't bother me to listen to my own sounds. I think this is evidence for the attention dysregulation / predictive processing theory. I remember you writing a post a while ago about that.
It's so much easier hating humans than any other creature. People ignoring priority to the right deserve to get beat. People who fart in busses or elevators, shot. If the dog does it under the table, it's just something that happens.
> people who burn themselves on hot stoves will happily touch a cold stove
I don't know about others, but I won't do this happily! Though I will touch a cold stove, I approach them with the same fear and trepidation as hot ones, and certainly wouldn't feel comfortable leaving my hand (or indeed any non-stove-object) on one. Full disclosure: I did burn my hand on a stove as a child.
Yeah the "pavlov don't work that well" actually seems to work. To this day I'm still afraid to touch metal doors because I stayed in a room which always trigger static electricity.
I have the same issue with noise outside, and get the same anger, directed about "people could choose to not make that noise". Loud motorbikes, people talking loudly at 10pm outside, etc. Also I like sleeping with the window open which makes things worse. I do have that anger to people who make noise generally, in office/home contexts too, especially at night ; and like KJZ said, at people watching videos with the sound on in public or talking loudly on the phone in buses and stuff.
I used to have a white noise machine, it helped with the window closed. I also moved, and now live in a place where people don't talk at 1am outside loudly at least every two nights.
Also agree with sim gishel that visual stimuli is way less of an issue.
And finally I think I hate way more than the average person I know music I don't like being played out loud.
Not sure what to make of all that, but at least it's some more data.
Are you a more quiet and respectful person on average compared to your environment? There's a part of me that feels sensitive to noise-related injustice because I'm literally almost invisible most of the time--people can't hear me walking or talking even when I feel like I'm stomping and shouting, and I take up almost no space and demand no attention--so people taking up more than their allotted share of public space and attention breaks my sense of perception a bit.
I think I am in that I often try to not make too much noise and the idea of making noise that bothers people really bothers me, however I tend to talk loudly (but I think the thing here is that I don't realize that I'm talking loudly, so it's hard to self-adjust).
The "allotted share" idea is very interesting. I'd say I have no issues getting heard on a physical level, but can have trouble getting heard on the "we understand your idea and will apply it because you've convinced us it's the thing to do".
When I left my family's house to live on my own for the first time, the flat I rented had an A/C that could not be turned off. Its noise levels shifted with the force of wind outside, such that it never (never!) sounded like pure white noise but rather a slightly ever-changing white noise. Two days in, the auditory pareidolia reached levels I never thought possible: when trying to fall asleep, I would hear voices, entire discussions, ghostly apparitions, distant screams.. No matter how hard I tried to reason them away, the "sounds" emanating from the A/C fan made it impossible to fall asleep. I started going to bed with headphones on - one ear into the pillow and the other engulfed by the headphone pad. I'd listen to Youtube videos or podcasts until I got so tired I fell asleep. When I left that building six months later for a new place with no A/C, sleeping in complete silence became impossible. In silence, my thoughts rushed around, both aware and unaware that I was the one making the effort to ruin my sleepiness by allowing my brain to mull things over repeatedly. Ever since then, I'd say I've fallen asleep with a background video/podcast playing in my ears about 9 nights out of 10. Since then, I haven't had any issues with background noise. Even when I write, I like to have some ambient music in the background but I tolerate silence perfectly well. I just can't fall asleep without listening to something, and it all comes from those nights of hearing distorted screams from the A/C unit until 3am.
This reminds me of my dad: he loves to go into nature to relax and get away from the big city. Except that most accessible nature is quite close to roads and every car noise reminds him of the city again. His obsession with sounds like that was probably trained on his job though: he is a sound engineer and cutting annoying sounds out of recordings is literally his job.
Could sound like it's related to OCPD (obsessive compulsive **personality** disorder) in some way?
Like rigidity, a feeling that things have to be just right, and very bombastic and aggressive critique of others if they don't conform to your ideas of how things should be. The idea that people doing things you find annoying represent a literal downfall of society seem related too. OCPD folks often have very poor insight and believe it's everyone else who is wrong and not perfectionist enough.
Scott has OCD IIRC and they are often, though certainly not always, comorbid. I have OCD and not an ounce of OCPD. I'm almost the opposite of a perfectionist. For me it's just the horrible, intrusive thoughts that make me incredibly anxious.
Eaton's Asterisk article mentions a study from 2023 which "found that misophonia isn’t correlated with having a [OCPD] diagnosis. It’s just that misophonia kind of looks like OCPD."
Interesting--I just posted elsewhere on the thread about how my misophonia and OCD seem to be linked, and both seemed tied to hormonal changes involved in PMDD that trigger an obsession with order and purity.
That's interesting—I too recall a couple of incidents similar to that in the story featuring your father. Mine are probably even more easily-explained as "kid worships father, adopts his ways", but as you say: that's not quite how I /remember/ it; what I /remember/ is that he mentioned a particular trait of his, and then I had it too.
I also have this at a mild level. Hadn’t realized until now that my intense hatred for people who play music on public transit rather than using headphones might be related to the annoyance at chewing.
I think this, from your article, might be key in all cases: “insofar as their continued noise indicates they don’t care about you enough to stop, it’s easier to be … angry about them.”
I agree, it's basically about people being inconsiderate and simply not caring. [Or not knowing what they ought to know, when it would be socially difficult for you to take them to task for it.]
Noise isn't the only way that can get to you, but it's the strongest channel and the hardest to block out.
I think the 'chewing' one that started the article doesn't really fit the pattern too well, unless someone is chewing with their mouth open and letting food fall out, whatever. Maybe for some people the thought of someone doing that infects the sound of chewing in general, even though everyone has to eat! It's still about people, though - nobody minds about the table manners of the dog or cat. (Or toddler, even.)
I wouldn’t be surprised at all is psychedelic therapy (maybe just take mdma while listening to the sound, and feel how it feels?) provided a big enough effect to destabilize that belief network. People have published proposals on it https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2022.983285/full
My own experience with misophonia is very similar to what Scott describes. And LSD (a moderate dose, first time trying psychedelics) had a very large effect on relieving it, which lasted for several months.
Isn't an at least CBT-adajacent explanation avoidance-reinforcement? You start with a dislike of some sound. When given the opportunity to avoid it, you do so and feel happy that you avoided the sound. That makes you want to avoid the sound even more next time, so you avoid sound even more. By the time your friend says, "Hey, you're really averse to sound," you're aware of a really strong desire to avoid sound, fill in the awfulness of sound that must represent, and run with it (secretly assuming it must be a good thing about you because the avoidance feels so good). Hence the wind doesn't trigger you (unavoidable), the bus does a little (you can see a path to avoiding it, but shouting at a bus driver to not make announcements is so far outside social norms it wouldn't occur to sane-ish people). So far as the people in the park, not only is it avoidable but you can fantasise about heroically confronting them, not be able to do that as it's a bunch of big teenagers, and take an ego hit at your inability to stop them on top (maybe leaving CBT territory here). I think the avoidance-reinforcement explains the headphones and the straining to hear pretty well as well.
Wouldn't you prefer to be unaware of the sound(s) once the headphones are on, then (→ easier "high" from "I've successfully avoided the sounds!")...?
I dunno—it's an interesting idea, and some parts do seem plausible to me, but overall I'm a bit skeptical: I can't ever really recall feeling any sequence of feelings such as that (e.g., happiness at avoiding something I dislike—I associate irritating things with either absence of feeling, i.e. unawareness/neutrality, or else anger/irritation, i.e. if I become aware of or have to deal with them; like, probably irritation still predominates over happiness, in the latter case... even after successfully having ended the nuisance(?)).
Not sure that happiness at avoiding something necessarily builds upon itself like that, either, even if we concede that there is some fairly significant good feeling from "I avoided a thing" in the first place... 'sjust intuitively seeming a bit implausible, t'me.
...but I'm notoriously terrible at introspection—so I could well be wrong, heh. .
Do you resonate with the idea that your inner world is delicate and precious in a way that other people have a duty to caretake? If so, you would have found that there are very few socially tolerated chances to vent your anger originating from this belief because people would label you as egotistical for holding such a view. But an "involuntary" sensitivity to noise that is out of your control and therefore can't get you labeled as egotistical for having it? That would be a rare, socially sanctioned opportunity to express your unexpressed rage stemming from this view of what others owe you. This would explain why you latched on to other people describing the aversion to noise as something that cannot be controlled, and also explains why you seek out the rage. There is too much hidden benefit from holding on to the belief that you cannot control your reaction to the noise. Just give yourself the right to express your sense of entitlement directly and the need to express it through this underhanded way should go away.
Love this comment. It's of course easier said than done, but in my experience totally true:
Once I don't need to justify (to myself, to others) that I have a right to be angry, or, which is the same, that there is something objectively wrong that it is only normal to be angry about, I can just let myself and others be (angry, and noisy, respectively). And funnily, opening myself up to it often leads to it subsiding over time.
I sometimes anthropomorphise the anger and I feel like it works something like this. It wants my attention, and as long as I'm looking at other people who are at fault, I'm not looking at IT. So it will stay, and probably yell more loudly.
I predict this will neither apply, nor "work" (and nor will anthropomorphizing the anger, as in the response by "Kata" below).
There are several reasons I could think of, some of which may even be true (say, e.g.: general distrust of "psychologizing" just-so stories like these, skepticism regarding whether it makes sense for "entitlement regarding delicate inner states" to manifest specifically as misophonia, uncertainty as to whether "I really hate chewing" is /that/ much more socially acceptable to express than "I hate getting interrupted"... unless we assume that "sound of chewing" was initially irritating enough that "I have an uncontrollable reaction to this" would suggest itself as a vector down which to express the entitlement—in which case we still have that unusual sensitivity to explain in the first place,¹ etc. etc.)...
...but mostly, it's because (a) I think Scott & I are pretty similar, and (b) to me these both—OP & response comment below—seem like very "female" ways to think/feel. I can't imagine myself, or my male friends, nodding along.
...or that's my own intuition/experience, anyway—perhaps Scott will say "no, that definitely sounds like me and all my guy friends too, we all meditate upon our delicate insides and have dialogues with mental avatars of our feelings", heh.
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¹(although I guess this last /does/ fit with the "crystallization upon the notion's being floated by another party", come to think of it)
Really? I'd personally understand/ feel others would understand "I hate getting interrupting"—if anything—/more/ so than "listen, I have this really weird thing about chewing, trust me this is a thing okay it's not my fault–"
I predict there is not much I could say that would alter your conclusion because the possibility that you have a "delicate" inner world threatens your "masculine" ego. FYI, I have distinctly more male-typical patterns of thinking relative to my peers, and resonate with being classified as having a "schizoid" psychology (as described by the best writers on the topic, e.g. McWilliams or Greenberg; the DSM-5 characterization is shit and focuses only on a pathological version of the underlying dynamic; socially integrated schizoids like me tend to get classed as the "introspective/autistic/creative/bleeding heart" types).
I also was jarred by your labeling of this as a "just-so" story even though it makes predictions that (as you even noted in your footnote!) match the data (it was a model that readily surfaced based only on data from just one of those predictions, so it wasn't overfit to the training data to put it in machine learning terms). I would argue that you did a "just-so" labeling of this as a "just-so" story to conform to your prior beliefs about the value of psychological modeling.
>because the possibility that you have a "delicate" inner world threatens your "masculine" ego<
Oh, I don't have misophonia, myself¹—my prediction was just based upon (a) being similar to Scott in other ways & (b) the language used. I guess it's really more the reply to your comment (the one about affirming one's Right To Be Angry & envisioning one's anger as a person yelling for attention, and so forth) that seemed strongly "female-way-of-thinking", to me (but a demand that others have a duty to protect one's delicate inner world could /also/ be argued to be a particularly feminine perspective too).
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¹(maybe this supports your idea too, in a way: I have never been accused of being particularly humble or patient, and get irritated—enraged, even, heh²—very quickly & easily when trying to concentrate and someone interrupts me... maybe if I'd instead grown up thinking I couldn't express this, I'd have misophonia too–)
²(it goes away just as quickly, is my only saving grace here. I forgive totally & near-instantaneously. this has caused interpersonal problems before, in that most people seem to hold grudges for incomprehensibly long times, to me... days, even! ten minutes is about my limit, for the /really/ severe grudges...)
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>I also was jarred by your labeling of this as a "just-so" story even though it makes predictions that (as you even noted in your footnote!) match the data<
Sorry—I can see, in retrospect, that the term "just-so story" seems unduly certain & dismissive. I didn't mean it as in "this is definitely an incorrect & 'made-up' garbo hypothesis!", but rather as in "one can come up with lots of plausible explanations like this for various psychological traits & tendencies, and it's hard to know which to go with... so I tend to react with a—mild—blanket skepticism to all of 'em."
I.e., as you note, there /are/ reasons to like the explanation you offered, and it's not unconvincing—but my /intuition/ is usually going to be "nah, it's just some weird brain thing with no real explanation other than 'sometimes people be like this'".
I'd be interested to see if various treatments based upon your hypothesis (e.g. the example you give of explicitly acknowledging to one's self that one has the right to say "don't mess up my inner meditations!", or maybe something like having friends & family verbally affirm the importance of one's inner world, or... etc.) work for people. My ex-wife has terrible misophonia; I'll ask her!
Ha the more I ponder this the clearer it becomes there must be some kind of displacement going on, either your explanation or something else or both. Regardless of the exact source of displacement, there is an obvious mechanism through which the misophonia is reinforced by internal needs.
The crucial part is he knows he seeks out anger deliberately in a way that he labels stupid. It sounds like it's not clear where this drive is coming from, but it must be coming from somewhere. Usually, behavior that does not serve *any* need will dissolve automatically over time when it reaches the point of becoming conscious of it. But if it serves some unconscious need behind the scenes it's a different story. So likely there are one or more unacknowledged needs or beliefs behind the desire to become irrationally angry.
In light of this, it makes sense that directly trying to rewire the brain to reinterpret the sounds as harmless doesn't work. The misophonia is rewarded every time the drive to be angry arises and is fulfilled while the interpretation of sound as annoying is active.
None of this directly explains where the need for this anger comes from, but as long as this drive is there, it's locking the misophonia in place. So without finding a different outlet for it or letting go of it entirely, I imagine the misophonia won't go away at this point.
I feel like this almost supports OP. You feel like whatever noise is equivalent to a personal slight which seems somewhat egotistical. The noise is other people living their life not them banging on ur door. The change in mindset from I feel like someone is wronging me so I can be angry about this to I should feel guilty for being angry about other people living their lives feels like a key piece to psyching yourself out of this. Like Scott said this feels fake at least from the outside looking in.
I think Scott used some examples that seemed like situational reactions rather than specific weird sounds. But you'll find that when people realize realize they have misophonia (by reading a forum or whatever) the way they identify it is becomes of oddball sounds that other people mention they react to, like eating an apple.
There is not egotistical angle to someone reacting to that kind of sound. The chewing one, sure, but there are many other examples that really seem quite random but many people with misophonia seem to react to the exact same specific sounds.
That's a good point—it definitely seems to be a particular set of sounds that commonly trigger misophonia, whereas more complex psychological explanations about egotism etc. don't immediately suggest (to me) that we'd find this to be the case.
Is it wrong to view your inner world as delicate and precious in a way that other people have a duty to help caretake?
Society recognizes that it benefits from allowing the inner worlds of some types of individuals (e.g. artistic, creative types, autistic geniuses) to flourish. If those people are often praised for their mental output, and are often coerced into doing things because the society declares there is a "duty" to do them, why would it be "wrong" for them to develop the belief that the society has a reciprocal "duty" to caretake the system that produces the mental output it so cherishes?
The comment I was responding to said "I think it feels like someone wronging me", and it wasn't clear if "it" referred to my explanation or the person's experience of misophonia. I assumed they were referring to my explanation, because if they feel "wronged" when someone triggers their misophonia, that is a match to my explanation (as another commenter pointed out).
For me a lot of the conflict is second-order - I occasionally have this reaction to e.g. a roomates particular way of clearing his throat. But intellectually it obviously isn't true that other people have a duty to caretake my inner world. Moreover it is clear that in fact I am being the unreasonable one who should change. And that I don't have a reasonable expectation that someone drive down all involuntary sounds they make to an arbitrarily low threshold. (And for that reason misophones kind of offend me with their sensitivity, ironically)
Versus, playing speakers in public. In this case I feel cleanly and uncomplicatedly righteous and may depending on my testosterone level that day actually go aggro the person in question, because they are clearly violating a norm
Could you instead report them to the local police? If the rage you feel is disproportionate to the threat posed by the activity (is that what you meant by “second order”?), then it sounds like your general rage at “people who cause harm by selfishly disregarding the social order” is finding an outlet in such fights?
Righteous rage is a trap. You may think it helps enforce the social order, but the side effect of making people terrified of being classified as a justified target of the righteous rage invariably seems to cause more problems than it solves (e.g. someone who sees you pick a fight in the park may become irrationally afraid of strangers picking fights). It's why cancel culture is so toxic. The truly marginalized in society do not have the power to get away with using aggressive force; if they think they do, they have forgotten what it means to be truly marginalized, and by causing people be afraid of their anger they are most likely causing more harm than whatever they are trying to stop.
>Could you instead report them to the local police?
They certainly could. They could also--with precisely the same probability of bringing down any consequences upon the noisemaker--write their complaint concisely and legibly on a piece of lined paper, and then tear that paper up and throw it away.
I make no claims as to the therapeutic value of either course of action.
You read the part where Scott described layering on white noise and ear phones and then not hearing the offending sound, going searching for it so he could keep being angry about it? And another person saying it's like waiting for someone to jump out in front of you in traffic? And another person likening it to the downfall of society?
For me, it's far more explainable as an inability to keep certain noises in the background. They're basically a pop-up window over my brain followed immediately by the same rage that pop-up windows on a computer rightfully engender. Furthermore, it's somehow not just the actual sound. Hearing somebody crunching chips is "I'd literally murder you with my bare hands except there are consequences for it". If I'm at a lightly-populated Mexican restaurant, I have to wear earplugs. If the place is packed, even though people are crunching everywhere constantly (and I hear it if I try to hear it), it's fine. It stays backgrounded (and not because of the overall noise level) and it doesn't raise stress levels at all. I have a similar visual phenomenon as well. I can sit in a sports bar with 20 TVs and focus on one without a problem. If my girlfriend is sitting next to me watching tiktok trash, no matter what I'm doing, if it's in my field of vision, something about that kind of shit jumping around the screen is impossible to keep backgrounded, as are various spazzy elements in game UIs when I try to concentrate on the actual game pieces. It's not as intensely rage-inducing as sounds, but the concentration-breaking causing a stress response is very similar. And my tolerance is noticeably worse when I'm tired, for whatever that's worth.
> it's far more explainable as an inability to keep certain noises in the background
Yes, I think this is true for my sound issues, too. I really struggle to keep weird-diction talking out of my brainspace. I'm not doing the mistake of actively trying (at least for me, actively trying to ignore things tends to make it worse), but it's definitely attention-related for me. I've described it as "it's impossible to ignore" to my primary.
It does seem like this has something to do with difficulty in controlling one's attention. Long-time meditators have spent a lot of time exercising their attentional muscles and are able to shift awareness from one object to another, dial their focus in and out, watch sensory stimuli rise and fall, etc. All that practice increases the capacity to choose where one directs attention. I don't think you have to be a long-time meditator to get better at it though. The metacognitive therapy folks have a some exercises to help with this as part of teaching people how to stop ruminating.
The rage seems to me could be related to feeling out of control -- victimized essentially by sounds that one cannot shift awareness around and so feeling subject to it. Strengthening the capacity to shift awareness around flexibly seems like could make a person feel less victimized by the sound and therefore less enraged by it.
If a person adds an overlay of "this shouldn't be happening" -- whether that's about social judgment or thinking the world should be better than it is -- that can amplify the rage in a context where a person feels victimized by their lack of choice/control.
There are a bunch of comments in the thread along those lines, and I don't know if Scott did a terrible job of describing his experience, or if his experience is just very different than mine, but none of the "norm-violation", "control", "justice", or higher-level thought process things are even remotely related to my experience. The rage is *instant*, on a similar timescale to how long it takes to register pain from touching a hot object. Literally 0 to snarling in under half a second. There are no higher-level functions involved. There are no moral judgments involved (ok, sure, people who play videos in public are pieces of shit, but people who eat chips at a Mexican restaurant aren't). Plenty of triggers aren't even sounds made or caused (in any normal sense of the word) by conscious entities. There's no thought of victimization. Maybe there's some way to CBT-unprogram yourself from instant rage via "getting your attention hijacked is good, ackshually" feedback, but I have no idea what that would realistically look like.
Your experience suggests there are two things going on (at least) and that the moral outrage part is an additional overlay to the visceral and immediate rage triggered by the sound. Maybe the moral outrage is an effort by the conscious mind to explain to itself the otherwise unexplained rage in response to the sound, and that your mind for whatever reason doesn't need to do that?
this reminds me of how old people are often weird and annoying (love the view from inside). do the malicious networks accumulate, or maybe some part of the pentagram gets stronger with age?
Scott also felt very irritated, when his travel-pals seemed (to him) to ignore his wishes. Which is perfectly understandable, but then he might have been expecting too much (mind-reading ability) or being "more touchy".
For me (a non-misophoniac), misophonia is an interesting case of fusing morality with aesthetics. Is there any principle by which enforcing some aesthetic preferences is considered okay, but enforcing others is "exclusionary" and "gatekeepy"?
Let's say I run a rationalist meetup and I come up with rules for guests. No listening to loud music on the phone, of course. Use deodorant to not smell bad, okay. Chew with your mouth closed, that's reasonable, misophonia is common. Don't touch people without consent, that's fair.
How about "don't wear stained clothes"? Offending the sense of vision is not fundamentally different from offending the sense of hearing or smell. "Don't kiss your partner in public"? Attitudes to PDA vary dramatically across the world. "No wearing socks with sandals"? Or maybe, more realistically, "No broccoli haircuts"? Reasonable demands do seem to transition to ineffable etiquette and "No fedoras" rules of fashion gradually without a clear dividing line.
Thinking about these cases might seem trivial, but there are examples of movements that have suffered setbacks due to aesthetic considerations (r/antiwork interview, or the Faces of Atheism fiasco). So it would be nice to find any principles more legible than "do whatever the host asks you to".
Conversely, might it help misophoniacs to think of their anger as having the same degree of "moral validity" as making a fashion style demand? Like, equating telling someone they're loud with telling someone their fashion is out of style? Misophoniacs, please let me know if I'm being dumb.
Maybe that olfactory ethics PhD lady can help us out with this.
I remember reading something about physical and moral disgust being processed in the same region of the brain leading to the two being conflated often. I think this happens with fat phobia, homophobia, and I'm totally convinced the same thing is happening with misophonia. I'm shocked by how strongly I get a moral reaction to it. But I think of it as an irrational impulse to overcome.
Unpleasant noises do typically have much larger negative hedonic value for me than unpleasant visual stimuli because it's easy to shut out unpleasant visual stimuli by shutting my eyes or by staring at the one small thing in my visual field that is most aesthetically pleasant. The only visual stimuli that really bother me are flickering lights whereas I have difficulty coping with a lot of everyday noises. I wear socks with crocs in the winter because I presume that any discomfort that other people have from seeing my unaesthetic footwear choices is negligible relative to the discomfort that I would experience if I were forced to choose between wearing itchy trainers and getting itchy chilblains. However I'll bite the bullet here and say that I'd rather spend 1 second listening to a pneumatic drill than spend a googolplex seconds watching people wear socks with sandals.
> Thinking about these cases might seem trivial, but there are examples of movements that have suffered setbacks due to aesthetic considerations (r/antiwork interview, or the Faces of Atheism fiasco). So it would be nice to find any principles more legible than "do whatever the host asks you to".
"Don't do things that undermine the purpose of the group" seems like the relevant guideline here, and a pretty widely accepted one. The real trouble starts when the group's members have very different ideas of what it's for. "Social club" versus "collective project" is the classic example.
I don't have this problem with sounds, but certain textures under certain conditions drive me crazy. There's a kitchen set i own where the spatula, tongs and ladle have a certain soft plastic texture. I don't mind using them but washing them is unbearable. Something about the water and soap makes the plastic halfway between slippery and not slippery in a way that is so viscerally uncomfortable, even rubber gloves don't help much.
Silicone, probably. I hate it too, but I don't like to use it anyway because I instinctively feel it's so soft it might contaminate the food.
I get the same effect (affect?) when a little bit of washing up liquid gets on its plastic bottle. You just can't get the slipperiness to go away. It seems to be worse with a concentrated liquid I've been using lately.
I'd be lying if I said that those things loom large in my psyche, though. While some sounds do make me mad.
Resident member of the Church of Cobalamin here, are your vitamin B12 levels OK? I mean, they probably are, but I remember e.g. how unbearable dry glass felt to take out of the dishwasher with a rag was for me when I had B12 issues, because sensory input was just Too Much, so I feel obliged to nudge.
This is relatable to my experience with car noises when I moved onto a main road--attempting to soundproof the house, putting on white noise and straining to hear cars through it, anger at drivers for speeding (higher speeds, of course, produce more noise), requesting that the cops do more to enforce the speed limit--and it just kind of faded away over time. I no longer notice the car noises.
This is a little simplistic, but I think its just simple anger- an exaggerated, negative response to others. So its not about working with sounds but working with our experience of anger towards others. I've noticed this when I am doing something and there is someone making a lot of noise. Then when I look at them and they are someone I feel tolerant of making that noise, I am fine. And when its someone I think should know better, or who doesn't have a good reason, I am not fine. So as you alluded to in the piece its not the noise, but the context, and that has to do with our tendency towards anger, which we can control.
I have my own theory but this is also super interesting. I note that the people in my life (including me) who have misophonia are also extremely conflict avoidant and tend towards passive aggression.
Maybe there's an element of "This person existing in my space causes friction -> I internalize that friction as a series of minor inconveniences that I shouldn't make a scene over -> I am taking 100% responsibility for resolving all conflicts in my living and work spaces without even telling the other person a conflict exists -> Jesus Christ now I gotta put up with them chewing too loud too?" to the whole thing.
Agreed. If it was truly about just the senses the context could have no effect. we all know the experience of finding blaring horns in a city completely unbearable and then living there long enough, and starting to be fine with them and eventually not experiencing them. At the same time you could hear your newborn wimper in the slightest way and 'hear it', or a mild chewing noise and 'hear it' but not hear the sirens and honking outside the window.
After the first half I intended to ask about a mindfulness meditation practice as a technique to address this, and lo and behold that's how the post wraps.
Have you actually tried a basic mindfulness meditation practice? I am not sure I would describe it as "focusing so hard on your mental processes" so much as "non-judgementally observing the natural flow of thoughts and feelings" by noticing whenever your attention has drifted away from your object of meditation (breath, mantra, sound, gently observing a flame, etc). It takes a while (at least a few weeks of daily work) but you really do notice how transient thoughts and feelings are and that you can choose how to react to them.
All of which is also to say that your reactions are clearly not "fake" (you feel the strongly and they influence your actions) and the line between pathology and responding to thoughts and feelings in a not helpful way is much fuzzier than most would LIKE to admit in the mental health space.
Like your diagram is so clearly a thought spiral. A mindfulness practice gives you, over time, the ability to choose whether to engage with that spiral at all or to allow the sensation to pass on its own (which it always does).
I find this interesting because I suspect I have misophonia with certain kinds of diction - but I can tolerate it perfectly fine (as in, emotionally, I'm absolutely chill and wondering why this is usually an issue for me) for several hours before it very abruptly snaps to emotional levels of "okay, if I don't have noise-cancelling headphones I'm going to murder someone" and if I can't withdraw I become intensely miserable. This is every news reel, talk show, especially badly-acted movie or over-enunciated Youtube video ever, where people don't talk to each other as they would in real life, but only with exaggerated stresses, to Keep your Attention locked On the Stream.
If someone *links* me to a Youtube video that's like this (as they almost all inevitably are - and, as you can imagine, I resist even clicking Youtube links as a general rule, unless it's from a close friend), I will get annoyed at the video in the first few seconds and close the tab.
If it's a Youtube video someone else is playing on a laptop, where audio distortion from bad speakers mixes with the ridiculous diction, I feel set upon much more quickly.
I rarely outright get angry at anyone, it's more a feeling of needing to defend myself somehow. It's very intense when it sets in. I don't really understand where it comes from. Thankfully since I have noise-cancelling headphones I can usually help myself, and my TV-obsessed primary switches to headphones as much as circumstance (he finds it hard to do this while eating, for example), his ears and headphone battery power will let him, so we can alternate.
Conversely, I don't mind music in public places if the people blaring it are clearly having fun, but I might get very angry if they're doing it despite clearly not enjoying it, themselves (i.e. showing somehow that they're mostly blaring it because they DGAF, not because it's contributing to their happiness to be immersed in music).
Maybe many people have an elevated inclination towards anger as a means of self-stimulation in the context of an overly (and unnaturally) stable environment.
Maybe there is a misalignment in terms of the level of control we have over our surroundings and the level of control we have over our own mind.
Maybe this partly explains why some people with certain forms of mental illness actually feel better living outside, where their inner and outer worlds are less incoherent.
Oh wow I don't recognize the pathological extreme that I luckily avoided but the description of how annoyance feeds into increased attention which feeds into moral and social judgment feels terrifyingly familiar.
Btw for me in similar situations (but again noteven comparable to what you described inintensity) it has been helpful to keep an unused mitigation strategy at hand.
Like, if I have earplugs in my bathroom cabinet but I don't bother to get up from bed to get them I sort of update on the direction of the noise being less annoying, more easily ignorable, more in my control and less blameable on others.
But I have to be careful least I find my self complaining about the neighbors "waking me up with noise, but not all the way enough to get up and get the earplugs" and how this is such a moral failing on their part...
I think I have this with whistling (think "Whistle" by florida, not sports referee with an actual plastic whistle). It has gotten bad enough that I feel very uncomfortable around TVs when there's a commercial break and the TV isn't muted, just because I know that I'm probably going to hear somebody whistle soon enough.
I think it started by my brother whistling tunes and ignoring my pleas to stop (age 10 or so), which caused the loop Scott described. Now it feels like it's spiraling out from just whistling to commercial breaks and, to a much lesser degree, radio, though I have far less of a problem with those when I'm in full control of the device and can easily mute it.
My wife has it with whistling too, which is a shame, cause I enjoy whistling a jaunty tune from time to time. The worst was last summer, when we drove 6 hours out to Philadelphia to see Beck perform with the Philadelphia Orchestra. We knew there was an opening act, someone we'd never heard of, a woman named Molly Lewis if I recall correctly. She comes up on stage with no band, just a microphone and some prerecorded music, and just starts whistling. For thirty minutes plus. A gifted whistler to be sure, but my wife did not see it as a pleasant surprise. The look on her face.... we laugh about it now. Actually, no, I laugh about it now, she just cringes. The sad thing is, Beck is doing the same orchestra tour this summer, which would be fun to go to, but with the same opening act.
I’ve got a few noise triggers. Mostly neighbour noise. I once had a thought that if someone were to hold a gun to my son’s head and exposed me to one of these noises and said that if I get in the slightest bit annoyed/irritated they will pull the trigger.
I realised I sure as hell wouldn’t get annoyed. I felt quite certain about that, even if I was all wired up to dials. It showed me it’s a choice. That was a revelation. I have no proof of that this would be the case of course but I have high certainty about it. I wondered if this was a case if putting the ego in its place. (There’s usuallly some thought, they shouldn’t be doing this, that shouldn’t be happening).
What works though day to day? For me when I’m experiencing the uncomfortable trigger response these days is - simply taking the pain.
Being in it and allowing it fully, like watching a tornado outside except we are feeling the storm of our fear rage inside. I imagine leaning back inside a little and let it rage away in front of my as a physically felt sensation of emotion.
This requires serious willingness and when that is present a momentum can be built up.
I might find the noises aren’t even being noticed for long periods after a while. There even are periods where I start welcoming the noises like it’s a fun game and I prepare to take the discomfort and do it.
I demonstrate (perhaps to a stuck survival threat prior) that it might be uncomfortable but it’s certainly not dangerous. This is the tack I’m continuing on. Collective evidence that nothing bad happens.
Mass is essentially just energy that is constrained / congealed in some way so that it interacts with itself and moves in a cyclic fashion. Which fits the concept of sound waves travelling in a medium. So I think sound having mass should be an obvious conclusion from relativity principles. (I guess you could say that light in a medium has mass too, by the same argument.)
I read somewhere in a conversation about anger management that if you can keep your temper in check at work because you know you'd lose your job if you let it fly, then if you lose it at home against your loved ones, you know it's a choice and that you have the power to control it when you have to. The idea "I can't control it" is revealed to be an idea and not a truth.
And then this also makes me think of one of the ways to treat panic disorder is to turn towards it like it's a storm and let it blow, and that that eventually takes the wind out of its sails. Creating elaborate avoidance systems makes it worse. Same with anxiety or OCD where exposure and response prevention is the treatment. I don't know if this is the same as the CBT protocol that Scott says doesn't work.
Yes and if the person can delay blowing up, then they can take care of their anger a way other than by abusing their loved ones. They have choices, in other words.
It's often said of little kids that they regress at home after holding it together at school, but grownups have more choices than that because they can take themselves for a walk or to the gym or a therapist or meditate, etc.
I have a really bad case of tinnitus (runs in the family), such that I have a "headphones always on" lifestyle in the other direction- I'm constantly keeping my soundscape full of the kind of stimuli that I know helps me ignore or forget about the ringing in my ears. Pure white noise doesn't really do it; usually I need stuff like ASMR, or a song I'm willing to listen to on repeat 4-500 times, or really any AI generated music. Basically, something structured enough to be lightly pinging my attention, but not so distracting that it interferes with flow.
But this works by manipulating my state of mind, not drowning out the noise. And if I ever got trapped in a self-reinforcing loop of irrationally getting angry at the ringing, I'd be *screwed.* Because I'm going to be hearing it every minute of every day for the rest of my life, right? So far, I've managed to keep any sense of frustration in check, and maintain a level head and a sense of tranquility about it. But it feels like this very slight itch that, if I ever start really scratching it, has the potential to totally ruin my life.
funnily enough, I realized I had tinnitus on my meditation retreat. and I was worried about the same thing, but weirdly the association of it was 'I'm in a quiet and relaxed state' so it didn't register negatively for me. and relatedly: if you followed the jhana discourse, there is actually a form of meditation that is isn't focusing on that sound that can get you into jhana. so I think it's super highly contextual but it will not ruin your life, if you can approach it without fear. easier said than done though.
also: there is literature that suggests that there's a strong overlap between ASMR and misophonia
I don't really have misophonia, but I do get really self-conscious of people looking over my shoulder or being able to look over my shoulder at my screen or book. I wonder if it's related, since I clearly can't see them watching me, but I think it's a similar nagging feeling to when noise does annoy/distract me.
There's definitely something to this - maybe a latent urge to be aggressive to members of our own clan in order to enforce hierarchy, like chimpanzees? Personally, I have a serious "ick" about human saliva - I used to demand people in my house rinse their silverware after eating, before letting it touch anything - but I was confused about how animal saliva never bothered me, even though it's equally "gross". Then I had a baby, who has spent a significant fraction of her life so far plastering me in her saliva, and not only do I not mind, my disgust at other humans' saliva has significantly decreased. Maybe that's the cure for misophonia: associate the noise with a person for whom you feel overwhelming love and zero aggression. Maybe using MDMA or oxytocin could help.
Interesting the ape angle. I’d also like to see some research on anger within the families of those who have it, and wonder if it occurs in families where anger was discouraged or suppressed and the Misophonia acts like an escape valve? It’s curious that it’s those closest who seem to most annoy Misophonics.
This post sent me on a free association binge and since it's early and I have to get ready for work soon, you all get to read it.
The way you put it, it seems misophonia has a large social component, one like "how could they be so disrespectful, doing this thing they know hurts me mentally when they could just as easily not", to the point where it isn't the sound itself but the lack of respect. This feels like a specific instance of a common thing.
I think there's a pain in not being believed about a) sacred values and b) things that hurt you mentally or physically. ME/CFS sufferers come to mind here, it seems a lot of their energy is spent convincing people it exists at all and is not secretly bon-bon-guzzling laziness. A good amount of the energy in some ADHD spaces is sharing the pain of trying to convince others you have it, and the amount of effort I see them have to spend makes me wary of talking too much about my own.
Political debates online and the shockingly-often and mostly unconscious ability of both sides to miss the thrust of the other side's arguments and automatically assume the worst also comes to mind. It seems that either side has key sacred values that hurt like hell when violated, whereas the other side's concerns are at best kinda important, but not The Real Issue, or at worst a lie to justify their true intention of kicking puppies.
It really can be surprising. Scott has talked about the reactions to Osama bin Laden's death vs. Thatcher's, much like he describes Hitler vs. dude with boombox in park. bin Laden and Hitler we know (System 2 know) are bad guys, really awful. Hitler was probably top 5 worst in human history, but there's something System 1, visceral, about Thatcher and dude with boombox. People tut-tutting us about cheering bin Laden just didn't have a sacred value that had him as so anger-inducing his death would incite celebration. But boy did they for Thatcher.
Did Thatcher do some wicked stuff? Probably. Did she kill 10 million innocents including 6 million Jews and start a war that claimed 90 million more? Not even slightly.
(Did you feel a bristle at that last sentence? Something like "No fair, we're comparing Thatcher and bin Laden, not Thatcher and Hitler, you switched your reference classes! Thatcher's policies may have caused mostly-hidden OoM-similar damage to bin Laden, but you switched it around so Thatcher came out looking pretty good!" If so, first, sorry, but also that was kind of the point. Thatcher being bad is a sacred value for a lot of people, and it can be interesting to see where that comes up. Maybe you didn't, I'm not claiming that's universal!)
To be clear, sacred values are real, important, probably either innate or shaped during early childhood, and not just a thing of ninnies and scolds. We all have sacred values, and when they mostly align with our Dunbar-numbered group of social connections, things mostly work out.
Anyway, on misophonia, the way Scott puts it, it seems like anger that people don't seem to care to meet basic and easy needs of yours. People can just not have the boombox, or use headphones, or chew with their mouths closed, or not camp in the left lane (sorry, my exit is coming up on the left, and merging from the right lane in time will be tough), or whatever. Whereas they don't have the same sacred value, so they don't much care, and will go out of their way to spite you for feeling so strongly about it. To them, it feels as weird as someone being hateful about any uses of the number 53 and demanding they use 54 instead.
One thing that makes me wonder is that we also have a strong drive to fit in, not rock the boat, go along with the crowd, etc. Being exiled meant death for >99% of human history, so there's strong pressure to not be too ornery. Why are sacred values exempted from the get-along instinct? Why do we feel justified in asking people to stop chewing so damn loudly but not in asking for a raise or asking the city to fix a park we love?
Whoa this post kind of explains my unpleasantness when I hear my wife chew. Just my wife's....no one else's chewing bothers me. When it bothers me so much I call her the red giraffe (because her sound of chewing, especially apples, reminds me of the giraffes in the Serengeti.
I do remember when I was a kid / teenager my father would get very bothered at my chewing. Not my mother's or y sisters' chewing...only my chewing. Sometimes I was so fearful of bothering him I would let my saliva breakdown my food in mouth before I started chewing.
My daughter is on the autism spectrum and has a lot of sensory sensitivities (noise is one). We learned in OT that when she is having a hard time, to give her a sensory experience that she enjoys: deep arm and leg squeezes being the main one. General advice is to work on expanding their "sensory diet": heavy work, jumping, swinging, deep pressure.
I'm mildly autistic and have a lot of difficulty with loud noises. Moulded silicone earplugs are the thing that helps me most, but BIGOOD reusable earplugs are great too (and less expensive). Don't know if they'd fit children, I used headphones as a kid.
I enjoy a lot of proprioceptive and vestibular things, it's why a lot of autistics rock and spin. Your daughter might feel differently, though.
I suspect there are at least different elements to the phenomenon, if not entirely different bases with similar outcomes.
One is sensory, and if this is strong, the horrible noise of snow under your boots makes the otherwise wonderful experience hell just as much as somebody's chewing noises. Disgust plays a rôle, which helps to explain secondary (I think) problems with mute videos of people eating like that, but hardly why clean, crisp, lovely snow would be a problem. ASMR videos are as alien to you as BDSM. Your own eating noises are unbearable sometimes, eg when you caught cold.
The other is social, other people behaving badly against their fellow men, including you, in fact at this moment outright targeting you. Manners these days! Now this kind will be just as upset at people putting their feet up the table or using the wrong fork for their salad. Sensory misophones might not be bothered.
There's a secondary overlap, and both can develop a psychological level, which looks similar for both then.
That strangers eating noisily seem to be tolerated more than a brother doesn't seem to be a big clue in the puzzle to me. You're socially much more likely to shout at your brother, thump the table and run out of the room in despair than to do that in a restaurant or a train (or indeed towards family members where there's a gap in status). They'll do without pudding today, though, or go sit in another train car if they're travelling alone. And suffer.
This is kinda weird because it's a far broader range of sound than is typically considered misophonia, but the way you describe your reaction to sounds at a certain distance in your periphery is EXACTLY how I feel about karaoke -- I know it sounds absurd, but there is just something in karaoke, both listening live and performing myself, that starts pinging around that evil pentagon and makes me so so so upset.
I think a big part of it is that I'm a trans woman who has never had any success with voice training, so anything that calls particular attention to human voices is somewhat distressing to me, but (much like the "calling out stops on the bus" example) normal singing is so ubiquitous and important to people that it alone doesn't check the box -- but karaoke specifically feels sufficiently indulgent and unnecessary that it fully activates the pentagon, even though intellectually I know I should just merely not enjoy doing it.
I guess I have a case of this (I'm certainly triggered by snoring, at least), with an additional hatred for loud noises in general. Realistically, I'm probably not going to do anything about it, but I often imagine that if fate would make me a dictator of my country, my (bloody and repressive) regime would be known as Age of Silence, because there will be oh sooooo many restrictions on music, cars and motorcycles and fireworks. And I would mandate all apartment blocks to be built with good soundproofing, and damn the costs - nobody ever needs to suffer hearing their neighbors three floors up having a shouting match every day because the developer decided to be cheap. There would be AI-driven murder drones patrolling the streets for loud noises, and firing squads for the new building code violators. The former should also help be deal with most of protests, until protesters learn to be reeeealy quiet.
It surprises me to see this framed as a problem. I get angry about loud chewing sounds because, unlike other distracting sounds (e.g. a scream of an animal in a park nearby), they are avoidable and their presence shows that somebody is being inconsiderate to you. It's the thought that somebody next to you lacks the empathy, compassion or another resource or motivation to mind your well-being that generates an anger many times more distressing than the distraction generated by the stimulae.
In fact, if I know that somebody next to me has to eat in the same room as I'm sitting (e.g. we're in the office and they've been very busy) but I can hear that this person is making considerable effort to make their meal as silent as possible, I feel positive emotions like gratitude more than anger.
If we make the situation more extreme and imagine I'm a refugee in a small camp with other people, and I'm too weak to eat but they're too weak to make their chewing silent, I don't think I would be bothered about the chewing sounds at all. And this is exactly because negative emotions are supposed to be a signal to action (in case of chewing sounds, trying to change the loud eater's habits or trying to avoid them), so I won't feel negative emotions if I feel like there can be no action taken here. Just like when I see a building taken down by an unpredictable natural disaster rather than human violence or fraud.
I'm a person who tries to minimise how much I'm distracting other people and there's basically a sense of injustice if I don't see other people doing the same for me.
I'm curious, would you still get angry at loud eating if you're on vacation in a country where eating food loudly is a part of local culture? (say, slurping noodles in Japan). Your habit of quiet eating would just become an oddity there, not a sign of consideration. Do you think you'd exhibit misophonia when locals would be slurping noodles loudly next to you?
Good question. I think I would first try to reason why this is part of the local culture. Especially that I know the Japanese to be, on average, very mindful of their sound footprints.
If they tell me it's a sign of appreciation for the chef, I think I wouldn't have much anger towards the slurping/chewing (though I would still find it distracting)
I can relate to putting on earplugs/headphones to not hear the noise (in my case music from the outside at night), but still trying really hard to notice if I can hear even the slightest sound. In the worst cases I could not even tell if I still hear the music, or if it's my brain hallucinating the sound.
I wanted to say enlightenment should help with this. Both the specifics, the identity but also general sensory problems autistic people seem to have gets way better.
At 4th path (or before) something cool happens were before you were switching between the sense doors to having them all unified. So you can hear, see, think at the same time or at least the timing of switching is so fast again that you can't see it even as a skilled meditator (and the sensations saying oh this is this sense door disappear). This makes a lot of things way less annoying. Trying to go from one sense door from another is basically dukkha.
Even before letting go to larger and larger degree of the idea that you have to have a sensation of knowing in addition to the original one makes things less annoying already.
I'm definitely don't have a Misophonia, but occasionally I'll work from the lounge in my apartment building on weekends. It's sort of a hybrid workspace/lounge, and there's a pool table directly across from where I like to sit.
I find that sometimes, when people come to play pool and talk, it really bothers me. They aren't doing anything offensive of course, and I have no right to monopolize the space, but in some sense it feels like an imposition on me that I didn't consent to, which is annoying. It's really hard to read something or have sustained focus on work when my brain keeps switching to process what's going on at the pool table, and this constant forced switching of attention is frustrating.
But sometimes I don't care at all. And sometimes I can feel myself in between this not caring and caring mindset, especially when someone first arrives and makes noise, and can tip the scales into not caring through some mental effort. Basically telling myself "I don't actually care about this. They're just enjoying life! You can control how you emotionally respond to this." It helps to quietly laugh about it, as if the instinct to be annoyed is cute and laughable, like a toddler angry about some completely trivial thing.
Not always though, and once I feel like it bothers me, it's really hard to get out of that local minima, across the hump, to ambivalence.
Not sure what this contributes to the discussion, as I know the tendencies for everyone are different, and it's probably a lot easier for me to do than anyone else, but I can't help but feel that this can be controlled through the right psychological effort that isn't easily explained via words.
I mean, the whole straining to see whether you can hear the noise past the noise cancelling headphones - I'm somewhat surprised that I find myself not alone in doing this. I think it's partially caused by a resentment of being 'forced' into that situation. Why can't the noisemaker simply stop! I was convinced for a while that I was unlucky enough to know a lot of people who couldn't chew their food properly.
For me sounds fall into two distinct camps: a) no choice or not caused by a human and b) deliberate choice. a) is where realistically there isn't an alternative to the sound being made e.g. chewing, noise from a mechanical system, snoring. b) is where a choice was made to make the sound but there was an alternative e.g. music played audibly on public transport, doors slamming, loud TVs etc.
In both cases I find the noise somewhat debilitating and stressful but b) gets me disproportionately angry. In that case, it's not a logical process. But I've come to realise that for me, there is an element of getting annoyed at someone's temerity to just carry on with whatever they want to do without any thought about how others might feel. There's an element of annoyance that this person has carried their private life out into public without a care - "I am a mug sitting here conforming to society's etiquette". I can't exclude the possibility that it could be envy at their unselfconsciousness.
Is it about a feeling of lack of control over one's environment? Depression-related? Trauma-related? Annoyance at not being rich so I have to use public transport and listen to other peoples' terrible music rather than being chauffeur-driven everywhere in my soundproof Bentley as befits someone of my incredible intelligence(!)? Excuse-making, as in a get-out from doing a task or doing it badly - "I need(ed) silence to do this" (elite sportspeople can produce their best in noisy stadiums - I doubt they'd perform better if it was quieter)? Paranoia: "people are deliberately causing noise to annoy me!"? Some combination of all of these? I've absolutely no idea.
I wonder too if this correlates with the agreeable/disagreeable axis on the Big 5 personality test.
I liked the OCPD theory above and it makes total sense to me that survivors of childhood interpersonal trauma would have increased need for control over their environment or would be more prone to feeling victimized by it.
But likewise I could imagine genetic causes -- sensory processing differences that make a whole range of noises more intrusive to one's nervous system than for the average person... and society out there is pretty designed for to be comfortable for an average extrovert, thus way more stimuli that exceed tolerance standards for people who are not that.
I have the hatred of chewing and other food-related sounds. Unless a stranger is unusually loud or bad about it, it's fine. Restaurants are fine. Anywhere with noise is fine. But at home with someone, especially a partner? Rage. Sitting in front of someone at a talk who is unwrapping a candy or putting their hand into a crinkly bag of chips? Rage. I have mostly learned to cope by making sure there is background noise and reminding myself that I'm not allowed to forbid people to eat or make normal sounds.
It's definitely not just a sensory thing. One time my cubicle neighbor was eating yogurt and I could hear the spoon repeatedly touching the plastic container and it made me so angry. I looked over and he was actually doing something unrelated to food, like messing with a toner cartridge or whatever. The sound completely stopped bothering me after that.
I hate the little burbling fountains people find relaxing to put in a room. The sound of real water in a brook, stream, rivulet, puddle, gutter, etc., has never bothered me once in my life.
So excited (but still sympathetic) that my favorite writer also has misophonia! I'll add a plus 1 for meditation being one of the few things that has made a substantial difference. In my case it makes it easier in general to port over intellectual observations into actual emotions, (like this is irrational, I love my wife, she's just innocently chewing).
The other thing that made a big difference for me was raising my iron levels. On reddit I've noticed a number of other people referencing both iron deficiency and overload worsening or even causing misophonia. I read that iron deficiency can be a trigger for OCD and it seems potentially connected enough that I wonder if that isn't a coincidence.
i can't stand ASMR actually. I mean the classic whispering or smacking types. Like there is a vtuber that does a cute normal voice (Fuwamoco) but their ASMR stream is eh. the asmr stuff is a very recent thing actually: maybe ten years old?
you cant find asmr cds like nature sound ones, for example.
CBT therapist with misophonia here: I definitely recognize myself in many of the aspects mentioned. My main focus has always been chewing, closely followed by sniffling. The core always seemed to me to be the rudeness/disrespect someone seems to send with these actions. A key thought is always, “You know this bothers me, so why not just stop!” With my son, I didn’t mind at all when he started eating. The older he gets, the more it bothers me. For me, headphones help a lot, though. Just seeing someone chew bothers me much less. I’ve tried exposure/desensitization (watched chewing videos for ages), and I’d say it had some effect. Still, I find it rude, and I think it’s perfectly okay to find it aversive when I feel that someone truly just isn’t paying attention to their environment. If someone doesn’t cover their mouth or turn away when coughing, I also get frustrated/annoyed, and I’d like to keep it that way :) Side fact: we once conducted a mini “study” with students, asking how they rate classic ASMR sounds versus typical misophonia sounds. The main question was whether the values (negatively) correlate, i.e., whether people who really enjoy ASMR also tend to have misophonia. That wasn’t the case, there was no correlation at all.
I wonder if this is a flavor of OCD? The cycle you describe sounds similar to the cycles of obsessions + compulsions. (Obviously I'm thinking of this because I know you also had OCD at some point Scott.)
Also, I'm surprised you didn't point out the nominative anti-determinism of Jake Eaton :)
I came to the comments to suggests the same thing. I've been diagnosed with scrupulosity OCD. Much of what Scott describes above (e.g. the self-righteous anger / straining to sense the offending sensation / the guilt / the intellectualization) applies to how I fixate on fairness / obsess when I feel that me or other people I care about are treated poorly.
On whether or not stuff like this is fake: I fell from the third story window of a motel when I was five. So I had the effects from a young enough age that I do question how much of my life experience is normal or just stuff I adapted to.
Every couple of years I forget bad tinnitus isn’t normal and ask people if they experience it too. But I also have noise sensitivity (probably). There’s some evidence this is real, I can hear bass from a party too far away for me to realistically hear anything. But I have been able to, when very annoyed I can’t sleep, go out and walk straight to the party.
But it is also much worse with people close to me, and the reasoning is that they know I’ve grown up with this and so it feels intentional. Really they’re just living a normal life, but I can’t deal with that rationally at times.
I wear earplugs everywhere I know will be loud, and dread Sunday worship. I also refused to sing for years because it hurts me head. Music teachers hated me. I still don’t sing- can’t really.
However, my hated of noises has some dependency on how loud I’ve been. I’m more sensitive if I haven’t said much on the day yet. If I’m out with friends and have some distracting thing going on, like a board game or even dancing, then I do much better. I might wake up inflamed and with a terrible headache- but it won’t distract me as much in the moment.
Basically, if I start matching the noise then it downgrades but still hurts on the backend.
I have classic misophonia, but for me the visual triggers didn't follow the auditory ones -- if anything it was the other way around, the first trigger I can remember having was the sight of someone jiggling their leg.
You might consider meditation, not in the context of a retreat, but just generally. I learned it (TM) at 13 and have played around with it (including in the context of psychedelics) a fair bit. I never really do it any more but it feels like a kind of training for, “letting things go.” Numerous studies seem to support this(stress after movies…). Whenever stressful things happen, I tend to experience a sort of imagined long deep breath followed by a moment of serenity. Again, I have not meditated in 20 years (but I have meditated to the ultimate point of losing my ability to locate my “self”).
Sound is the one sense that we can't control. With few exceptions no one can make us taste, touch, smell or see things. But anyone can make a noise that we don't want to hear, which seems like a breach of our contract with society to "live and let live". A loud motorcycle on the street is like an invasion of privacy and drives me ballistic. Yet, last year a friend who is a photographer was desperate for a ride to a motor cross event so he could get some action shots. I agreed, to drive and help with the gear, dreading the experience. However once I got there, I realized I had voluntarily entered "their" world and I had no right to expect them to consider mine. Didn't change how I feel at home but for that day, I was fine.
This does very much sound like a 'trapped priors' problem. When I was younger, I had a very strong dislike for kids being loud--especially crying babies. I was the guy who would shoot eye-daggers at the parent with the crying baby on a plane. Later though, after my first born came along, this sort of magically went away. Now, when I hear a baby crying on a plane, I instinctively check to make sure it's not *my* kid that's crying--even if I know it can't be--and after I confirm that's not the case, it's totally fine. If anything, I feel sympathy for the parent that is trying to console the baby. Is it relevant that I was harshly disciplined as a kid for Being Too Loud? Probably!
If you are looking for solutions to this, my two cents are that interventions that get at trapped priors may work, e.g., meditation (though beware side effects!) Misophonia also worsens with stress, so addressing stressors should also help with the symptoms, if not necessarily the underlying cause.
Finally, and just a shot in the dark here, if you are experiencing more of this than usual these days, your new family additions almost certainly have something to do with it. If you think it would be helpful--or if anyone is curious--I'm happy to share some things I did to address a similar issue when my twins came along.
I have done dissociative drugs only ever, once. But the lesson from that of "things can be pretty loopy and not what you expect" formed a mental dyad in my mind with the general "be kind to others" upbringing value system / Christianity, that results in a robust and resilient loop on my mind of "assume positive intent" when faced with people or situations I don't like.
Things are annoying to me but rather than hitting the five nodes of frustration + anger + guilt, I hit one of the two nodes "trippy/random" or "be kind" and it reverberates with the other one
I know a few people who dramatically lowered their startle response by taking low-dose sublingual ketamine. Seems adjacent to that maybe, lowering some irritability/activation threshold.
Having a 2-year-old has alerted me to just how *loud* the world is all the time. She complains about the heater vents, every passing car, airplanes miles up in the sky, people talking (not terribly loudly) across the street.
Admittedly she is more sensitive than most (she's an only child in a quiet house and both her parents have at least a little noise sensitivity). But I'm beginning to suspect that "being able to put up with loud noises, all the time, without cease" is actually the aberration. In other words, that people go through intense conditioning at a young age (maybe not in a deliberate way) to tune out or otherwise deal with the irrelevant sounds, and when that conditioning fails it results in constant alerting which leads to annoyance/anger/migraines.
In my (zero research done or read) brain, it would look kind of like this:
Modern Child: "Hey There's a zooming sound outside"
Modern Parent: "It's just passing cars."
Modern Child's brain: "Car sounds are not a danger to us. When we hear a sound we will use some heuristic to determine if a sound is a car sound and if it is, we will not escalate to conscious awareness."
Medieval Child: "Hey there's a zooming sound outside"
Medieval Parent: "Wot creature be this that blazes and roars?! A demon come hell-by, to punish our sins?!"
Medieval Child Brain: "Ok so cars are a big deal and I should alert if I hear one in the right context, even if it's pretty far off."
You can see this in watching culture clashes sometimes! I've got a friend from a more sheltered upbringing who flips out every time they hear a loud pop or bang at night, thinking it's a gunshot. Other friends who grew up actually hearing gunshots can literally subconsciously go "oh that's a car backfire, no biggy."
Parents probably are unaware that part of their job is this aural conditioning, and do it even when they don't mean to. A tired parent (especially a misophonic tired parent) may snap at a kid for chewing too loudly, so kid learns "actually, loud chewing is apparently an alert-worthy sound since all the adults in my life say so."
I suspect part of this conditioning is context. Footsteps in snow aren't alert-worthy, but you've learned chewing is, so you only get annoyed at sounds when context tells you that it's a chewing sound. Even worse, let's say tomorrow the chewing sound was replaced with a pleasing melody. It wouldn't help because the point of your young conditioning wasn't to teach you which sounds are annoying, it was teaching you which situations require your attention. So you still get the "hey! Attention!" buzz when you hear the pleasing melody now. This could also explain why it's enraging when a friend does it but not when a stranger does. It'd be kind of the equivalent of telling your friend you have shell-shock and them still insisting on coming to your house and shooting off fireworks in the night.
I spent college in a ground floor manhattan apartment next to a bar open til 4am most nights. I put ear plugs in but singing, fighting, and screaming 15 feet from one’s pillow is still rather audible!! I love love love the energy of NYC and never got that mad at it. I would only call to complain if it got to be above a certain threshold thru earplugs, like the night before an exam. (Shout out to scum of the earth yuppies who would move in above legendary dive bar music venues of UNESCO-level significance and notoriety and then threaten to have them shut down!)
When I visit the world’s safest and quietest suburbs or rural areas, the silence or near silence at night fills me with abject terror. Negative misphonia?
Maybe the lack of car sounds suggests that there has been a zombie apocalypse? Parts of LA were profoundly unsettling during the pandemic for lack of traffic (among other reasons).
I feel rage whenever anyone talks semi-loudly within 50-ish feet of someone sleeping (even in another room). Never thought of this as unusual until now.
Does it also happen with people you really like/love? I suspect not. So it's related to your attitude to the offender. Try distancing by thinking of them as "interesting specimens".
"people who hate Donald Trump will laugh along with a lookalike Trump impersonator."
No, I find Trump impersonations irritating in the same way, though not to the same degree, as the original, and I generally avoid watching them. It's the manner of his speaking, and not just the content, that irritates me, though I couldn't say for sure that the manner didn't become irritating because of the content.
I avoided George W. Bush and his impersonators for the same reason. Once I saw Bush speaking on a TV in the arrivals shuttle from Heathrow to London, and I was incensed that I'd just flown 6000 miles to get away from this guy and here he was.
I haven't felt that way about other presidents whose policies I opposed. I liked Nixon and Reagan impersonations and even attempted them myself.
Interesting! I have had a really strong disgust response to the spoken words of every single president in power during my lifetime -- along with all other prominent U.S. political figures of any persuasion -- and have always avoided live news for that reason.
There's something about the extremely high bulls*it factor of how politicians speak that is intolerable to me to listen to any amount. It feels so deeply cringy and embarassing and distressingly pretend all at once. It feels like being subjected to an endless toxic stream of lies or dreading when the next obscene lie will come along. I can't do it. I read about politics a ton though and can handle reading quotes from those same politicians without disgust.
I can watch live speeches or interviews of foreign leaders speaking in a foreign language, including ones I speak. Which seems kind of like how people are more affected by sounds their loved ones make than strangers. It feels to me like the spoken words of U.S. politicians directly implicates me in some way that I have trouble getting distance from.
I don't like loud sounds, and loud seems to be a range that most people notice but aren't bothered by. I can't enjoy a rock concert, and some restaurants are too loud for me.
I'm pretty sure I'm enraged by excessively loud motor vehicles, while I just strongly dislike construction that's as loud.
Absolutely driven to distraction, despair, and anger by the scent of gardenia, including the subtlest note in perfume across a room.
If someone leaves a banana peel in an office trash can (as opposed to the kitchen trash where non-sociopaths put it), I can smell it 20 feet away and cannot mentally function so much as to send an email. Doesn’t have to be overripe funk or starting to rot.
I enjoy eating bananas. And would consider myself above-average tolerant of novel or strange bordering on disgust-reflex inducing smells (I have lived in a country notorious for big smells, occasionally quite unpleasant ones).
My younger brother who was socially awkward and I had to constantly protect from bullies (up to and including getting the shit kicked out of myself) was hypersensitive to all kinds of smells! And his coughing and retching made me absolutely crazy, I just wanted him to flip a switch and turn off the histrionics. My mother would react as if we were being gassed to death at the slightest trace of secondhand smoke (or nail polish chemical!), outdoors, across a football field, usually during the most sublimely enjoyable play session on the most gorgeous spring day. (Is this why I disproportionately enjoy my once- or twice-a-week cigarette?)
Road rage is like a misophonia experience on wheels.
Philosophy class essay exam in college c. 1975, the saboteur next to me was using an unsharpened pencil, dragging it on the paper heavy-handed caveman style, dull arrythmic cursive scratching, noisy rapid sawtooth strokes, and poking the table top to dot the i's. I was prepared for the test, but not for the parasitic assault in my head.
Thankfully no laptops used in those days -- incessant finger tapping drives me nuts, too.
I'm in a long-term relationship with another misophonia sufferer and we don't mind accommodating each other's requests to stop one thing or the other. We avoid conflict because we understand what the other person experiences, and we still playfully make fun of dissimilar triggers.
Well, I can’t say that definitively. But it’s never happened, nor even come so close to happening that it seemed remotely possible. Maybe I’ve just always dined with really civilized people?
Even if I *had* ever encountered someone whose chewing annoyed me, that’s still quite a long ways indeed from “everyone hates the sound of chewing”.
Same, has never happened to me either. I do have a sensitive gag reflex so if kids get food all over their mouths, I will gag, but that's a different thing I think. No anger associated with it.
This makes a lot of sense to me -- something about overall background activation level of the nervous system. If you bring it down, the threshold for reacting to a whole host of stimuli should come down.
Perhaps this is one of the downsides of having a single personality in our heads (which, going by the bicameral mind post, might be fairly recent)
You could try looking at r/tulpas and creating one that really likes noise. Possibly it's harder to get stuck in these sort of loops with several personalities in your head, because even if one personality dislikes noise, another personality might not. (Suggestion only semi-serious)
I have something like this too. I used it as an empathy pump to understand what microaggressions feel like (minus the political aspect). It's not the act itself that is bad as much as the fact that someone could've easily avoided it but chose not to.
Flat mate listens to music and it bleeds through the thin wall? It's fine. Can't expect someone to wear headphones in their own room.
Flat mate leaves the music on, locks the room and goes out? Now this is a problem, but maybe they're simply not aware of it.
Now if I tell them about it and they go into my room to check how it sounds like and say "oh come on, you're barely hearing it, never bother me about this again"? That's much worse. IT'S NOT HARD TO TURN THE SPEAKERS OFF WHEN YOU GO OUT STEVE. WE DON'T HAVE TO ARGUE ABOUT IT, YOU CAN JUST TURN THE SPEAKERS OFF. And that's when I start fixating masochistically on the flat mate's microaggressions towards me so that I could hate them more thoroughly.
I thank god that the sound that makes me suffer and faint is rare and easy to avoid. Can't imagine what hell my life would have been if it was as common as chewing.
An internal narrative about why your suffering/displeasure/anger/sadness is justified is incredibly common, natural, understandable, relatable, normal, etc. (I do it all the time.) But I think it *always*, *100% of the time* makes things worse for you and often leads you to behave in ways that make the world a worse place for others (which easily ties into many feedback loops). ***Regardless*** of how "justified" your emotional reaction actually is.
See the parable of the second arrow.
Of course even if this is true, it's very hard to avoid.
As I was reading the post I kept thinking about how mindfulness is supposedly just the ticket for breaking the cycle on these sorts of things, so I was glad to see it mentioned.
I actually tend to think it‘s exactly not dominance, because a psychology that is particularly mindful of dominance hierarchies would not come up with an „unnecessary“ vulnerability that rivals could exploit.
Tom Dozier has developed an empirical treatment methodology based on progressive muscle relaxation that seems hokey but worked almost immediately for my son. By observing over zoom while my son's trigger was activated, he was able to identify a specific muscle that was contracting involuntarily in direct association with the misophonia response. Once he pointed it out, it was obvious and I could see it too. I had been extremely skeptical up to that point, but was quickly convinced. A few sessions of PMR focusing on this muscle reduced symptoms dramatically. For details see: https://misophoniatreatment.com
I'm really curious if the McGurk Effect desensitization works on things that are widely considered unpleasant sounds, like fingernails on a chalkboard.
I recently discovered (or perhaps tricked myself into thinking I discovered) a misophonia-esque thing I experience. For a long time I thought I disliked anime TV shows in general, but recently I watched some with dubs instead of subs and discovered that in fact the thing I dislike is the fact that in the original Japanese, the female voice actors frequently speak (and squeal and make other noises) in extremely high pitches, and that that makes my skin crawl and I hate it. I've experienced "I hate very high pitched human voices" before plenty of times - I'll be listening to a song and enjoying it, then the singer hits a very high note and I hate it, then it goes back down and I'm back to enjoying it. Now I'm watching dubbed anime, where the English language voice actors have what I consider "normal human voices" and I'm enjoying it.
The way I've understood my misophonia is there are certain sound qualities that trigger some physical reaction, and my righteous indignation about the people making the sound amplifies my distress. But there is still some underlying physical reaction there that is not just emotional.
What misophonia feels like to me is the nails on a chalkboard feeling. If someone were doing it repeatedly and deliberately you would feel angrier... But even once, by mistake, done by a stranger is going to trigger goosebumps.
I wonder what level of discomfort two people with misphonia would have if they agreed to eat together.
The other person would fully understand your position and suffering, but you both agreed to bear it for the duration of the meal. I would guess it would be uncomfortable but not anger-inducing?
Curious if your partner started doing one of these things do you think you'd ask them to stop? Do you think you'd just try to put up with it and suffer? Would you invest more time overcoming it? Leave it they didn't stop? Excuse them but no one else?
I did not realize that the general idea "people are annoying; they breathe and blink" can be divided into individual components such as only sound.
For me, any unwanted sensory input creates a sense of betrayal. It is a statement of team disloyalty (where team could be family, students in class, group at work etc).
The logic goes like this:
- We are a team. We have goals to accomplish together.
- To accomplish goals, we need to pass information and synchronize effort.
- Synchronize effort means sometimes we all talk, and sometimes we are quiet so we could listen to something important. Sometimes the room is well-lit for reading, sometimes dark for rest. Aromatic candles are for weddings and spa retreats, healthy living space smells of nothing. Etc.
- If you don't agree with this, you are basically not on the team, or you think I am not.
- Don't you dare tell me to just deal with it. I agree to stop my offensive behavior instantly, but you think you can just do whatever you want?
And you are saying I am not a team player?
- Aaargh, smash, other sounds of Achilles walking away to stay in his tent forever.
You are allowed to express your opinion on trivial matters, so I assume I also have that right? No? Here are my two cents::
A certain part or percentage of the brains resources are allocated to detecting sounds that might indicate danger. Some sounds (roaring maybe?) will definitly get our attention. It makes sense that unnatural sounds (scraping fork etc) trigger us, since they could indicate danger.
It forces, us to act on emotions. It makes us switch from system 2 to system 1.
Everything that signals danger works this way. Demagouges wants us to switch from 1 to 2 (feel, not think) and use various tricks like escalating the speed in which they talk, simulating someone who is panicking or otherwise signaling danger. People with guttural voices can do this easier than the rest of us, since it sounds like the guttural growls of a predator. You know who I'm thinking of.
My adrenaline is triggered by sudden, high, sudden sounds! Someone coughs loudly and aggressively! Makes sense that it aggravates me, right?
For some people, certain sounds gets coded as worthy of attention by the same system and forces them to switch from system 2 to system 1, which causes stress and an adrenaline rush. It is usually when we try to focus or concentrate and need the brains resources for something else, that such sounds causes the most stress. That makes sense if we think of it in terms of allocated brain resources.
I'm of course writing this because I don't think any of the worlds leading experts or doctors have thought about this. I must be smarter than them. :)
> Something about that resonated with me, and since then I’ve been the same way. Was I always like that, and his comment just called my attention to it? That’s not how I remember things, but who knows?
This, and the preceding paragraph, is a potential information hazard for misophoniacs like me. Please consider altering this.
i don't know. I think a common thing is the perception of annoyance or disgust at being inflicted on more than the sound, then. It's not just a bad sound, its an attack that triggers fight or flight, and that might be closer to anxiety as someone else said.
the flip side of misophonia is ASMR though, which is those same scritchy sounds to evoke pleasure. That I can't get. like lip smacking on a microphone.
i also think anxiety is a lot more common than people think; a lot of people may operate under constant stress in general, and may be too specific on self-diagnosis. like chewing sounds on snow is because snow is calming to people; snow is peaceful by default and doesn't annoy you unless driving.
I had misophonia as a kid, and still have a much milder version of it. Like Scott, I’ve ruminated a lot about how it works.
For me, the abhorrent sound was silverware clattering or scraping. I got the biggest doses of the sound in restaurants, where staff was hastily bunching and dumping and placing silverware while clearing and setting tables (my family did not eat in quiet, high end restaurants). Hearing the sound made me have vivid images of silverware scraping or bumping my teeth, and the combo of the sound itself plus the imagined tooth sensation was so acutely unpleasant that my arms would break out in goosebumps and I would sometimes shudder involuntarily. And yet, oddly, my imaginings of silverware bumping my teeth did not involve the idea that this would cause pain. For some reason, the idea of silverware hitting my teeth was horrible in itself, the way the idea of a swarm of harmless insects running up one’s arm is for most of us, including me. Away from restaurants there was much less real life silverware racket going on, but I still encountered a few things. One was my parents cutting food with a knife and fork in a way that caused the 2 utensils to rub against each other. This too would make all my skin tighten with disgust and horror, and the hair of my arms would stand up in goosebumps. The other was accidentally bumping one of my own teeth with a metal utensil. That was horrible, in a worst-fears-come-true kind of way, and even now, several decades later, accidental tooth-fork taps and scrapings sometimes give me an electric shock of horror and a case of goosebumps. I have always preferred to eat with plastic utensils and often did, but made myself stop doing that a couple years ago because of concerns about tiny bits of plastic remaining in my body.
And yet, oddly, during the era when my misophonia was peaking I had braces , and was neither more nor less bothered than other kids by the orthodontist putting metal bands on my teeth, which often hurt some at the time and usually caused soreness afterwards. The misophonia was oddly specific. To bother me, the metal on my teeth had to be silverware, and it had to be tapping or scraping on them. Also odd was that I abhorred the idea of silverware tapping or scraping even though I did not imagine it causing pain. And I dreaded exposure to my trigger far more than I dreaded mouth pain. I did not, by the way, feel anger at people making silverware noise that bothered me.
When I ruminate about my odd sensitivity I don’t get very far. It seems to me to be very similar to the aversion to snakes or to insects or to smells of organic rot that most people have. It has that same inborn, impossible-to-override quality. I think aversions to snakes, bugs and rot must be inborn tendencies towards alarm and aversion that were advantageous for survival back when life was more physical. Why, though, do a good many people have mouth-related aversions like mine? An aversion to certain tastes might also be the result of evolution — maybe having it protected people some from eating toxic things? But what’s the survival advantage of an aversion to the sound of others’ chewing, or to light, harmless contact between teeth and a metal?
I have wondered whether useless mouth-related aversions like mine are to useful ones, such as taste sensitivities, as sexual kinks are to sexual appetite for that act that produces babies — something about the wiring for the evolutionarily useful thing being very close to a bunch of other wires, and with the result that many people get crossover effects.
It's impossible to watch silent footage of someone chewing without involuntarily imagining the sound of that person chewing. For anyone with 'good' auditory imagery, imagining the sound of someone chewing has exactly the same hedonic value as listening to someone chewing.
Noise is worse when my attention is on it, and much more bearable when I am distracted by deep pressure or proprioceptive input, or when I am thinking about a topic that I am really interested or doing some task which places high demands on attention and working memory. Also the same noise might be either pleasant or unpleasant depending on what mood I am in. The same applies to just about any other type of qualia.
Getting angry at noise is not an unreasonable reaction. After all, if you take one randomly chosen second in your life, the probability distribution for how happy you feel during that second is much more greatly affected by what noises are going on around you during that second than by, say, whether you have cancer or whether your mum died yesterday or whether you are currently starving to death. I had anorexia as a teen, and I can confidently say that being close to starvation has very small negative hedonic value compared with having to put up with the noise on the school playground. I don't think that it is unreasonable to say that unpleasant noises are the single greatest cause of human suffering. Uncomfortable tactile sensations come a close second and if it were possible to change social norms around so that everyone could wear their clothes with the seams on the outside inside of on the inside then the QUALYs saved would be enormous.
Disclaimer: I have not personally experienced the qualia of a neurotypical person so I am trying to guess how much noise annoyance NTs experience based solely on their behavior. I'm hoping that some NTs here give their perspective on how much noise affects their day-to-day happiness levels.
I think this thought piece unintentionally pinpoints the neurobiological basis of intellectualized thoughts, indeed the complex subjective origins of what preoccupies the mind and the attitude people take about issues in general. Objectivity in the strictest sense of the term (meaning no personal bias) is an illusion. The issues that interest our thinking mind and the attitude we take about issues are very likely downstream of the same inscrutable neurobiological processes that underlie misophonia. What we feel or doesn't feel or couldn't feel are all baked into what we think or couldn't think of. It is in this sense that the theories that thinkers and scientists passionately defend like gospel are product of their subjective experiences (or personality).
What a topic. I suffer from misophonia. In the last 5 years, I've sought to gain a better understanding of it. I've participated in research studies, attended online seminars, tried psychological treatment, tracked my symptoms, and just thought a whole lot about it's effects on my life.
You've covered so much ground that I've thought about. It'll be hard to fully organize my thoughts, but I hope this popcorn assortment gives you some more to think about.
Researchers have recently proposed "misokinesia" as a related condition. It explains the flip side of misophonia, the fact that it's not just sound but also movement. I am personally affected by both hearing and seeing people chew. But I'm also affected by other sounds (slurping drinks, sniffling noses, mouth breathing, fans clicking, clocks ticking) and unrelated movements (my children waving things near my face, people hovering behind me, people pacing around the room).
Back to misophonia.
I'm also more affected by people in my close social circle. I think there is a combination of a conditioned responses. One aspect of the condition is that you're accustomed to this person making the offending noises. So before they even start, there's a creeping anxiety about the sensations you're about to be subjected to. Then there's also an anger response, which I think is also fear related. This person probably knows at this point that you are affected by the sound. The fact that they don't control the sound threatens your sense of safety and that triggers anger. It's this astonished sensation that someone in your safe space refuses to help keep you safe.
I think that there are similar responses to strangers, but more so when there's a pattern to how groups of strangers will act. Some cultures habitually eat louder, and I tend to get more anxious when I see them in a dining space. People tend to chew popcorn in a movie theater or gum on an airplane, so I anticipate this and feel the anxiety creep in before I've even arrived at the location. Likewise, when angry feeling arises from the actions of strangers, it's likely when those people are violating social and moral rules. A sense of, how could they not understand that this behavior is unsafe or unacceptable.
From my experience, desensitization and flooding don't work. More time exposed to the stimulus makes it worse. More time spent thinking about the stimulus makes it worse. Traditional Cognitive Behavioral Therapy techniques don't work, in fact it only seems to make it worse. Like your friend experienced through meditation, the more I'm able to turn my mind to thoughts other than the stimuli, the more I'm able to dampen my reactions. Blocking out the sound with noise cancelling headphones is good, but turning on some baroque lute (with a strong and predictable rhythm) is even more powerful at reducing my responses to the stimuli.
On a related note, sound therapy that features erratic noises like chimes makes my reactions so much worse. There's an element of my brainwaves being thrown into chaos and needing to be restored to order.
I'm also extremely bothered by the sounds that are just within my periphery but not entirely discernible. I interpret this as a survival instinct. It feels like compulsion to understand 'what is that sound?' like identifying the tiger stalking in the jungle before it pounces. Once I identify the sound, the affect is lessened, but not entirely and not for all sounds.
In some cases though, knowing where the sound is coming from is not good enough. There's a compulsion to continue to find the source of the sound. I think this stems from the safety signaling. If the sound comes from a threat, then vigilance would dictate that you don't let the threat out of sight or it might sneak up on you.
Chewing and slurping, and sounds that relate to being eaten by a wild creature basically, are always a trigger for me. Talking sounds can be a mixed bag. For instance when someone speaks just on the edge of my ability to hear, it can heighten the effect. I think this has to do with my senses revving into high gear to parse out the meaning of the sound. I've tested this theory by feigning that I can't understand and require the information repeated. Getting in this habit greatly reduces the overall effect, especially long term.
Some groups, like Duke University, study misophonia as an emotional condition, putting it in the realm of psychology. While I think that repeated exposure leads to psychological symptoms, much of this is the result of anticipating the distress and then ramping up the fight or flight system to prepare for the confrontation. I also think that there is a physiologic aspect, yet I haven't seen much crop up in the scientific literature about this. My hypothesis range from sensory processing disorders to a disorder of the cranial nerves that run through the ear and also modulate other nerves in the face. This latter idea comes from my experience with clenching my teeth. I have lost teeth by clenching at night while listening to my husband mouth *breath* (not snore). It feels like either I'm trying to force my mouth shut, as though doing so would help him do so, *or* that I'm trying to close my ears which triggers the same nerve to close my jaws.
As for when and how this arises, there's anecdotal evidence that misophonia arises sometime around 8 years old. This is also the point when most people start retaining their memories. I myself remember these symptoms starting around this time and they've never gone away.
One very interesting thing I am learning here is the association with *anger* in the misophonia. When Scott wrote it, I just assumed he was projecting misophonia on himself when really he was probably dealing with something else. But now to hear you say it adds credence and makes me wonder if I'm missing something.
Although I only learned about the term recently, I would describe myself from suffering from misophonia, but I have never felt anger because of it. I think?
My largest trigger is styrofoam, particularly the screechy kind used in packaging. I feel no fear or anxiety seeing it. I can force myself to handle the material. But hearing it causes goosebumps and pain (likely from my muscles tensing so tight I hurt myself). Scraping on ceramic plates or chalkboards doesn't really bother me that much, but styrofoam, whoa.
Beyond that, music (especially with lyrics) played at a low/background level where I have trouble understanding what they are saying, clocks ticking, and to a lesser extent windchimes in the background all really bother me. The sensation is qualitatively different than styrofoam. I find it hard to concentrate, and I will generally turn off the music / leave the room, but I suppose I haven't found myself trapped in a situation with an offending sound.
Scratch that, dripping tub, couldn't fall asleep due to it, angrily got up, but I blame the sleep interruption there!
So maybe what I have isn't misophonia since it just bothers/hurts me and doesn't particularly enrage me or force me to flee? And I'm not immune to rage, try to make small talk while I'm doing deep concentration reading/writing and I have (to my shame) flown off the handle before. Or maybe there are related symptoms that express differently to different people (and different stimuli?!)
If I like someone, and I hear them chewing, it is calming and relaxing to me. If I hate someone, and I hear them chewing, I become enraged. I think the sound is sort of triggering some pre-existing emotional complex, like the trigger word "Ronald McDonald."
I have stopped sitting in the silent compartments in trains, even when I need to sleep or work during a trip. Experimentally I found out that it was a lot easier to ignore twenty people talking loudly in a normal wagon than that one rude guy whispering into his phone in the silent area.
When I was younger, I had a misophonia-esque response to the sound of breathing. This was miserable - you can't exactly scream at someone for having the audacity to be alive within earshot. It's faded as I've gotten older, which I think largely has to do with being able to change my auditory environment at will.
As a misophonic person, I am very pleased to see an article that resonates with me, even if it doesn't help with the issue. For me CBT worked partly, mostly the part where you have to delay avoidance behaviors
I actually do not think Scott's problem is a great example of misophonia. It seems to be a sort of.hybrid, part unusually high sensitivity to racket made by people, part unusually low sense of fellowship with random other members of our species. Lest you think I'm making a harsh judgment about Scott, I should say that I am about like he is about noise, though in my case it's mostly racket when I'm trying to sleep. But like Scott, I grow mental hate structures about people who wake me, and then chronic anger at those people makes me way more vulnerable to any noise they make.
A couple summers ago there was construction on the house next door, and the workmen always started way earlier than my usual waking time. I pictured them doing irritating things like leaving one of their noisy machines running pointlessly while they stood by chatting. I imagined them shrugging and sniggering triumphantly if they somehow knew how much they were bothering me. I'd often look at the window at them after they woke me, and never saw a single piece of evidence that they were making noise they could have avoided, or were actively contemptuous of the people whose sleep they were disturbing. And yet I kept on looking, somehow hoping to see them doing something clearly unfair and inconsiderate. All I ever saw was blokes working, with every appearance of being utterly oblivious of people and points of view like mine. I'm sure I would have been much less bothered by their noise if I'd found it easier to mentally inhabit their point of view. But I am for sure below average in the basic feeling of fellowship I naturally have towards strangers.
I don't think there is a name of the kind you have in mind. Common language has more: loner, self-absorbed, unfriendly. But the low sense of fellowship is strongly associated with 2 diagnoses: Schizoid Personality Disorder and Autistic Spectrum Disorder.
I wrote about my own experience (recently) in really coming to terms with my misophonia, and, for the most part, fixing it. I wrote a post on here about what the triggers were for me, what I remembered causing it (as you have yours), and how I was able to basically retrain my nervous system in responding to the sound. Now when I hear chewing, even really egregiously loud chewing, it's at worst very unaesthetic, like someone playing bad music. I still have a little work to do on it, but I can more than tolerate chewing sounds, often the sound does not register in my conscious experience.
What you might not like to hear is that I don't think you can just logic your way out of it. There's something more imagistic going on with the association than just "priors that aren't updating", and I really believe that if that's your entire view of the mind, you are not going to make any progress in "fixing" this. Even if it's how the brain actually works, it's not the language the mind speaks in to you. I do agree with you that there is something that feels like a tangling, a knot, and that it can be untangled. But it has to be done imagistically, in the imagination. This, I believe, is why CBT is not effective, nor is any sort of exposure therapy.
The left/right hand dialoguing is good stuff! Somewhat adjacent to internal family systems -- bringing a kind self to younger parts and opening up an ongoing relationship there where healing can happen.
Regaining a sense of choice seems key. I could sit here, I could leave, I'm not trapped here. There are so so many experiences in childhood in which we are trapped both physically/logistically and emotionally (no room for our anger). Awful stuff, and also as you discovered, we have resources in us to heal those injuries and bring that younger self who was hurt into a more present-day connection with us as grownups who have power and choice and new perspectives. And who can validate the feelings that got trapped back there and had no safe means of expression.
I think for me the left/right hand dialoguing really helps step out of the body/ego/individual and into experience as a dialectic. It's like, near psychedelic level for me in communicating with myself.
Definitely the sense of agency, and the untangling of what made me feel trapped in the first place. Getting to go back and choose who is "correct" in what situation and re-writing those memories was what finally got my nervous system to calm down.
Could this be an addiction? I have a milder form of this, and the story about straining through earmuffs for noise to get mad about resonates for me! This combined with the mentions of righteous anger, and overblown anger in general make me think some chemical like dopamine (?) may be involved in this response and this turns into an addiction. It seems obvious looking at society that righteous anger, outrage, and frustration are addictive mental states. They're so arousing and immediate and compelling. I'm not really up-to-date on the best addiction treatments for behaviours like this but I wonder if a treatment along those lines would be more effective.
I know in my case, everyone should be glad its not a free country because if it was, the punishment visited upon those with straight piped cars, big stupid trucks, or Harleys would be entirely disproportionate.
this means there must be a subjective moral component, because a tractor that is objectively five times as loud as a douche wagon ram doesn't trigger the same response.
I have about the same level of misophonia that you have, but I have had some success with the following:
1. I have successfully applied CBT to OCD, by trying to be OK with not being OK with noise. As they say in OCD, "that which you resist tends to persist", and so I stopped fighting my negative reactions and letting myself be as upset as I need to be.
2. Using Reddit/Internet therapy did help, as I learned that how people react to sound is based on intensity, duration, one's attitude towards the source, whether someone is in a pensive phase (such as lying in bed) or busy, and whether you can do anything about the sound. Even for people without misophonia, this subjectivity must be affected by the same parameters, just to different intensities, and maybe with a different texture of neurosis. Even a neurotypical will say that some sounds "drive them insane", but for a misophoniaac, it may be a different kind of "insanity."
3. After moving to San Francisco, I spent some money getting custom earplugs from Kaiser, but in speaking with my audiologist, she brought up the point that using noise cancellation can increase your sensitivity. And so when I use a device, I'll ask myself first, "Will this get the desired effect?" If there is high-pitched construction outside, then playing white noise, such as a YouTube video of a Boeing 747, will effectively mask it. But if it's bass-y, then the sound will "punch through," and so I'll find myself searching to see if I can still hear the source. In those cases, I won't use masking because I know it will backfire.
4. Acclimation does happen, though, it just takes a lot longer. But every time I move apartments, those first two weeks are pretty challenging, even with quiet places. But then I eventually get used to many of the sounds.
Other notes:
5. I've experienced some positive "social contagion" aspect, but in real-time. I notice if I'm with a group of people I'm entertaining, and the sound of foot-fall on the ceiling comes through, I'll somehow pretend it doesn't exist because some leadership instinct kicks into me that wants everybody to emulate how chill I am.
6. There appears to be some super-cycle aspects to my attitude. I lived in the Mission once with lots of footfall above and sounds coming from the alley, but it didn't bother me as much until I could afford to move out, then it really bothered me, because "I could change things" again.
7. Big city vs. medium city seems to be like night-and-day. A lot of people will move out of big cities because of noise, even if they're not misophoniacs. I lived in Austin for 12 years, when it was a medium-sized city, and just the rate at which you would get an A or A- soundscape in your living situation was so much higher than in SF. If you think rent in the City is expensive, wait till you add a quiet requirement to your search.
I'd say I have a similar level/type of misophonia. Do your recommend the custom earplugs? Is the level of sound insulation better than deeply inserted foam plugs?
The custom fitted ones are great, especially if you ask for fully solid ones (some are partially hollow to allow some sound to pass through). They’re much better than deeply inserted foam plugs. The foam ones always seem to wriggle out a smidge, letting a lot of sound in. Even when they’re fully secure, though, they don’t block as much as the fitted ones. The fitted ones are solid masses. The foam ones always have at least some air to allow for elasticity. So I have a pair of the custom ones, plus I have an AirPods Pro. I keep the custom ones by my bed in case there is some construction noise in the morning and I can’t go back to sleep. Or I bring it to rock shows. Otherwise, the AirPods cover me for day-to-day use, such as subways or airplanes.
Thanks for sharing. Some of those info might help our teenage daughter. Switzerland's largest city (400k people, 1.5 Million in the greater area) just made the use of leaf blowers illegal most time of the year with some seasonal exceptions. In Europe it's always about finding the right compromise of personal freedom and the general good.
I think there's a big connection to one's basic feeling of safety. If the people closest to me can't be bothered to accommodate a minor quirk of mine, can I really count on them when I really need them? I'm not saying it's a rational inference, more like a feeling of broken unity. We're not a team anymore, and that's fucking scary. That would explain why one keeps scanning for signs that it's happening under the headphones and the white noise - you're scanning for a serious threat to your future well-being!
I've never thought of calling it misophonia, but I have a strong aversion to the "radio voice", the kind of perky and unnaturally intense speech that radio speakers tend to use. Probably became salient for me when I was living in a student dorm and getting rudely woken up every early morning by some neighbor's radio blaring news and shit. To this day my home is a TV and radio-free zone, and I find myself becoming alert, and getting ready to be angry, if someone close to me clicks a youtube link and some guy's pushy voice comes up. Yet if it comes from another house, it's only a minor annoyance, without the emotional overtones.
Sounds like you have not tried putting the ear plug and construction headphones on only one ear at a time. Or lie with your head on a cushion with either ear pointing up, to see if that makes any difference. Trying this would narrow down the location of the trigger between primary and secondary auditory processing.
When I had a very similar problem, the reaction was not anger but euphoria; yet this turned out to be focal epilepsy (caused by a tumor in my primary auditory cortex) which can produce either. Trivial to check, just get an EEG and trigger yourself during the measurement.
The last time I went to the cinema the small audience was basically perfect and respectful. Except one guy opened a pack of mints or something and it made the slightest rustle and if I had a gun I may have happily shot him then and there.
When I was about 15 I vocalised my annoyance at my friend who habitually made a sort of wet lips-parting sound when he chewed. I didn't know that misophonia was a thing and I was trying to explain that it was actually physically painful to hear. Anyway my other friend who was there said something to the effect of "no it's not, you just want to put other people down". I look inside myself and know this is basically wrong -- I'm generally very hard to annoy except for a few things like this. But having read this I wonder if my other friend was not completely wrong. I'm certain it's not about "putting others down", but it may have more of a social element than I thought.
Another recent, related development: I watch a lot of cooking videos and there's this sort of trend to make them ASMR, especially if they originate in east asia (?). This apparently involves lingering on shots of creamy stuff being stirred, poured etc. and turning the upper mid frequencies way up on the EQ. This also triggers my misophonia and sets off a chain of thought that ends up like "I can't believe they didn't consider my misophonia when making this second-rate ASMR" which obviously annoys me even more.
What's interesting about this is that I can feel the social element of misophonia here. But I'm certain the annoying sound was the starting point of it. I didn't know things being poured could be misophonic until I heard the ASMR-ised monstrosity; so it is, for me at least, something about a certain range/distribution of frequencies that starts the chain of mental events.
(To be clear, the whole video will be misophonic because they apply the EQ boost to the whole thing. So even chopping and blending will trigger it. I'm not about to go and test it but I suspect even just the ambient noise in the video will sound annoying to me).
A large percentage of the comments are of the form me-too: People's racket bugs the hell out of me. They are so inconsiderate! Maybe I have misophonia too?
I actually think Scott's problem is either a pretty unusual case of misophonia or not misophonia at all. The cases of it I have seen (I'm a psychologist) all involve sensitivities that are hard to relate to. They have that in common with most phobias and OCD issues I have encountered. The person tells you what's bothering them, and it's bizarre. They are sure their lips are too thin, and that strangers are covertly staring in disgust. They are afraid there is AIDs tainted blood in Russian dressing, because it's pink. They can't bear the squeaking sound of styrofoam containers rubbing against each other, it gives them a vile dry feeling in their mouth when they hear it. Are they *crazy*? Nope. They all say, "look, I totally get that this makes no sense." And they do. You get the feeling that whatever path led them to their preoccupation, it's some odd one, probably one with unusual neurological pinnings, not one of the familiar ones such as imitating admired people, striving for social or career success, pleasing parents, etc.
So Scott's bete noir lacks that weird quality. Everybody can relate to it. It is also just not a common one among people with misophonia. 95% of people with misophonia have a thing that has to do with the sounds mouths make, and lots more have things relating to throat and nose noises.
I'm not saying it's not legit, and hasn't called real suffering --- just that I'm not sure it's best thought of as misophonia.
FWIW I, besides being a psychologist, am also someone with a thing very like Scott's about being inordinately bothered by other people's racket. I also had misophonia that was pretty intense up to the age of 20. The thing that bothered me was had that bizarre, how-does-that-even-work quality: the noise of silverware being rattled together. Hearing it did not make me angry, and I was not even able to say what bothered me about it. I just found the sound intolerably unpleasant. It made me break out in goosebumps and shudder involuntarily. When I was little, I also cried. The experience of being horrified by that noise was *very* different from being bothered by noisy people when I wanted to read or sleep. The latter made sense to me, and involved familiar feelings of annoyance. The former was much more intense, but made no sense even to me.
> It is also just not a common one among people with misophonia.
The chart you posted has "music neighbors" as highest in the category of "ambient sounds" (59%), so wouldn't this make it fairly common? Party noise is a widespread complaint in r/misophonia too.
Yes, I saw that. All I can say is that based on my observations and my own experience with misophonia, annoyance at the miscellaneous racket other people make is a common experience. Seems like most people can relate to it, and the difference between people regarding thatkind of noise is mostly one of degree. But there’s a set of things that both the person with the problem and those that hear about it experience as odd. My misophonia about rattling silverware felt odd to me. “Classic” misophonia, distress about odd noises, just seems different enough to me to suggest it works in a different way. Notice that quite a large fraction of the commenters here describe experiencing what Scott does. Is misophonia then quite a common disorder? Meanwhile, a scattering of people report being bothered by mouth noises and other odd things. I think those people have something unusual and diagnosable going on.
I noticed that i hated music played out loud without my hands being near the volume control, that I previously loved while listening to it with headphones on, fingers touching the volume-control on my phone.
The headphone is another thing. >I< listen to music with my headphones on and feel queasy playing it out loud, and I get second-hand queasy when someone else does it. A feeling that my preferences should be normative.
Up until now I wouldn't have thought of myself as having misophonia, but the reaction you describe reminds me exactly of my reaction to snoring. I've spent hours before literally seething with rage as I try to sleep in a room where someone is snoring. For me though, if anything this seems to be much more lenient for those closer to me. I think the rage comes from a disgust because I associate snoring with fatness/laziness, whereas since the people I know who snore aren't fat or lazy, I can have them literally in the same bed as me snoring in my ear and it has no effect.
Also contrary to your description, as I start to think of this reaction as being under the label "misophonia", I feel like it loses power over me, rather than me identifying with it. Partially I think this might be that I am realising that snoring is not "objectively the most annoying sound in the world" to other people like it is to me, and also it reminds me of my brother, whose misophonia over metal forks on teeth I always found melodramatic and fake. Now I feel like my own reaction to snoring is melodramatic and fake, and the righteous anger doesn't feel so righteous anymore.
This reminded me of something Dan Carlin mentioned offhand in the Hardcore History episode, "Painfotainment". Talking about the history of public torture, he mentioned that in the days of public executions, there's no record of anyone vomiting at the sight of blood, or fainting at witnessing death. Sensitivity to the sight of torture seems to be a modern phenomenon. Whether that's because something about modern culture creates the response, or because pre-modern cultures naturally suppressed an otherwise normal response, I think the implications are similar.
I had always assumed something like vomiting or fainting after witnessing gore were involuntary - and it's possible they are, even so - but what's fascinating is the possibility that there's some social/cultural input that can influence involuntary responses.
Both of these posts were interesting...getting a little more insight into the particular dynamics of why my bugaboo sounds result in <s>annoyance</s> let's not beat around the bush, straight-up rage. In some ways, it's good to have a differentiating handle beyond just "lol, autistic sensitivity issues", which even in relatively friendly groups can come across as Speshul Snowflake whiny. (If one person literally has stronger sense of hearing than everyone else, it's difficult to be accommodating while not also thinking that person's kinda crazy, I can't hear The Thing...) Unwanted bass thrummings can GDIAF, unnecessarily intrusive public phone calls/media sans headphones can eat an eggplant, people dragging or scuffing their shoes as they walk makes me want to break faces. Earwormey music too, because by design the torturous stimulus will keep playing in my head even after the original sound has stopped.
Wouldn't it be great if there was a universal Master Volume knob for reality.exe and sometimes you could just reach over and...turn it to zero?
Age and experience grants a little more control over the *reaction*, but honestly the trigger threshold seems to get worse, not better. So it's not encouraging that most of the standard desensitizing therapies don't seem to work much among even mild Hooked On Misophonics. But also liberating, in that Science(tm) now shows it's "not my fault" to a great extent, and I shouldn't feel endless guilt over not being able to overcome this particular flaw through Sheer Willpower. (I have had some promising results with prazosin, but obviously that's not a realistic option if I need to be alert and awake otherwise.)
I'm not sure if I have misophonia but when my neighboring farmers make high-pitched noises at night to scare away wild pigs, it's so debilitating that I once got out of my house at 2 AM on a cold night in full anger and confronted one of them about it. The noise was so distressing that I ended up talking to local authorities about the late-night nuisance. I don't think anyone else in the neighborhood has issues with this specific noise but it disturbs me to my core.
As someone on the autism spectrum, I would describe my sensory issues as a form of schizotypal thinking. I experience life through a social persecution model. I try to achieve things, and various forces conspire against me to prevent me from achieving them. Therefore, whenever I am in an unfamiliar environment, my brain automatically tries to fit the environment into this schema: I am trying to achieve something out of being in this environment, and various aspects of the environment (the bright light, how that guy is chewing, so on and so forth) are conspiring against me to prevent me from achieving this. Obviously I don't anthropomorphize the environment on a conscious level, but this is how my brain subconsciously processes it.
From understanding, misophonia is at least partially genetic, at least to a degree that 23andme is able to predict it. So it can't be all "fake".
That said, I am pretty sure I didn't have predisposition to misophonia, but got to some degree "infected" by it by my wife, who always had it. While before I didn't notice e.g. people chewing, after my wife pointed it out to me a few times, I started noticing it by myself and hating it.
Or, as very common for genetic causes, misophonia is related to/ favorised by more general trait(s) that are genetic. Social conformism, ability to control emotions, emotion intensity in the first place, social paranoia....
Like Scott said, many if not most people are annoyed by chewing sounds (and bodily sounds in general), and by relatively loud sounds emitted in public but not a public message per se (I think it's a kind of public proclamation of power for homo sapiens, hence music or honking are much more annoying than wind or global traffic noise). But this general annoyance becomes rage-inducing pain for some (and only in some circumstances).
Maybe it's the fake feeling those annoyance are deliberate and targeted toward the victim (i.e. social paranoia). Because when it's not fake and indeed totally deliberate, misophobia is not a fringe phenomenon but the actual norm (and probably the natural primate reaction to a clear social challenge). Just look at the donkey popping noise in the cab in Shrek 2. Crazily funny, because any homo sapiens (and I guess most primates) understand instinctively it's not just a popping noise but a challenge.
You should talk less, think less, and try more mindfulness instead. You are surely a very skilled talker, but silence is also a really good thing. And also, psychotherapy — not "science-based", just regular psychotherapy, with, you know, empathy, responsibility, observing your feelings, all that stuff.
EMDR worked for a lot of people, according to a French psychologist specialized in misophonia. But it seems like it only worked for misophonia caused by a specific event one can remember.
Beta blockers have been found to work, incidentillaly, on someone who had misophonia.
I suspect it's a power gain stuff, or more accurately, a way to regain power in situations you are at a disadvantage: getting absolutely mad-angry got you what you wanted in the past , i.e. get rid or control the behavior of annoying people (the crazy opponent wildcard you need to even chances in many game theory setups where you have a power disadvantage compared to your opponent) and/or get the support of bystanders so they stand with you in the conflict. So getting mad-angry got selected as a good reaction in some circumstances.
Of course you can fake it, but I have observed that for anger (or emotions in general), faking it and actually feeling it is not that different, including to yourself, and less and less the more you do it.
The difference of reaction if it's a total stranger chewing, or a close person, basically push me a lot toward this interpretation.
A good discrimination thing: would you react the same if it's an officer chewing, or a clearly dangerous guy in a shady area restaurant, with a lot of friends and nobody else around? Maybe you will feel the same but hide your anger? But as I said, hiding anger is not that different to not being as angry in the first place. Or not being angry at all if you are not into introspection :-)
With that interpretation, this kind of phobia/bad reaction to mildly annoying social stuff is greatly increased by victim joker card approach to social relations, and by any positive reaction to tantrums (by kids or adults). On the other hand, it should be greatly decreased in societies where loosing your cool is always a sign of weakness and almost never a winning move.
It should thus become more common those last 2 decades in western societies...
I suffer from this too, and appreciate this account. For me it started after living next door to obnoxious neighbours; I became hypersensitive to signs that it was about to become worse, and now even quite minor noises are unbearable. Before then I think I was quite normal. I lived in student accommodation and was quite tolerant of normal student rowdiness. But I'm also quite neurotic, and I wonder if that made me more susceptible.
An even simpler explanation: there is a set of neural pathways in the brain which is hypersensitive to the perception of a certain kind of stimuli. Not the sensory pathways themselves, but something farther upstream, closer to but just prior to consciousness. Something that the conscious mind perceives as sensory stimuli, but actually consists of some of that but combined/interacting with other things, like a hypersensitive emotion center.
Say your brain is producing random low level spurts of anger, your mind will start looking for something to attach it to/explain it with. Due to your own unique life experiences, that happens to be certain types of people making provocative background noises. I think something similar happens with schizophrenic hallucinations--the neural voice simulator is randomly overactive, so one hears voices, and attributes that to something in the external environment (in the case of schizophrenia, something that isn't there, but perhaps this condition is less extreme than that).
It seems to me that this would be something very difficult to impossible to control with mere conscious will power. Maybe you could train yourself out of it, but even that isn't certain. Try training yourself out of tinnitus for example (a condition where the brain creates the simulation of a sound that isn't there).
Perhaps you could redirect the anger toward something else (a punching bag in the garage might work). Relaxation techniques could help moderate the behavioral response. But you're not going to reason your way out of it, hence the low efficacy of CBT.
Commenting here just to push back against the social norms of "don't make noise when other people are present" which some commenters here are trying to establish. Nope, that's not the norm. I don't care about chewing, music, whistling, etc. Just live and let live. I much more prefer the norms of "do whatever you want as long as it's not really really loud for others" and I'm talking about music at a loud concert type of loud. (I don't mind street musicians though)
Huh! I experience a bunch of righteous anger in this way where I terminally want people to suffer and I hadn't realized how many of the cases are sound-associated. It's not all sound-based, there's a generalized righteous-anger-thing that applies in unrelated situations too, but it's unusually common for norm violations that look like needlessly bothering nearby people with noises (revving motorcycles, construction crews starting at 8AM in the morning, etc).
I don't know if misophonia is the right term here, because I'm not intrinsically averse to the noises outside of the moral context? E.g. if you tell me I accidentally wandered into a motorcycle-revving parade where everyone signed up for this experience and the motorcycle-revvers are providing a service to everyone but me, I don't find the experience of hearing it any more aversive than the raw sensation, which by itself is extremely minor. (Or if I wander across someone revving their motorcycle in the middle of the woods, where they could have reasonably expected no one else to be around.) And it never triggers for my friends having fun - only when it seems like the perpetrator is pretty flagrantly disregarding the preferences of people around them for minor personal benefit.
I resonate with this. I can remember being on the last day of a 10-day silent meditation retreat and hearing the person next to me clearing his throat every 15 seconds drove me insane for an hour. Made clear to me how little progress I had made during the retreat.
I am like your father- if a noise startles me during certain phases of sleep (especially the first 1/2 hour or so) then I am instantly wide awake and it takes a while for the adrenaline to wear off enough to be able to fall back asleep again. The noise can be very low volume - even right at the threshold of hearing - and it has the same effect. I am almost certain that this is a physiological rather than psychological response. I am also hypersensitive to noises during other phases of sleep, but if those wake me up then I can usually fall back asleep pretty quickly.
Interestingly one of my daughters has exactly the same sensitivity, the other is unaffected.
If you are also like this, I would strongly urge you to try to find a quiet place to sleep even if that means moving. It is hard to appreciate how big an impact getting frequently woken up can have on your life while you are in it. But once you can get setup so that you can usually sleep though the night and get caught up on your missed sleep, it is amazing how much better will you feel.
Supporting anecdote: my gf has misophonia. If I do ANYTHING while we're on the phone (like get a glass of water) she goes nuts. She claims that she only developed it after dating a guy a few years ago who had it. He yelled at her so much for making noise that she internalized it and now does the same.
Also I'm not generally misophonic but if a neighbor's music invades my house I sometimes lose my mind. My tolerance is very context-specific, though. I currently live in a nice, quiet neighborhood and about once a month I have to hear muffled band-practice sounds from a neighbor. I notice but it doesn't enrage me because my brain classifies it as reasonable behavior - it's rare, during the day, and I know it'll be over soon. My last neighbors where COMPLETE methed-out assholes and would make noise constantly. Ten times a day I'd have to listen to their car stereos blast for 30 seconds while they parked or left. I couldn't STAND it - it was the primary factor that led me to move - I think because it made me feel helpless in the face of aggressive behavior (both they and the police ignored my complaints). I felt out of control and therefore got enraged - I fantasized about burning their house down. With my current situation I don't feel that way because I trust that they're reasonable people and if I really had a problem that they would respond to my complaints. So I have misophonic reactions that very consciously require a cognitive loop ("those assholes!") to activate.
I appreciate this post, because I have a rage trigger that's totally unrelated to sound but I see a lot of the same patterns here.
I get unreasonably pissed about bad UI or poor functionality in software. I was born in the 80s and have been using computers since I was a child, but somehow in the last ~5 years I feel like nothing works anymore. Stuff like this just happens every day:
- You click on a sub-section of a webpage and it asks for a login. You put in your username/pw and it puts you back on the front page. When you click the place you wanted to go again, it asks for login again.
- There's some text in a textbox that you want to edit, so you click in the middle of the text to put your cursor in the right spot, and at first your cursor does appear there, but after a second, it puts the cursor at the beginning of the text.
- I see a comment on an article I want to reply to, but there's no reply button. I figure maybe I have to create an account? I go through the whole email rigamarole, and there's still no reply button. I check for a solution and people say "make sure to verify your email" which I just did.
- You click the "translate" button and it doesn't say "service not available," it pretends like it works, but just returns nothing at all.
- Discord shows you an image, but then when you click to see the full size, it starts loading the image that you were already looking at???
I could go on, but there's infinity of these now. And every time I grit my teeth. "Why. Why. Why are you doing this. Why is it like this. Why anything."
It becomes a self-reinforcing pattern. I'm mad that I wasted 10 seconds on something that should've taken 2 seconds, but I'm also returning to being mad about everything I was mad about any time recently. And, being a millenial, I associate "getting pissed at technology" with older generations, so it doesn't sit well with my self-image either.
I can feel you. In my late 40s now I just hate all the malfunctioning things wasting my valuable time. A 10 years older good friend of mine switched to apple tech a whole ago because he couldn't stand anymore all the crappy things not working together correctly. My wife is not a tech enthusiast like me and she hates bad tech all her life, that never changed. A lot of females feel the same, more then males, I think. There is even the acronym "woman's expectance factor" for tech solutions with good enough usability and reliability to get accepted by womem. So guess you and me just get older and the excitement about new tech just has worn out. Now our brains just account the costs of adapting to changes or new tech working differently way higher than the expected dopamine kick out of playing with a new toy.
I felt similar more then 4 decades. Couple years ago because getting to sleep at night got even worse with endless thought trains and stuff my doctor prescribed me "eszitalopram, a mild medicine who will help calming your endless thoughts down. That will ease your sleep". It did and it turned out to me it's a widely used SSRI and antidepressant and it changed a ton of my then life long issues to the better. Turns out I might have had severe ADHD my whole life and upping my serotonin (not dopamine, what is said to be the cause of ADHD) improved everything so much. I hated noises, music, smells, smoking especially and tons of other things, I was overthinking everything, getting angry at random things and going into a lot of fights. And guess what? I stil don't like cigarette smoke the most time - but once I even had the impression it smelled delicious like roasted tobacco. What the f*...a ton of other annoying things and behaviours which bothered me a lot from random people doing tiny random stuff up to the upcoming thermal death of the universe - stopped as well. Not 100% - but it's easy now to just recognize a bad thought and tell to myself: stop it - and I stop.
Our teenage daughter is getting mad about chewing of her younger brother. And she hates the noise and feeling of walking over sand. She says she cannot stand both. And a lot of foods textures. And smells. And I got the impression it was better then she was a time on eszitalopram as well. Crazy brain chemistry...
A few years ago there was a study that exposure to street noise is connected with risk of dementia. I hated street noise before, but after reading the study I felt my hate was validated by science, and it made my misophonia so much worse.
Huh. This is me. I too have misophonia and have noticed that it's not entirely about the sound itself as much as it is about the social contract being broken or feeling threatened. It happens most strongly for sounds that have a visceral effect on me - someone shouting and being angry at their crying children, a motorcyclist with an unnecessarily loud engine in a residential area, but sometimes extend to much more innocuous sounds: people laughing in the office (can't they see I need to concentrate?) clattery keyboards (surely they notice that it's unreasonably loud) annoying coughs (why haven't they seen the doctor yet?) car horns (it's not going to get you there any faster, and I'm sure you're just using it to express your anger) etc. that trigger an internal monologue of varying unreasonableness. I expect the people who get annoyed by chewing sounds also have an unreasonable monologue which tells them that it is being done deliberately, or that the chewing people are being inconsiderate in some way.
The only thing I've found that helps is meditation. noticing the difference between literal sensation and my emotional reactions to it allows me to let go of the emotional reactions. It doesn't help with everything - I can't get rid of my visceral fear/anger reaction to a loud angry motorbike sound - but it helps a lot.
But why would only noise have such a network that creates trapped priors? Couldn't you draw this network for anything that bothers anyone? Maybe we do have it, and that's why each person is inordinately annoyed by something which "pushes their buttons"? Maybe I should try meditation with my somethings, since therapy didn't seem to make a dent...
My personal torture is hearing throat-related sounds, particularly those having to do with contagion, like coughing or sniffling. Interestingly, I first noticed it when I hit puberty, when someone coughed behind me in 6th grade and I suddenly wanted to jump out of my chair and strangle them or do literally anything to make them stop.
I didn't know at the the time, but misophonia is one of the first symptoms of approaching PMS during the luteal phase and there is research to back this up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgAXZ6LmZrI Now that I track my cycle, I know that the misophonia also correlates with compulsive cleaning and OCD symptoms and fixation on other "purity signifiers."
What do all these things have in common? To me, "disruptive" noise, injustice (particularly violation of social norms), OCD, germs/coughing, and sensitivity to stimuli all point to some underlying mechanism involving perceived order/disorder in information processing. Maybe it's not about the specific sensory input conveying the information--sound, sight, emotion--but rather the amount of "informational disorder" or "wrongness" inherent in the experience of perception that triggers the extreme negative response.
Well, shoot, you've rained on my parade a little. I had a bad case for any kind of mouth noises as a child...open mouther chewing, snoring, sniffling, or teeth sucking. Almost the entirety of my third grade journal that we were required to write in the first 20 minutes of class every day is dedicated to my hatred of the snorffling, sniffling, mouth noises of the kid who sat next to me, and how much I hated him. My grandma sucking her dentures also made me murderous, and snoring while I was trying to sleep out me into straight up serial killer fury.
However, this has gone away in adulthood. I was thinking it's bc my sense of hearing has dulled, so I'm just not that sensitive about noises. But I think it's probably just more likely that I have way more control over my environment now, and don't have to ever be in a situation I feel trapped in where I'm listening to these noises.
But I did have a rage recently, and in this case it was about the absence of noise. My Uber driver home from the airport drove me the entire 25 minute drive with NO music or radio or talking or any type. In a silent electric car!!! Just total silence, stuck in a car with a stranger. I was boiling mad. What kind of psycho just drives in total silence like that?!? At least put some low music on. There wasn't even any car hum bc it was electric. I could have just asked him to turn on music, but I was so bothered that any weirdo would NOT have any on that I kept waiting to see if he would truly just drive in complete silence the whole way. My fists were balled and shaking by the last leg of the drive, and I was so furious that I kicked my suitcase across the room and scared the dog, once I got back into the house.
So that can't be a noise irritation like I always thought misophonia was. It was obviously a noise triggered sense of anger and outrage that someone was doing something wrong and fucked up. Though in this case it was just silence. So are you saying basically that all misophoniacs are just major control freak jerks??
I suffer from targeted misophonia: I have a cabin deep in the woods, where I go to for peace and quiet. Unfortunately, I have a neighbor who is "a local" who presumably doesn't much appreciate foreigners in his town, and liberally uses his noisy ATV to buzz around my property for his own enjoyment, and I presume, my annoyance. A double-whammy.
Lately, he's also added some windchimes where the sound carries directly to my property thanks to the wind that's continually coming off the water. So, even when he's not buzzing around with his ATV, I get the "pleasant sounds" of a large windchime interrupting my enjoyment of natural sounds.
The windchimes and the ATV sounds have scarred me. I now get triggered when I hear similar sounds in *other* situations, even when I'm not in my idyllic cabin in the woods.
Everything Scott admitted to seems right here. It's something of an intersection of righteous indignation combined with particular aural sensitivities.
As a kid, I had a huge aversion to the sound of metal scraping metal. I have no idea where it comes from and imagining the noise makes me shudder a little bit, but hearing it in the real world is something I don't even notice anymore. I remember there was a time that we were out to dinner with my mom and grandpa, and my mom stepped away to go to the bathroom, and my little sister started scraping her silverware together to torture me and I was reaching across the table to make her stop, and then my mom came back and saw us fighting and punished both of us, which I thought at the time was extremely unfair. Reading this post, I'd have expected that to cause some kind of loop where every future recurrence of the noise causes me to remember that event, making me hate it more, etc. Fortunately that hasn't seemed to happen and the problem instead went away.
I had a similar situation where anyone touching the back of my head (or pulling the hair there) felt like torture, and that made me afraid to get my hair cut so my hair ended up growing really long. In 1st or 2nd grade, another student grabbed my hair and yanked on it while we were eating, which caused me to much distress I abandoned my food and was inconsolable for a while. I don't see any reason why this couldn't cause a similar kind of thought loop to misphonia, but if didn't and now I have no problem whatsoever with the back of my head being touched.
Both of these happening sound to me like some kind of classic ASD hypersensitivity issues. I wonder why I had those issues then, but don't now. Is that a common progression? I certainly don't really feel like I got less autistic, haha.
Two things have helped me be less bothered by noise:
1. C. 2017, for my tinnitus, trying a a mindfulness practice of paying close attention to the sound. Curiosity rather than judgement, so it was also also acceptance practice.
I think the sound became less interesting to my brain and so it was largely ruined out.
2. In 2007, spending several days near a call-to-prayer loudspeaker during Ramadan in Sumatra, which started before 4am and continued for over half an hour. The noise was loud enough to be physically painful to my ears, at least for the first few minutes. Left me exhausted.
But by the third night I was sleeping through it. And from 2009 I spent another 1.5 years in an Indonesian neighbourhood with sporadic loud noises at night (the security guard loudly whacking a metal pole on the street near my window to signify that all is well).
There was a deliberately practice of acceptance in these cases as well – I recognised that it was my reaction that was keeping me alert, rather than the noise itself.
But I'm still very bothered by the sound of people chewing with mouth open. Mainly if there is a sense that it's not going to stop soon – perhaps that is why it's less troubling When a stranger does it.
I have it with chewing, sneezing, and sometimes talking or music when trying to concentrate.
I've attended three meditation retreats and done tons of meditation. Had the same realizations as the article described.—it definitely helps. I can recognize sounds as, appearances in consciousness, feel the bodily sensations they associate with, and tolerate waaaaay more than I used to.
While reading the article, a lady at the next table sneezed. I muttered, "fuck you," out loud, and a feeling of rage accompanied by the thought "Do you want to get kicked in the face?" arose.
After reading this, I hypothesized that it should be possible to learn some sort of Voluntary Reverse Misophonia, in which the sounds of others induce a sense of gratitude, appreciation, and sympathetic joy.
I tried Reverse Misophonia a few times, and it was a positive experience. Listening to the sounds of the people around me in a crowd, it would normally be on the order of seconds of waiting to catch some laughter, and it is easy to feel relaxed goodness at the sound of laughter, even if you don’t hear the joke.
Pretty quickly, I got a tad annoyed when the people around me were being too quiet! But unlike regular misophonia, there’s no righteous anger (since nobody owes you their sounds), so I returned to peace easily.
I’m putting this experiment on hiatus out of concern that this mental-self-experimentation has limited upside for me, since I already like people and have a healthy mind. (the upside might include Nirvana, but I don’t care enough about Nirvana to try). And it has large potential downside (regular misophonia sounds awful. Plus, the “voluntary” part of “voluntary reverse misophonia” is a dealbreaker for me, and I don’t know if reverse misophonia will be voluntary).
I haven't got it as bad as you have (or did), but I've definitely got it. In my case, the overwhelming aversion is rooted in the sense that the people making the noise are being selfish, inconsiderate, and disrespectful. They are not sharing our common sensory environment responsibly. The same applies to chewing sounds. If other people can hear you chew, you shouldn't be eating.
This is a very fascinating post, but what actually was going through my head as I was reading was “Wow, no wonder Scott prefers quiet suburbs over busy cities.”
I feel like I’m sort of the opposite? Mild background noise is mildly relaxing compared to complete silence.
I think in most cases it has to be a combination of things. Your roommate might have cemented your identity as a misophone by pointing it out but that doesn't mean they weren't pointing out something real in the first place. Similarly, I used to be intensely sound- and light-sensitive to the point of construction headphones and heavy shades when I went outside, because those things would cause me intense pain. The Alexander Technique severed the vicious cycle that caused the pain - it was my flinching reaction that was giving me the intense headaches that would blow up into migraines, and I became able to control the flinch and smooth out the tightening of my muscles. I no longer have the extreme reaction (and accompanying avoidant behaviors, and accompanying self-identification as Somebody Who Cannot Tolerate Noise Or Light) that I used to have. AND YET... I still jump more than other people do at loud noises, I am still unable to differentiate sounds from loud background noise as easily as other people, I still get stunned and overwhelmed by noises more easily. (And similarly with lights, I am still more sensitive to/bothered by lighting conditions than your average human.) That was the thing I was reacting to that was giving me those symptoms in the first place. The fact that I can mitigate my outsized reaction to the stimulus now doesn't imply that I'm experiencing the stimulus the same as everyone else. My eardrums shake a certain amount and most people's brains go "noise" and my brain goes "NOISE" and sometimes "AUGH, NOISE" and that's just how it is.
Scott, ahm, this article hit home. I have observed many of the patterns you speak off. I mean, if you take all these patterns apart, it's just an exaggerated affective response. I have no idea what emotions are, but trashing the walls by trying to mimic the neighbors' idiotic sounds back at them is quite behavioral and affect driven. Apparently they drop things. I mean, so do I. I have to say, I try to be fair. When I drop things I have to hate myself as much as I hate the neighbors dropping things. And it works. Same result.
I have the same kind of misophonia as you do, only somewhat worse, I think - I can't imagine living with a roommate on purpose [I've only done it once in my life and it was a disaster, and living with family even in a big space goes incredibly poorly], or abandoning my big construction headphones whenever I'm *inside*.
I have the exact same emotional profile of reflexive straining to hear the noise to see whether I should be enraged. I'm not saying it's not a personal identity thing for you, but for me it's not. I have nothing like your narrative history with it - for me it's just something that's been there for as long as I can remember. I acquired baggage when people reacted to my strong reactions to sound as a kid, but that's because I'm highly sensitive to other people's feelings [particularly about me]; I *know* their feelings weren't causing my strong reactions, in my case.
I have the thing where family members trigger me more. I also have the thing where I reflexively keep straining for sound at the edge of my detection to see whether I should be angry. I don't think it's fake.
My theory of misophonia, for a while, has been that the weird filiophobic rage response is a corruption or overflow of the brain's instinctive-behavioral *rape deterrence* pathway. For whatever reason, when the trigger sounds are heard, misophonics' emotional systems react like we're being sexually violated, even though the normal other observables that would correspond with that aren't occurring, so the reaction is "socially inappropriate". It's been found that misophonics have an unusually strong correlation between activation in the amygdala and activation in the insular cortex [which deals with gastrointestinal stuff, righteous anger, emotional internality, music and other emotion-producing sounds].
I try not to pick at typos, but this one flips the meaning. Presumably it’s supposed to be “that’s not how I remember things”, as concluded the previous paragraph.
> I talk a big talk, but so far knowing all of this hasn’t helped me tolerate noise more, not even a little bit.
But you say you’ve improved, eg not wearing huge airplane headphones whenever you go outside. Did something different help? Or does this not represent an improvement?
If you didn’t know all this, you’d likely be much more caught up in your frustration and think / talk about it very differently. Instead you’re describing it with a great deal of detachment.
So maybe you’re saying the emotional response hasn’t blunted, but separately, you’re better at dealing with it?
(FWIW this is how I feel about flying. No matter how much I learn about plane safety, there is some core part of me that is sure my doom is imminent on every flight I take. But I live with this fear and take flights because I know it’s pushing me in the wrong direction.)
Wow, your experience with this is surprisingly similar to mine! I've never heard anyone else articulate it before.
I totally agree that there is something about the "inconsiderate-ness" of the noise that is part of the problem, and fuels a righteous anger. I used to fantasize about cutting the headphone cords of the NY subway riders who had their music turned up so loud I could hear it in their headphones.
I have historically been very sensitive to feeling dismissed or like my feelings are not validated, which makes me feel very angry. So the idea of "people make annoying noises and they aren't considerate of my feelings/needs to *not* hear those noises" fits very well as part of that pattern.
I've also noticed that I am very afraid of making annoying noises *myself,* lest someone criticize me for doing so. And I've seen in my life that I'm sometimes extra critical of people who do things that I am afraid to do. So I have been practicing doing this, in small ways, like playing a youtube short on the subway without headphones, so that others can (somewhat) hear it.
All in all, I have actually found some improvement in my misophonia (?) in the past few years, via:
1. Mindfulness in general and mindfulness of my own anger, specifically.
2. Working in therapy on self-validation
3. Practicing doing the things that I am scared to do (which relates in this case because I'm scared to make annoying noises)
To be clear, I worked on these things for reasons unrelated to misphonia, but I think it has ended up helping with that anyway.
I'm late to reading this article and you probably won't see this comment now, but I recommend the book "Sounds Like Misophonia". It helped reduce my misophonia by at least 50% I would say. I just don't notice the sounds as much as I used to. When I do notice them, they tend not to be as rage-inducing as they used to be (depending on my current stress levels and other contextual factors).
I definitely think my misophonia is in some way related to the fact I grew up in a house with a father that did all sorts of incredibly annoying things with zero self awareness and absolute impunity. No one could call him out as he had an aggressive temper, especially bad when any fault was brought to his attention. I was effectively muted from expressing any legitimate negative feelings. When I hear someone eating noisily or talking too loudly with no social grace It is immediately triggering and brings up very strong feelings of being trapped and feelings of huge resentment that I, and other people, should have to put up with that person's oversized presence and undersized lack of awareness. I get it even with my kids, even when they were small and had no idea that what they were doing might be rude or uncomfortable. It feels like the personal has made a deliberate effort to slight me, like I'm being prodded with a stick. I know in my conscious mind that this is ridiculous but it is an emotional reaction from somewhere much deeper.
The intensity of my fury at people watching videos with the sound up in public is so consuming that it sometimes feels irrational even to me. It had never crossed my mind to put it in the misophonia category but I relate a lot to your five-pointed diagram – maybe my response is more psychologically fraught than I had realised.
If you define misophonia as "all noises are annoying/rage inducing" then sure, but I'm confident that people playing things out loud on their phones is sufficiently different to be fully justified. I have no real misophonic tendencies and get intensely annoyed by it too. It is a) a new phenomenon (unlike chewing) and b) completely avoidable (unlike chewing).
For the same reason I think Scott's decision to use as an example "gangbangers loudly playing music in a park" muddies the waters between what is and what isn't irrational to dislike.
EDIT: To clarify why I'm confident that my annoyance at people who play videos out loud on public transport is *not* related to misophonia, I've lived with people with the more extreme examples, asking for silence after 10.30pm, reluctance to eat meals in groups, and frankly most of the time it just isn't something I notice. But the music on transport example is often accompanied by an indignation on behalf of *others*. And frankly it also comes accompanied by a whole host of thoughts and worries about changing/declining social norms, decline of politeness and so on.
I also think there is a thread between "you can just learn to not get annoyed by things" and the "but how does this affect you personally?" tone that people who object to general degradation of norms and etiquette will recognise. I recognise that "polite silence" is a temporal and geographic anomaly achieved in just a few societies but I don't think lamenting its loss ought to be solely seen as misophonia!
Yeah I agree that this trend is genuinely bad and correlated with a whole range of other genuinely bad trends – it's just that on top of my perfectly reasonable reaction on those grounds, I am carrying around a further degree of obsession and rage on this subject which just makes my mental life even more unpleasant. I don't want to chill out to the extent that I no longer care about the loss you describe, since the loss you describe is very meaningful to me, I just wish I could put things in proportion a little better moment to moment.
Yeah. I don’t have problems with chewing or the other common misophonia triggers, but where I used to live, our usual mailman had this habit of tunelessly whistling when he came by to deliver the mail, and the sound triggered a feeling of rage in me for whatever reason (and my apartment was right on the other side of the mail room in the building, so I always heard it if I was there).
I also work in a cubicle farm and feel angry when people hum or whistle at their desks. But in that case, it’s more “WE LIVE IN A SOCIETY, PEOPLE!” — don’t they realize there are people around them who they’re disturbing? Anyway, yes, I agree that these are two different feelings.
I worked in a noisy factory while wearing earplugs, and that motherf*cker behind me who wouldn't stop whistling doesn't know how close he came to dying.
How close did he come to dying?
The posts on this topic are fascinating. I have many negative emotions and compulsions that can, have, and will continue to lead to bad outcomes but anger isn't generally one of them. Annoyance, sure, but it's been a very long time since I've felt the rich anger that other people are experiencing. Really interesting to hear how that manifests.
Can you imagine a scenario where you snapped and attacked him? Do you think it's something that eventually would have been likely to happen?
I had a co-worker who would take off his earphones and leave them on the desk. Then I would ask him to turn off the music.
No one else in the office could hear it.
I think anger can be fully "justified" without being rational.
If you need to get somewhere, and a crowded bus is the most convenient/efficient way to get there, and someone sits down next to you in the last empty seat and busts out their phone and starts playing some loud music you really dislike.... that's bullshit, I agree. And in that situation, I'm sure I would seethe about it until I got off at my stop. But spending 15 minutes seething in anger is more unpleasant than spending 15 minutes calmly enduring something unpleasant, right? Does it make sense to call the angry seething rational?
> But spending 15 minutes seething in anger is more unpleasant than spending 15 minutes calmly enduring something unpleasant, right?
No, not universally.
I fortunately do not have this about music, I can tune it out. I was on a train a few months ago and a man asked the parents of a toddler to turn the sound off the phone the toddler was watching.
At the time I couldn't comprehend why he'd prefer to hear a toddler caterwauling as the parents obliged, to the tinny sound of a nursery rhyme. Personally my preferences run the opposite way. But I guess he was like you (and Scott).
Well the ideal scenario is the toddler remains entranced by the screen even when the sound is off.
I guess an ideal scenario is that trains give out free headphones like aeroplanes do (though not all toddlers will wear them, I think it would have worked in this case!)
Or people planning to listen to things on phones bring headphones with them? No need to push this one onto the train operator. (Note that aeroplane headphones deliberately don't work with non-areoplane devices so you leave them behind for the next guy.)
This is tangential to the rest of the argument but it's been a while since airplane headphones were like that in my experience.
(In fact, the last trip I took, the in-flight entertainment system had that weird dual jack, but the headphones they handed out just had the usual single plug.)
Maybe we will eventually evolve toddlers that do not cry in public.
Do you also hate people talking to each other? What's the fundamental difference between talking to someone and watching a video with sound on?
I think it's that people cannot easily have a conversation otherwise, but they can usually watch a video with headphones (or wait to watch the video). I think the point of the post is that what seems like a pure sensory annoyance is actually an indirect reaction to discourtesy.
"The man is saying the same syllable each time, but depending on which picture of his mouth moving you look at, you hear it differently."
Hmm, I don't hear any difference at all. It does not seem to be an universal effect.
Try this one. It doesn't lead your expectations quite as much. https://youtube.com/shorts/wx4AC_QfdKE?si=EX4S2gRLSLcHziOS
Nope. I closed my eyes and the sounds are quite different. Gaslighting for effect.
> I closed my eyes and the sounds are quite different.
That's the whole point: that your auditory perception is altered when it co-occurs with a visual perception. If you shut off the visual perception then of course the auditory perception will not be misdirected by the visual countersignal.
I am no native speaker (plus less good in paying attention to faces, maybe), so the effect did not work that much on me (Germans don't do "wa" with the lower lip behind upper teeth).
The second mouth position induced “fa”, rather than “wa.”
Yep, my wrong. Thanks!
There are a few conditions that can prevent the effect from occurring, autism and its related conditions are a primary one
Prior to undergoing LASIK, my eyesight was pretty bad. As a result, I rely on eyesight a bit less and on hearing a bit more than an average person. That could be it.
Interesting, I think I have the exact same misphonia. Including the part about, putting on headphones and blasting rain + brown noise, but then still just being angry if once a minute I can hear a quarter second thing that maaaybe was the sound of someone talking. And the part about how people who make noise like this need to suffer but hitler doesn't.
That said, I don't think the boxes you put forth capture it.
Intellectualization is something I do about everything. Or, try not to do, but have the urge to do about anything. Like littering, I have the urge to intellectualize, how it represents the day of society, I generally don't like it. Still, I don't have anywhere near the aversion I do to certain sounds for littering though it ticks the boxes you listen..
Seems to me a sixth component has to do with attention. My mind is always just passively listening and scanning for sounds. But my vision isn't always scanning for trash-like objects. This makes bad visual stimuli of most forms far less intrusive.
EDIT: I also just realized, I stim a lot, and it doesn't bother me to listen to my own sounds. I think this is evidence for the attention dysregulation / predictive processing theory. I remember you writing a post a while ago about that.
It's so much easier hating humans than any other creature. People ignoring priority to the right deserve to get beat. People who fart in busses or elevators, shot. If the dog does it under the table, it's just something that happens.
> people who burn themselves on hot stoves will happily touch a cold stove
I don't know about others, but I won't do this happily! Though I will touch a cold stove, I approach them with the same fear and trepidation as hot ones, and certainly wouldn't feel comfortable leaving my hand (or indeed any non-stove-object) on one. Full disclosure: I did burn my hand on a stove as a child.
Hot iron burnt here. Always a bit nervous touching one. And rarely ironing ;)
BTW the Italian proverb for "once bitten twice shy" is "he who got scalded by hot water is afraid of cold water"
Hebrew the same. It's in the Talmud.
Yeah the "pavlov don't work that well" actually seems to work. To this day I'm still afraid to touch metal doors because I stayed in a room which always trigger static electricity.
I did notice this about myself in college.
Loud traffic noise all night? Totally fine.
The soft sound of my roommates benignly having fun without me while I try to sleep? Enraging.
This did actually go away for me when I started meditating and realized that it only bothered me when the noise had a blamable agent behind it though.
Relevant https://thelivingfossils.substack.com/p/what-to-do-with-emotions-part-i?utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true
I have the same issue with noise outside, and get the same anger, directed about "people could choose to not make that noise". Loud motorbikes, people talking loudly at 10pm outside, etc. Also I like sleeping with the window open which makes things worse. I do have that anger to people who make noise generally, in office/home contexts too, especially at night ; and like KJZ said, at people watching videos with the sound on in public or talking loudly on the phone in buses and stuff.
I used to have a white noise machine, it helped with the window closed. I also moved, and now live in a place where people don't talk at 1am outside loudly at least every two nights.
Also agree with sim gishel that visual stimuli is way less of an issue.
And finally I think I hate way more than the average person I know music I don't like being played out loud.
Not sure what to make of all that, but at least it's some more data.
Are you a more quiet and respectful person on average compared to your environment? There's a part of me that feels sensitive to noise-related injustice because I'm literally almost invisible most of the time--people can't hear me walking or talking even when I feel like I'm stomping and shouting, and I take up almost no space and demand no attention--so people taking up more than their allotted share of public space and attention breaks my sense of perception a bit.
I think I am in that I often try to not make too much noise and the idea of making noise that bothers people really bothers me, however I tend to talk loudly (but I think the thing here is that I don't realize that I'm talking loudly, so it's hard to self-adjust).
The "allotted share" idea is very interesting. I'd say I have no issues getting heard on a physical level, but can have trouble getting heard on the "we understand your idea and will apply it because you've convinced us it's the thing to do".
When I left my family's house to live on my own for the first time, the flat I rented had an A/C that could not be turned off. Its noise levels shifted with the force of wind outside, such that it never (never!) sounded like pure white noise but rather a slightly ever-changing white noise. Two days in, the auditory pareidolia reached levels I never thought possible: when trying to fall asleep, I would hear voices, entire discussions, ghostly apparitions, distant screams.. No matter how hard I tried to reason them away, the "sounds" emanating from the A/C fan made it impossible to fall asleep. I started going to bed with headphones on - one ear into the pillow and the other engulfed by the headphone pad. I'd listen to Youtube videos or podcasts until I got so tired I fell asleep. When I left that building six months later for a new place with no A/C, sleeping in complete silence became impossible. In silence, my thoughts rushed around, both aware and unaware that I was the one making the effort to ruin my sleepiness by allowing my brain to mull things over repeatedly. Ever since then, I'd say I've fallen asleep with a background video/podcast playing in my ears about 9 nights out of 10. Since then, I haven't had any issues with background noise. Even when I write, I like to have some ambient music in the background but I tolerate silence perfectly well. I just can't fall asleep without listening to something, and it all comes from those nights of hearing distorted screams from the A/C unit until 3am.
This reminds me of my dad: he loves to go into nature to relax and get away from the big city. Except that most accessible nature is quite close to roads and every car noise reminds him of the city again. His obsession with sounds like that was probably trained on his job though: he is a sound engineer and cutting annoying sounds out of recordings is literally his job.
Could sound like it's related to OCPD (obsessive compulsive **personality** disorder) in some way?
Like rigidity, a feeling that things have to be just right, and very bombastic and aggressive critique of others if they don't conform to your ideas of how things should be. The idea that people doing things you find annoying represent a literal downfall of society seem related too. OCPD folks often have very poor insight and believe it's everyone else who is wrong and not perfectionist enough.
Scott has OCD IIRC and they are often, though certainly not always, comorbid. I have OCD and not an ounce of OCPD. I'm almost the opposite of a perfectionist. For me it's just the horrible, intrusive thoughts that make me incredibly anxious.
Yes - I was initially thinking it might be related to narcissism (NPD) but OCPD seems like a better fit.
This makes sense to me, coming from a family of people who lean OCPD.
Eaton's Asterisk article mentions a study from 2023 which "found that misophonia isn’t correlated with having a [OCPD] diagnosis. It’s just that misophonia kind of looks like OCPD."
Interesting--I just posted elsewhere on the thread about how my misophonia and OCD seem to be linked, and both seemed tied to hormonal changes involved in PMDD that trigger an obsession with order and purity.
Ah, the part about your father so reminded me of the explanation behind the saying ‘waiting for the other shoe to drop’.
Twin babies and a hatered of noise seems like a difficult situation!
Unfortunately science has looked in the wrong direction on this. But articles like this let me know I’m on the right track.
I wonder how this looks through a predictive processing lens?
It feels like the network of self-sustaining noise irritation is like... a valley made of a series of local minima or something?
That's interesting—I too recall a couple of incidents similar to that in the story featuring your father. Mine are probably even more easily-explained as "kid worships father, adopts his ways", but as you say: that's not quite how I /remember/ it; what I /remember/ is that he mentioned a particular trait of his, and then I had it too.
I also have this at a mild level. Hadn’t realized until now that my intense hatred for people who play music on public transit rather than using headphones might be related to the annoyance at chewing.
I think this, from your article, might be key in all cases: “insofar as their continued noise indicates they don’t care about you enough to stop, it’s easier to be … angry about them.”
I agree, it's basically about people being inconsiderate and simply not caring. [Or not knowing what they ought to know, when it would be socially difficult for you to take them to task for it.]
Noise isn't the only way that can get to you, but it's the strongest channel and the hardest to block out.
I think the 'chewing' one that started the article doesn't really fit the pattern too well, unless someone is chewing with their mouth open and letting food fall out, whatever. Maybe for some people the thought of someone doing that infects the sound of chewing in general, even though everyone has to eat! It's still about people, though - nobody minds about the table manners of the dog or cat. (Or toddler, even.)
I wouldn’t be surprised at all is psychedelic therapy (maybe just take mdma while listening to the sound, and feel how it feels?) provided a big enough effect to destabilize that belief network. People have published proposals on it https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2022.983285/full
My own experience with misophonia is very similar to what Scott describes. And LSD (a moderate dose, first time trying psychedelics) had a very large effect on relieving it, which lasted for several months.
Isn't an at least CBT-adajacent explanation avoidance-reinforcement? You start with a dislike of some sound. When given the opportunity to avoid it, you do so and feel happy that you avoided the sound. That makes you want to avoid the sound even more next time, so you avoid sound even more. By the time your friend says, "Hey, you're really averse to sound," you're aware of a really strong desire to avoid sound, fill in the awfulness of sound that must represent, and run with it (secretly assuming it must be a good thing about you because the avoidance feels so good). Hence the wind doesn't trigger you (unavoidable), the bus does a little (you can see a path to avoiding it, but shouting at a bus driver to not make announcements is so far outside social norms it wouldn't occur to sane-ish people). So far as the people in the park, not only is it avoidable but you can fantasise about heroically confronting them, not be able to do that as it's a bunch of big teenagers, and take an ego hit at your inability to stop them on top (maybe leaving CBT territory here). I think the avoidance-reinforcement explains the headphones and the straining to hear pretty well as well.
Wouldn't you prefer to be unaware of the sound(s) once the headphones are on, then (→ easier "high" from "I've successfully avoided the sounds!")...?
I dunno—it's an interesting idea, and some parts do seem plausible to me, but overall I'm a bit skeptical: I can't ever really recall feeling any sequence of feelings such as that (e.g., happiness at avoiding something I dislike—I associate irritating things with either absence of feeling, i.e. unawareness/neutrality, or else anger/irritation, i.e. if I become aware of or have to deal with them; like, probably irritation still predominates over happiness, in the latter case... even after successfully having ended the nuisance(?)).
Not sure that happiness at avoiding something necessarily builds upon itself like that, either, even if we concede that there is some fairly significant good feeling from "I avoided a thing" in the first place... 'sjust intuitively seeming a bit implausible, t'me.
...but I'm notoriously terrible at introspection—so I could well be wrong, heh. .
Who's telling you you're "notoriously terrible at introspection"? Yourself?
Very funny!
Do you resonate with the idea that your inner world is delicate and precious in a way that other people have a duty to caretake? If so, you would have found that there are very few socially tolerated chances to vent your anger originating from this belief because people would label you as egotistical for holding such a view. But an "involuntary" sensitivity to noise that is out of your control and therefore can't get you labeled as egotistical for having it? That would be a rare, socially sanctioned opportunity to express your unexpressed rage stemming from this view of what others owe you. This would explain why you latched on to other people describing the aversion to noise as something that cannot be controlled, and also explains why you seek out the rage. There is too much hidden benefit from holding on to the belief that you cannot control your reaction to the noise. Just give yourself the right to express your sense of entitlement directly and the need to express it through this underhanded way should go away.
Love this comment. It's of course easier said than done, but in my experience totally true:
Once I don't need to justify (to myself, to others) that I have a right to be angry, or, which is the same, that there is something objectively wrong that it is only normal to be angry about, I can just let myself and others be (angry, and noisy, respectively). And funnily, opening myself up to it often leads to it subsiding over time.
I sometimes anthropomorphise the anger and I feel like it works something like this. It wants my attention, and as long as I'm looking at other people who are at fault, I'm not looking at IT. So it will stay, and probably yell more loudly.
I predict this will neither apply, nor "work" (and nor will anthropomorphizing the anger, as in the response by "Kata" below).
There are several reasons I could think of, some of which may even be true (say, e.g.: general distrust of "psychologizing" just-so stories like these, skepticism regarding whether it makes sense for "entitlement regarding delicate inner states" to manifest specifically as misophonia, uncertainty as to whether "I really hate chewing" is /that/ much more socially acceptable to express than "I hate getting interrupted"... unless we assume that "sound of chewing" was initially irritating enough that "I have an uncontrollable reaction to this" would suggest itself as a vector down which to express the entitlement—in which case we still have that unusual sensitivity to explain in the first place,¹ etc. etc.)...
...but mostly, it's because (a) I think Scott & I are pretty similar, and (b) to me these both—OP & response comment below—seem like very "female" ways to think/feel. I can't imagine myself, or my male friends, nodding along.
...or that's my own intuition/experience, anyway—perhaps Scott will say "no, that definitely sounds like me and all my guy friends too, we all meditate upon our delicate insides and have dialogues with mental avatars of our feelings", heh.
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¹(although I guess this last /does/ fit with the "crystallization upon the notion's being floated by another party", come to think of it)
Really? I'd personally understand/ feel others would understand "I hate getting interrupting"—if anything—/more/ so than "listen, I have this really weird thing about chewing, trust me this is a thing okay it's not my fault–"
I predict there is not much I could say that would alter your conclusion because the possibility that you have a "delicate" inner world threatens your "masculine" ego. FYI, I have distinctly more male-typical patterns of thinking relative to my peers, and resonate with being classified as having a "schizoid" psychology (as described by the best writers on the topic, e.g. McWilliams or Greenberg; the DSM-5 characterization is shit and focuses only on a pathological version of the underlying dynamic; socially integrated schizoids like me tend to get classed as the "introspective/autistic/creative/bleeding heart" types).
I also was jarred by your labeling of this as a "just-so" story even though it makes predictions that (as you even noted in your footnote!) match the data (it was a model that readily surfaced based only on data from just one of those predictions, so it wasn't overfit to the training data to put it in machine learning terms). I would argue that you did a "just-so" labeling of this as a "just-so" story to conform to your prior beliefs about the value of psychological modeling.
>because the possibility that you have a "delicate" inner world threatens your "masculine" ego<
Oh, I don't have misophonia, myself¹—my prediction was just based upon (a) being similar to Scott in other ways & (b) the language used. I guess it's really more the reply to your comment (the one about affirming one's Right To Be Angry & envisioning one's anger as a person yelling for attention, and so forth) that seemed strongly "female-way-of-thinking", to me (but a demand that others have a duty to protect one's delicate inner world could /also/ be argued to be a particularly feminine perspective too).
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¹(maybe this supports your idea too, in a way: I have never been accused of being particularly humble or patient, and get irritated—enraged, even, heh²—very quickly & easily when trying to concentrate and someone interrupts me... maybe if I'd instead grown up thinking I couldn't express this, I'd have misophonia too–)
²(it goes away just as quickly, is my only saving grace here. I forgive totally & near-instantaneously. this has caused interpersonal problems before, in that most people seem to hold grudges for incomprehensibly long times, to me... days, even! ten minutes is about my limit, for the /really/ severe grudges...)
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>I also was jarred by your labeling of this as a "just-so" story even though it makes predictions that (as you even noted in your footnote!) match the data<
Sorry—I can see, in retrospect, that the term "just-so story" seems unduly certain & dismissive. I didn't mean it as in "this is definitely an incorrect & 'made-up' garbo hypothesis!", but rather as in "one can come up with lots of plausible explanations like this for various psychological traits & tendencies, and it's hard to know which to go with... so I tend to react with a—mild—blanket skepticism to all of 'em."
I.e., as you note, there /are/ reasons to like the explanation you offered, and it's not unconvincing—but my /intuition/ is usually going to be "nah, it's just some weird brain thing with no real explanation other than 'sometimes people be like this'".
I'd be interested to see if various treatments based upon your hypothesis (e.g. the example you give of explicitly acknowledging to one's self that one has the right to say "don't mess up my inner meditations!", or maybe something like having friends & family verbally affirm the importance of one's inner world, or... etc.) work for people. My ex-wife has terrible misophonia; I'll ask her!
Ha the more I ponder this the clearer it becomes there must be some kind of displacement going on, either your explanation or something else or both. Regardless of the exact source of displacement, there is an obvious mechanism through which the misophonia is reinforced by internal needs.
The crucial part is he knows he seeks out anger deliberately in a way that he labels stupid. It sounds like it's not clear where this drive is coming from, but it must be coming from somewhere. Usually, behavior that does not serve *any* need will dissolve automatically over time when it reaches the point of becoming conscious of it. But if it serves some unconscious need behind the scenes it's a different story. So likely there are one or more unacknowledged needs or beliefs behind the desire to become irrationally angry.
In light of this, it makes sense that directly trying to rewire the brain to reinterpret the sounds as harmless doesn't work. The misophonia is rewarded every time the drive to be angry arises and is fulfilled while the interpretation of sound as annoying is active.
None of this directly explains where the need for this anger comes from, but as long as this drive is there, it's locking the misophonia in place. So without finding a different outlet for it or letting go of it entirely, I imagine the misophonia won't go away at this point.
I'm misophonic and that doesn't reaonate with me. I don't know if it's a useful model for other people, just wanted to add a data point.
I think it feels like someone wronging me, similar to someone cutting me off in traffic in a way that forces me to slam my brakes.
I feel like this almost supports OP. You feel like whatever noise is equivalent to a personal slight which seems somewhat egotistical. The noise is other people living their life not them banging on ur door. The change in mindset from I feel like someone is wronging me so I can be angry about this to I should feel guilty for being angry about other people living their lives feels like a key piece to psyching yourself out of this. Like Scott said this feels fake at least from the outside looking in.
I think Scott used some examples that seemed like situational reactions rather than specific weird sounds. But you'll find that when people realize realize they have misophonia (by reading a forum or whatever) the way they identify it is becomes of oddball sounds that other people mention they react to, like eating an apple.
There is not egotistical angle to someone reacting to that kind of sound. The chewing one, sure, but there are many other examples that really seem quite random but many people with misophonia seem to react to the exact same specific sounds.
That's a good point—it definitely seems to be a particular set of sounds that commonly trigger misophonia, whereas more complex psychological explanations about egotism etc. don't immediately suggest (to me) that we'd find this to be the case.
Is it wrong to view your inner world as delicate and precious in a way that other people have a duty to help caretake?
Society recognizes that it benefits from allowing the inner worlds of some types of individuals (e.g. artistic, creative types, autistic geniuses) to flourish. If those people are often praised for their mental output, and are often coerced into doing things because the society declares there is a "duty" to do them, why would it be "wrong" for them to develop the belief that the society has a reciprocal "duty" to caretake the system that produces the mental output it so cherishes?
The comment I was responding to said "I think it feels like someone wronging me", and it wasn't clear if "it" referred to my explanation or the person's experience of misophonia. I assumed they were referring to my explanation, because if they feel "wronged" when someone triggers their misophonia, that is a match to my explanation (as another commenter pointed out).
For me a lot of the conflict is second-order - I occasionally have this reaction to e.g. a roomates particular way of clearing his throat. But intellectually it obviously isn't true that other people have a duty to caretake my inner world. Moreover it is clear that in fact I am being the unreasonable one who should change. And that I don't have a reasonable expectation that someone drive down all involuntary sounds they make to an arbitrarily low threshold. (And for that reason misophones kind of offend me with their sensitivity, ironically)
Versus, playing speakers in public. In this case I feel cleanly and uncomplicatedly righteous and may depending on my testosterone level that day actually go aggro the person in question, because they are clearly violating a norm
Could you instead report them to the local police? If the rage you feel is disproportionate to the threat posed by the activity (is that what you meant by “second order”?), then it sounds like your general rage at “people who cause harm by selfishly disregarding the social order” is finding an outlet in such fights?
Righteous rage is a trap. You may think it helps enforce the social order, but the side effect of making people terrified of being classified as a justified target of the righteous rage invariably seems to cause more problems than it solves (e.g. someone who sees you pick a fight in the park may become irrationally afraid of strangers picking fights). It's why cancel culture is so toxic. The truly marginalized in society do not have the power to get away with using aggressive force; if they think they do, they have forgotten what it means to be truly marginalized, and by causing people be afraid of their anger they are most likely causing more harm than whatever they are trying to stop.
>Could you instead report them to the local police?
They certainly could. They could also--with precisely the same probability of bringing down any consequences upon the noisemaker--write their complaint concisely and legibly on a piece of lined paper, and then tear that paper up and throw it away.
I make no claims as to the therapeutic value of either course of action.
The visceral response people get to a sound isn't righteous rage. You're trying to apply a lens that seems completely off here, imho.
You read the part where Scott described layering on white noise and ear phones and then not hearing the offending sound, going searching for it so he could keep being angry about it? And another person saying it's like waiting for someone to jump out in front of you in traffic? And another person likening it to the downfall of society?
I also have misophonia and this description doesn't resonate at all. It's nothing like that at all, for me at least.
For me, it's far more explainable as an inability to keep certain noises in the background. They're basically a pop-up window over my brain followed immediately by the same rage that pop-up windows on a computer rightfully engender. Furthermore, it's somehow not just the actual sound. Hearing somebody crunching chips is "I'd literally murder you with my bare hands except there are consequences for it". If I'm at a lightly-populated Mexican restaurant, I have to wear earplugs. If the place is packed, even though people are crunching everywhere constantly (and I hear it if I try to hear it), it's fine. It stays backgrounded (and not because of the overall noise level) and it doesn't raise stress levels at all. I have a similar visual phenomenon as well. I can sit in a sports bar with 20 TVs and focus on one without a problem. If my girlfriend is sitting next to me watching tiktok trash, no matter what I'm doing, if it's in my field of vision, something about that kind of shit jumping around the screen is impossible to keep backgrounded, as are various spazzy elements in game UIs when I try to concentrate on the actual game pieces. It's not as intensely rage-inducing as sounds, but the concentration-breaking causing a stress response is very similar. And my tolerance is noticeably worse when I'm tired, for whatever that's worth.
> it's far more explainable as an inability to keep certain noises in the background
Yes, I think this is true for my sound issues, too. I really struggle to keep weird-diction talking out of my brainspace. I'm not doing the mistake of actively trying (at least for me, actively trying to ignore things tends to make it worse), but it's definitely attention-related for me. I've described it as "it's impossible to ignore" to my primary.
It does seem like this has something to do with difficulty in controlling one's attention. Long-time meditators have spent a lot of time exercising their attentional muscles and are able to shift awareness from one object to another, dial their focus in and out, watch sensory stimuli rise and fall, etc. All that practice increases the capacity to choose where one directs attention. I don't think you have to be a long-time meditator to get better at it though. The metacognitive therapy folks have a some exercises to help with this as part of teaching people how to stop ruminating.
The rage seems to me could be related to feeling out of control -- victimized essentially by sounds that one cannot shift awareness around and so feeling subject to it. Strengthening the capacity to shift awareness around flexibly seems like could make a person feel less victimized by the sound and therefore less enraged by it.
If a person adds an overlay of "this shouldn't be happening" -- whether that's about social judgment or thinking the world should be better than it is -- that can amplify the rage in a context where a person feels victimized by their lack of choice/control.
Just thinking out loud...
There are a bunch of comments in the thread along those lines, and I don't know if Scott did a terrible job of describing his experience, or if his experience is just very different than mine, but none of the "norm-violation", "control", "justice", or higher-level thought process things are even remotely related to my experience. The rage is *instant*, on a similar timescale to how long it takes to register pain from touching a hot object. Literally 0 to snarling in under half a second. There are no higher-level functions involved. There are no moral judgments involved (ok, sure, people who play videos in public are pieces of shit, but people who eat chips at a Mexican restaurant aren't). Plenty of triggers aren't even sounds made or caused (in any normal sense of the word) by conscious entities. There's no thought of victimization. Maybe there's some way to CBT-unprogram yourself from instant rage via "getting your attention hijacked is good, ackshually" feedback, but I have no idea what that would realistically look like.
Your experience suggests there are two things going on (at least) and that the moral outrage part is an additional overlay to the visceral and immediate rage triggered by the sound. Maybe the moral outrage is an effort by the conscious mind to explain to itself the otherwise unexplained rage in response to the sound, and that your mind for whatever reason doesn't need to do that?
this reminds me of how old people are often weird and annoying (love the view from inside). do the malicious networks accumulate, or maybe some part of the pentagram gets stronger with age?
Scott also felt very irritated, when his travel-pals seemed (to him) to ignore his wishes. Which is perfectly understandable, but then he might have been expecting too much (mind-reading ability) or being "more touchy".
For me (a non-misophoniac), misophonia is an interesting case of fusing morality with aesthetics. Is there any principle by which enforcing some aesthetic preferences is considered okay, but enforcing others is "exclusionary" and "gatekeepy"?
Let's say I run a rationalist meetup and I come up with rules for guests. No listening to loud music on the phone, of course. Use deodorant to not smell bad, okay. Chew with your mouth closed, that's reasonable, misophonia is common. Don't touch people without consent, that's fair.
How about "don't wear stained clothes"? Offending the sense of vision is not fundamentally different from offending the sense of hearing or smell. "Don't kiss your partner in public"? Attitudes to PDA vary dramatically across the world. "No wearing socks with sandals"? Or maybe, more realistically, "No broccoli haircuts"? Reasonable demands do seem to transition to ineffable etiquette and "No fedoras" rules of fashion gradually without a clear dividing line.
Thinking about these cases might seem trivial, but there are examples of movements that have suffered setbacks due to aesthetic considerations (r/antiwork interview, or the Faces of Atheism fiasco). So it would be nice to find any principles more legible than "do whatever the host asks you to".
Conversely, might it help misophoniacs to think of their anger as having the same degree of "moral validity" as making a fashion style demand? Like, equating telling someone they're loud with telling someone their fashion is out of style? Misophoniacs, please let me know if I'm being dumb.
Maybe that olfactory ethics PhD lady can help us out with this.
I remember reading something about physical and moral disgust being processed in the same region of the brain leading to the two being conflated often. I think this happens with fat phobia, homophobia, and I'm totally convinced the same thing is happening with misophonia. I'm shocked by how strongly I get a moral reaction to it. But I think of it as an irrational impulse to overcome.
Unpleasant noises do typically have much larger negative hedonic value for me than unpleasant visual stimuli because it's easy to shut out unpleasant visual stimuli by shutting my eyes or by staring at the one small thing in my visual field that is most aesthetically pleasant. The only visual stimuli that really bother me are flickering lights whereas I have difficulty coping with a lot of everyday noises. I wear socks with crocs in the winter because I presume that any discomfort that other people have from seeing my unaesthetic footwear choices is negligible relative to the discomfort that I would experience if I were forced to choose between wearing itchy trainers and getting itchy chilblains. However I'll bite the bullet here and say that I'd rather spend 1 second listening to a pneumatic drill than spend a googolplex seconds watching people wear socks with sandals.
> Thinking about these cases might seem trivial, but there are examples of movements that have suffered setbacks due to aesthetic considerations (r/antiwork interview, or the Faces of Atheism fiasco). So it would be nice to find any principles more legible than "do whatever the host asks you to".
"Don't do things that undermine the purpose of the group" seems like the relevant guideline here, and a pretty widely accepted one. The real trouble starts when the group's members have very different ideas of what it's for. "Social club" versus "collective project" is the classic example.
I don't have this problem with sounds, but certain textures under certain conditions drive me crazy. There's a kitchen set i own where the spatula, tongs and ladle have a certain soft plastic texture. I don't mind using them but washing them is unbearable. Something about the water and soap makes the plastic halfway between slippery and not slippery in a way that is so viscerally uncomfortable, even rubber gloves don't help much.
Silicone, probably. I hate it too, but I don't like to use it anyway because I instinctively feel it's so soft it might contaminate the food.
I get the same effect (affect?) when a little bit of washing up liquid gets on its plastic bottle. You just can't get the slipperiness to go away. It seems to be worse with a concentrated liquid I've been using lately.
I'd be lying if I said that those things loom large in my psyche, though. While some sounds do make me mad.
Resident member of the Church of Cobalamin here, are your vitamin B12 levels OK? I mean, they probably are, but I remember e.g. how unbearable dry glass felt to take out of the dishwasher with a rag was for me when I had B12 issues, because sensory input was just Too Much, so I feel obliged to nudge.
This is relatable to my experience with car noises when I moved onto a main road--attempting to soundproof the house, putting on white noise and straining to hear cars through it, anger at drivers for speeding (higher speeds, of course, produce more noise), requesting that the cops do more to enforce the speed limit--and it just kind of faded away over time. I no longer notice the car noises.
This is a little simplistic, but I think its just simple anger- an exaggerated, negative response to others. So its not about working with sounds but working with our experience of anger towards others. I've noticed this when I am doing something and there is someone making a lot of noise. Then when I look at them and they are someone I feel tolerant of making that noise, I am fine. And when its someone I think should know better, or who doesn't have a good reason, I am not fine. So as you alluded to in the piece its not the noise, but the context, and that has to do with our tendency towards anger, which we can control.
I have my own theory but this is also super interesting. I note that the people in my life (including me) who have misophonia are also extremely conflict avoidant and tend towards passive aggression.
Maybe there's an element of "This person existing in my space causes friction -> I internalize that friction as a series of minor inconveniences that I shouldn't make a scene over -> I am taking 100% responsibility for resolving all conflicts in my living and work spaces without even telling the other person a conflict exists -> Jesus Christ now I gotta put up with them chewing too loud too?" to the whole thing.
Agreed. If it was truly about just the senses the context could have no effect. we all know the experience of finding blaring horns in a city completely unbearable and then living there long enough, and starting to be fine with them and eventually not experiencing them. At the same time you could hear your newborn wimper in the slightest way and 'hear it', or a mild chewing noise and 'hear it' but not hear the sirens and honking outside the window.
After the first half I intended to ask about a mindfulness meditation practice as a technique to address this, and lo and behold that's how the post wraps.
Have you actually tried a basic mindfulness meditation practice? I am not sure I would describe it as "focusing so hard on your mental processes" so much as "non-judgementally observing the natural flow of thoughts and feelings" by noticing whenever your attention has drifted away from your object of meditation (breath, mantra, sound, gently observing a flame, etc). It takes a while (at least a few weeks of daily work) but you really do notice how transient thoughts and feelings are and that you can choose how to react to them.
All of which is also to say that your reactions are clearly not "fake" (you feel the strongly and they influence your actions) and the line between pathology and responding to thoughts and feelings in a not helpful way is much fuzzier than most would LIKE to admit in the mental health space.
Like your diagram is so clearly a thought spiral. A mindfulness practice gives you, over time, the ability to choose whether to engage with that spiral at all or to allow the sensation to pass on its own (which it always does).
As far as your own misophonia goes you could do worse than look up the mechanics of how jouissance works in the theories of Jacques Lacan :)
I find this interesting because I suspect I have misophonia with certain kinds of diction - but I can tolerate it perfectly fine (as in, emotionally, I'm absolutely chill and wondering why this is usually an issue for me) for several hours before it very abruptly snaps to emotional levels of "okay, if I don't have noise-cancelling headphones I'm going to murder someone" and if I can't withdraw I become intensely miserable. This is every news reel, talk show, especially badly-acted movie or over-enunciated Youtube video ever, where people don't talk to each other as they would in real life, but only with exaggerated stresses, to Keep your Attention locked On the Stream.
If someone *links* me to a Youtube video that's like this (as they almost all inevitably are - and, as you can imagine, I resist even clicking Youtube links as a general rule, unless it's from a close friend), I will get annoyed at the video in the first few seconds and close the tab.
If it's a Youtube video someone else is playing on a laptop, where audio distortion from bad speakers mixes with the ridiculous diction, I feel set upon much more quickly.
I rarely outright get angry at anyone, it's more a feeling of needing to defend myself somehow. It's very intense when it sets in. I don't really understand where it comes from. Thankfully since I have noise-cancelling headphones I can usually help myself, and my TV-obsessed primary switches to headphones as much as circumstance (he finds it hard to do this while eating, for example), his ears and headphone battery power will let him, so we can alternate.
Conversely, I don't mind music in public places if the people blaring it are clearly having fun, but I might get very angry if they're doing it despite clearly not enjoying it, themselves (i.e. showing somehow that they're mostly blaring it because they DGAF, not because it's contributing to their happiness to be immersed in music).
I have a mild version. If mild equals = crippling, you have a mild version.
Maybe many people have an elevated inclination towards anger as a means of self-stimulation in the context of an overly (and unnaturally) stable environment.
Maybe there is a misalignment in terms of the level of control we have over our surroundings and the level of control we have over our own mind.
Maybe this partly explains why some people with certain forms of mental illness actually feel better living outside, where their inner and outer worlds are less incoherent.
Oh wow I don't recognize the pathological extreme that I luckily avoided but the description of how annoyance feeds into increased attention which feeds into moral and social judgment feels terrifyingly familiar.
Btw for me in similar situations (but again noteven comparable to what you described inintensity) it has been helpful to keep an unused mitigation strategy at hand.
Like, if I have earplugs in my bathroom cabinet but I don't bother to get up from bed to get them I sort of update on the direction of the noise being less annoying, more easily ignorable, more in my control and less blameable on others.
But I have to be careful least I find my self complaining about the neighbors "waking me up with noise, but not all the way enough to get up and get the earplugs" and how this is such a moral failing on their part...
I think I have this with whistling (think "Whistle" by florida, not sports referee with an actual plastic whistle). It has gotten bad enough that I feel very uncomfortable around TVs when there's a commercial break and the TV isn't muted, just because I know that I'm probably going to hear somebody whistle soon enough.
I think it started by my brother whistling tunes and ignoring my pleas to stop (age 10 or so), which caused the loop Scott described. Now it feels like it's spiraling out from just whistling to commercial breaks and, to a much lesser degree, radio, though I have far less of a problem with those when I'm in full control of the device and can easily mute it.
My wife has it with whistling too, which is a shame, cause I enjoy whistling a jaunty tune from time to time. The worst was last summer, when we drove 6 hours out to Philadelphia to see Beck perform with the Philadelphia Orchestra. We knew there was an opening act, someone we'd never heard of, a woman named Molly Lewis if I recall correctly. She comes up on stage with no band, just a microphone and some prerecorded music, and just starts whistling. For thirty minutes plus. A gifted whistler to be sure, but my wife did not see it as a pleasant surprise. The look on her face.... we laugh about it now. Actually, no, I laugh about it now, she just cringes. The sad thing is, Beck is doing the same orchestra tour this summer, which would be fun to go to, but with the same opening act.
"Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean it is not real?" - Albus Dumbledore
Couple of thoughts and a method.
I’ve got a few noise triggers. Mostly neighbour noise. I once had a thought that if someone were to hold a gun to my son’s head and exposed me to one of these noises and said that if I get in the slightest bit annoyed/irritated they will pull the trigger.
I realised I sure as hell wouldn’t get annoyed. I felt quite certain about that, even if I was all wired up to dials. It showed me it’s a choice. That was a revelation. I have no proof of that this would be the case of course but I have high certainty about it. I wondered if this was a case if putting the ego in its place. (There’s usuallly some thought, they shouldn’t be doing this, that shouldn’t be happening).
What works though day to day? For me when I’m experiencing the uncomfortable trigger response these days is - simply taking the pain.
Being in it and allowing it fully, like watching a tornado outside except we are feeling the storm of our fear rage inside. I imagine leaning back inside a little and let it rage away in front of my as a physically felt sensation of emotion.
This requires serious willingness and when that is present a momentum can be built up.
I might find the noises aren’t even being noticed for long periods after a while. There even are periods where I start welcoming the noises like it’s a fun game and I prepare to take the discomfort and do it.
I demonstrate (perhaps to a stuck survival threat prior) that it might be uncomfortable but it’s certainly not dangerous. This is the tack I’m continuing on. Collective evidence that nothing bad happens.
Not that it’s relevant but any thoughts on this discovery that sound has mass?
https://spacefed.com/physics/sound-has-mass-and-thus-gravity/
Mass is essentially just energy that is constrained / congealed in some way so that it interacts with itself and moves in a cyclic fashion. Which fits the concept of sound waves travelling in a medium. So I think sound having mass should be an obvious conclusion from relativity principles. (I guess you could say that light in a medium has mass too, by the same argument.)
I read somewhere in a conversation about anger management that if you can keep your temper in check at work because you know you'd lose your job if you let it fly, then if you lose it at home against your loved ones, you know it's a choice and that you have the power to control it when you have to. The idea "I can't control it" is revealed to be an idea and not a truth.
And then this also makes me think of one of the ways to treat panic disorder is to turn towards it like it's a storm and let it blow, and that that eventually takes the wind out of its sails. Creating elaborate avoidance systems makes it worse. Same with anxiety or OCD where exposure and response prevention is the treatment. I don't know if this is the same as the CBT protocol that Scott says doesn't work.
Yes and if the person can delay blowing up, then they can take care of their anger a way other than by abusing their loved ones. They have choices, in other words.
It's often said of little kids that they regress at home after holding it together at school, but grownups have more choices than that because they can take themselves for a walk or to the gym or a therapist or meditate, etc.
I live in terror of developing in this direction!
I have a really bad case of tinnitus (runs in the family), such that I have a "headphones always on" lifestyle in the other direction- I'm constantly keeping my soundscape full of the kind of stimuli that I know helps me ignore or forget about the ringing in my ears. Pure white noise doesn't really do it; usually I need stuff like ASMR, or a song I'm willing to listen to on repeat 4-500 times, or really any AI generated music. Basically, something structured enough to be lightly pinging my attention, but not so distracting that it interferes with flow.
But this works by manipulating my state of mind, not drowning out the noise. And if I ever got trapped in a self-reinforcing loop of irrationally getting angry at the ringing, I'd be *screwed.* Because I'm going to be hearing it every minute of every day for the rest of my life, right? So far, I've managed to keep any sense of frustration in check, and maintain a level head and a sense of tranquility about it. But it feels like this very slight itch that, if I ever start really scratching it, has the potential to totally ruin my life.
funnily enough, I realized I had tinnitus on my meditation retreat. and I was worried about the same thing, but weirdly the association of it was 'I'm in a quiet and relaxed state' so it didn't register negatively for me. and relatedly: if you followed the jhana discourse, there is actually a form of meditation that is isn't focusing on that sound that can get you into jhana. so I think it's super highly contextual but it will not ruin your life, if you can approach it without fear. easier said than done though.
also: there is literature that suggests that there's a strong overlap between ASMR and misophonia
I don't really have misophonia, but I do get really self-conscious of people looking over my shoulder or being able to look over my shoulder at my screen or book. I wonder if it's related, since I clearly can't see them watching me, but I think it's a similar nagging feeling to when noise does annoy/distract me.
There's definitely something to this - maybe a latent urge to be aggressive to members of our own clan in order to enforce hierarchy, like chimpanzees? Personally, I have a serious "ick" about human saliva - I used to demand people in my house rinse their silverware after eating, before letting it touch anything - but I was confused about how animal saliva never bothered me, even though it's equally "gross". Then I had a baby, who has spent a significant fraction of her life so far plastering me in her saliva, and not only do I not mind, my disgust at other humans' saliva has significantly decreased. Maybe that's the cure for misophonia: associate the noise with a person for whom you feel overwhelming love and zero aggression. Maybe using MDMA or oxytocin could help.
Interesting the ape angle. I’d also like to see some research on anger within the families of those who have it, and wonder if it occurs in families where anger was discouraged or suppressed and the Misophonia acts like an escape valve? It’s curious that it’s those closest who seem to most annoy Misophonics.
Could just be a case of self-applied exposure therapy.
This post sent me on a free association binge and since it's early and I have to get ready for work soon, you all get to read it.
The way you put it, it seems misophonia has a large social component, one like "how could they be so disrespectful, doing this thing they know hurts me mentally when they could just as easily not", to the point where it isn't the sound itself but the lack of respect. This feels like a specific instance of a common thing.
I think there's a pain in not being believed about a) sacred values and b) things that hurt you mentally or physically. ME/CFS sufferers come to mind here, it seems a lot of their energy is spent convincing people it exists at all and is not secretly bon-bon-guzzling laziness. A good amount of the energy in some ADHD spaces is sharing the pain of trying to convince others you have it, and the amount of effort I see them have to spend makes me wary of talking too much about my own.
Political debates online and the shockingly-often and mostly unconscious ability of both sides to miss the thrust of the other side's arguments and automatically assume the worst also comes to mind. It seems that either side has key sacred values that hurt like hell when violated, whereas the other side's concerns are at best kinda important, but not The Real Issue, or at worst a lie to justify their true intention of kicking puppies.
It really can be surprising. Scott has talked about the reactions to Osama bin Laden's death vs. Thatcher's, much like he describes Hitler vs. dude with boombox in park. bin Laden and Hitler we know (System 2 know) are bad guys, really awful. Hitler was probably top 5 worst in human history, but there's something System 1, visceral, about Thatcher and dude with boombox. People tut-tutting us about cheering bin Laden just didn't have a sacred value that had him as so anger-inducing his death would incite celebration. But boy did they for Thatcher.
Did Thatcher do some wicked stuff? Probably. Did she kill 10 million innocents including 6 million Jews and start a war that claimed 90 million more? Not even slightly.
(Did you feel a bristle at that last sentence? Something like "No fair, we're comparing Thatcher and bin Laden, not Thatcher and Hitler, you switched your reference classes! Thatcher's policies may have caused mostly-hidden OoM-similar damage to bin Laden, but you switched it around so Thatcher came out looking pretty good!" If so, first, sorry, but also that was kind of the point. Thatcher being bad is a sacred value for a lot of people, and it can be interesting to see where that comes up. Maybe you didn't, I'm not claiming that's universal!)
To be clear, sacred values are real, important, probably either innate or shaped during early childhood, and not just a thing of ninnies and scolds. We all have sacred values, and when they mostly align with our Dunbar-numbered group of social connections, things mostly work out.
Anyway, on misophonia, the way Scott puts it, it seems like anger that people don't seem to care to meet basic and easy needs of yours. People can just not have the boombox, or use headphones, or chew with their mouths closed, or not camp in the left lane (sorry, my exit is coming up on the left, and merging from the right lane in time will be tough), or whatever. Whereas they don't have the same sacred value, so they don't much care, and will go out of their way to spite you for feeling so strongly about it. To them, it feels as weird as someone being hateful about any uses of the number 53 and demanding they use 54 instead.
One thing that makes me wonder is that we also have a strong drive to fit in, not rock the boat, go along with the crowd, etc. Being exiled meant death for >99% of human history, so there's strong pressure to not be too ornery. Why are sacred values exempted from the get-along instinct? Why do we feel justified in asking people to stop chewing so damn loudly but not in asking for a raise or asking the city to fix a park we love?
The human body really needs a way to turn off hearing the way you can close your eyes for sight.
Whoa this post kind of explains my unpleasantness when I hear my wife chew. Just my wife's....no one else's chewing bothers me. When it bothers me so much I call her the red giraffe (because her sound of chewing, especially apples, reminds me of the giraffes in the Serengeti.
I do remember when I was a kid / teenager my father would get very bothered at my chewing. Not my mother's or y sisters' chewing...only my chewing. Sometimes I was so fearful of bothering him I would let my saliva breakdown my food in mouth before I started chewing.
My daughter is on the autism spectrum and has a lot of sensory sensitivities (noise is one). We learned in OT that when she is having a hard time, to give her a sensory experience that she enjoys: deep arm and leg squeezes being the main one. General advice is to work on expanding their "sensory diet": heavy work, jumping, swinging, deep pressure.
I'm mildly autistic and have a lot of difficulty with loud noises. Moulded silicone earplugs are the thing that helps me most, but BIGOOD reusable earplugs are great too (and less expensive). Don't know if they'd fit children, I used headphones as a kid.
I enjoy a lot of proprioceptive and vestibular things, it's why a lot of autistics rock and spin. Your daughter might feel differently, though.
I suspect there are at least different elements to the phenomenon, if not entirely different bases with similar outcomes.
One is sensory, and if this is strong, the horrible noise of snow under your boots makes the otherwise wonderful experience hell just as much as somebody's chewing noises. Disgust plays a rôle, which helps to explain secondary (I think) problems with mute videos of people eating like that, but hardly why clean, crisp, lovely snow would be a problem. ASMR videos are as alien to you as BDSM. Your own eating noises are unbearable sometimes, eg when you caught cold.
The other is social, other people behaving badly against their fellow men, including you, in fact at this moment outright targeting you. Manners these days! Now this kind will be just as upset at people putting their feet up the table or using the wrong fork for their salad. Sensory misophones might not be bothered.
There's a secondary overlap, and both can develop a psychological level, which looks similar for both then.
That strangers eating noisily seem to be tolerated more than a brother doesn't seem to be a big clue in the puzzle to me. You're socially much more likely to shout at your brother, thump the table and run out of the room in despair than to do that in a restaurant or a train (or indeed towards family members where there's a gap in status). They'll do without pudding today, though, or go sit in another train car if they're travelling alone. And suffer.
This is kinda weird because it's a far broader range of sound than is typically considered misophonia, but the way you describe your reaction to sounds at a certain distance in your periphery is EXACTLY how I feel about karaoke -- I know it sounds absurd, but there is just something in karaoke, both listening live and performing myself, that starts pinging around that evil pentagon and makes me so so so upset.
I think a big part of it is that I'm a trans woman who has never had any success with voice training, so anything that calls particular attention to human voices is somewhat distressing to me, but (much like the "calling out stops on the bus" example) normal singing is so ubiquitous and important to people that it alone doesn't check the box -- but karaoke specifically feels sufficiently indulgent and unnecessary that it fully activates the pentagon, even though intellectually I know I should just merely not enjoy doing it.
I guess I have a case of this (I'm certainly triggered by snoring, at least), with an additional hatred for loud noises in general. Realistically, I'm probably not going to do anything about it, but I often imagine that if fate would make me a dictator of my country, my (bloody and repressive) regime would be known as Age of Silence, because there will be oh sooooo many restrictions on music, cars and motorcycles and fireworks. And I would mandate all apartment blocks to be built with good soundproofing, and damn the costs - nobody ever needs to suffer hearing their neighbors three floors up having a shouting match every day because the developer decided to be cheap. There would be AI-driven murder drones patrolling the streets for loud noises, and firing squads for the new building code violators. The former should also help be deal with most of protests, until protesters learn to be reeeealy quiet.
I'd love to live under your dictatorship!
It surprises me to see this framed as a problem. I get angry about loud chewing sounds because, unlike other distracting sounds (e.g. a scream of an animal in a park nearby), they are avoidable and their presence shows that somebody is being inconsiderate to you. It's the thought that somebody next to you lacks the empathy, compassion or another resource or motivation to mind your well-being that generates an anger many times more distressing than the distraction generated by the stimulae.
In fact, if I know that somebody next to me has to eat in the same room as I'm sitting (e.g. we're in the office and they've been very busy) but I can hear that this person is making considerable effort to make their meal as silent as possible, I feel positive emotions like gratitude more than anger.
If we make the situation more extreme and imagine I'm a refugee in a small camp with other people, and I'm too weak to eat but they're too weak to make their chewing silent, I don't think I would be bothered about the chewing sounds at all. And this is exactly because negative emotions are supposed to be a signal to action (in case of chewing sounds, trying to change the loud eater's habits or trying to avoid them), so I won't feel negative emotions if I feel like there can be no action taken here. Just like when I see a building taken down by an unpredictable natural disaster rather than human violence or fraud.
I'm a person who tries to minimise how much I'm distracting other people and there's basically a sense of injustice if I don't see other people doing the same for me.
I'm curious, would you still get angry at loud eating if you're on vacation in a country where eating food loudly is a part of local culture? (say, slurping noodles in Japan). Your habit of quiet eating would just become an oddity there, not a sign of consideration. Do you think you'd exhibit misophonia when locals would be slurping noodles loudly next to you?
Good question. I think I would first try to reason why this is part of the local culture. Especially that I know the Japanese to be, on average, very mindful of their sound footprints.
If they tell me it's a sign of appreciation for the chef, I think I wouldn't have much anger towards the slurping/chewing (though I would still find it distracting)
I can relate to putting on earplugs/headphones to not hear the noise (in my case music from the outside at night), but still trying really hard to notice if I can hear even the slightest sound. In the worst cases I could not even tell if I still hear the music, or if it's my brain hallucinating the sound.
I wanted to say enlightenment should help with this. Both the specifics, the identity but also general sensory problems autistic people seem to have gets way better.
At 4th path (or before) something cool happens were before you were switching between the sense doors to having them all unified. So you can hear, see, think at the same time or at least the timing of switching is so fast again that you can't see it even as a skilled meditator (and the sensations saying oh this is this sense door disappear). This makes a lot of things way less annoying. Trying to go from one sense door from another is basically dukkha.
Even before letting go to larger and larger degree of the idea that you have to have a sensation of knowing in addition to the original one makes things less annoying already.
I'm definitely don't have a Misophonia, but occasionally I'll work from the lounge in my apartment building on weekends. It's sort of a hybrid workspace/lounge, and there's a pool table directly across from where I like to sit.
I find that sometimes, when people come to play pool and talk, it really bothers me. They aren't doing anything offensive of course, and I have no right to monopolize the space, but in some sense it feels like an imposition on me that I didn't consent to, which is annoying. It's really hard to read something or have sustained focus on work when my brain keeps switching to process what's going on at the pool table, and this constant forced switching of attention is frustrating.
But sometimes I don't care at all. And sometimes I can feel myself in between this not caring and caring mindset, especially when someone first arrives and makes noise, and can tip the scales into not caring through some mental effort. Basically telling myself "I don't actually care about this. They're just enjoying life! You can control how you emotionally respond to this." It helps to quietly laugh about it, as if the instinct to be annoyed is cute and laughable, like a toddler angry about some completely trivial thing.
Not always though, and once I feel like it bothers me, it's really hard to get out of that local minima, across the hump, to ambivalence.
Not sure what this contributes to the discussion, as I know the tendencies for everyone are different, and it's probably a lot easier for me to do than anyone else, but I can't help but feel that this can be controlled through the right psychological effort that isn't easily explained via words.
I mean, the whole straining to see whether you can hear the noise past the noise cancelling headphones - I'm somewhat surprised that I find myself not alone in doing this. I think it's partially caused by a resentment of being 'forced' into that situation. Why can't the noisemaker simply stop! I was convinced for a while that I was unlucky enough to know a lot of people who couldn't chew their food properly.
For me sounds fall into two distinct camps: a) no choice or not caused by a human and b) deliberate choice. a) is where realistically there isn't an alternative to the sound being made e.g. chewing, noise from a mechanical system, snoring. b) is where a choice was made to make the sound but there was an alternative e.g. music played audibly on public transport, doors slamming, loud TVs etc.
In both cases I find the noise somewhat debilitating and stressful but b) gets me disproportionately angry. In that case, it's not a logical process. But I've come to realise that for me, there is an element of getting annoyed at someone's temerity to just carry on with whatever they want to do without any thought about how others might feel. There's an element of annoyance that this person has carried their private life out into public without a care - "I am a mug sitting here conforming to society's etiquette". I can't exclude the possibility that it could be envy at their unselfconsciousness.
Is it about a feeling of lack of control over one's environment? Depression-related? Trauma-related? Annoyance at not being rich so I have to use public transport and listen to other peoples' terrible music rather than being chauffeur-driven everywhere in my soundproof Bentley as befits someone of my incredible intelligence(!)? Excuse-making, as in a get-out from doing a task or doing it badly - "I need(ed) silence to do this" (elite sportspeople can produce their best in noisy stadiums - I doubt they'd perform better if it was quieter)? Paranoia: "people are deliberately causing noise to annoy me!"? Some combination of all of these? I've absolutely no idea.
I wonder too if this correlates with the agreeable/disagreeable axis on the Big 5 personality test.
I liked the OCPD theory above and it makes total sense to me that survivors of childhood interpersonal trauma would have increased need for control over their environment or would be more prone to feeling victimized by it.
But likewise I could imagine genetic causes -- sensory processing differences that make a whole range of noises more intrusive to one's nervous system than for the average person... and society out there is pretty designed for to be comfortable for an average extrovert, thus way more stimuli that exceed tolerance standards for people who are not that.
I have the hatred of chewing and other food-related sounds. Unless a stranger is unusually loud or bad about it, it's fine. Restaurants are fine. Anywhere with noise is fine. But at home with someone, especially a partner? Rage. Sitting in front of someone at a talk who is unwrapping a candy or putting their hand into a crinkly bag of chips? Rage. I have mostly learned to cope by making sure there is background noise and reminding myself that I'm not allowed to forbid people to eat or make normal sounds.
It's definitely not just a sensory thing. One time my cubicle neighbor was eating yogurt and I could hear the spoon repeatedly touching the plastic container and it made me so angry. I looked over and he was actually doing something unrelated to food, like messing with a toner cartridge or whatever. The sound completely stopped bothering me after that.
I hate the little burbling fountains people find relaxing to put in a room. The sound of real water in a brook, stream, rivulet, puddle, gutter, etc., has never bothered me once in my life.
Thank you for your vulnerability.
Seriously, right? Brave piece of writing I thought.
So excited (but still sympathetic) that my favorite writer also has misophonia! I'll add a plus 1 for meditation being one of the few things that has made a substantial difference. In my case it makes it easier in general to port over intellectual observations into actual emotions, (like this is irrational, I love my wife, she's just innocently chewing).
The other thing that made a big difference for me was raising my iron levels. On reddit I've noticed a number of other people referencing both iron deficiency and overload worsening or even causing misophonia. I read that iron deficiency can be a trigger for OCD and it seems potentially connected enough that I wonder if that isn't a coincidence.
For noise, more than other senses, I feel like there is also the opposite quite strongly: certain noises (e.g. ASMR) are inexplicably pleasant to us.
i can't stand ASMR actually. I mean the classic whispering or smacking types. Like there is a vtuber that does a cute normal voice (Fuwamoco) but their ASMR stream is eh. the asmr stuff is a very recent thing actually: maybe ten years old?
you cant find asmr cds like nature sound ones, for example.
CBT therapist with misophonia here: I definitely recognize myself in many of the aspects mentioned. My main focus has always been chewing, closely followed by sniffling. The core always seemed to me to be the rudeness/disrespect someone seems to send with these actions. A key thought is always, “You know this bothers me, so why not just stop!” With my son, I didn’t mind at all when he started eating. The older he gets, the more it bothers me. For me, headphones help a lot, though. Just seeing someone chew bothers me much less. I’ve tried exposure/desensitization (watched chewing videos for ages), and I’d say it had some effect. Still, I find it rude, and I think it’s perfectly okay to find it aversive when I feel that someone truly just isn’t paying attention to their environment. If someone doesn’t cover their mouth or turn away when coughing, I also get frustrated/annoyed, and I’d like to keep it that way :) Side fact: we once conducted a mini “study” with students, asking how they rate classic ASMR sounds versus typical misophonia sounds. The main question was whether the values (negatively) correlate, i.e., whether people who really enjoy ASMR also tend to have misophonia. That wasn’t the case, there was no correlation at all.
There does seem to be an accompanying value judgment that goes along with it. ‘They should, they shouldn’t be ‘
I sometimes reframe the neighbour noise I have by thinking of them upstairs as lovely struggling older people and it annoys less.
I wonder how many people this post will have the same effect on as your dad and roommate had on you.
I wonder if this is a flavor of OCD? The cycle you describe sounds similar to the cycles of obsessions + compulsions. (Obviously I'm thinking of this because I know you also had OCD at some point Scott.)
Also, I'm surprised you didn't point out the nominative anti-determinism of Jake Eaton :)
I came to the comments to suggests the same thing. I've been diagnosed with scrupulosity OCD. Much of what Scott describes above (e.g. the self-righteous anger / straining to sense the offending sensation / the guilt / the intellectualization) applies to how I fixate on fairness / obsess when I feel that me or other people I care about are treated poorly.
Similar situation, but with a head injury:
On whether or not stuff like this is fake: I fell from the third story window of a motel when I was five. So I had the effects from a young enough age that I do question how much of my life experience is normal or just stuff I adapted to.
Every couple of years I forget bad tinnitus isn’t normal and ask people if they experience it too. But I also have noise sensitivity (probably). There’s some evidence this is real, I can hear bass from a party too far away for me to realistically hear anything. But I have been able to, when very annoyed I can’t sleep, go out and walk straight to the party.
But it is also much worse with people close to me, and the reasoning is that they know I’ve grown up with this and so it feels intentional. Really they’re just living a normal life, but I can’t deal with that rationally at times.
I wear earplugs everywhere I know will be loud, and dread Sunday worship. I also refused to sing for years because it hurts me head. Music teachers hated me. I still don’t sing- can’t really.
However, my hated of noises has some dependency on how loud I’ve been. I’m more sensitive if I haven’t said much on the day yet. If I’m out with friends and have some distracting thing going on, like a board game or even dancing, then I do much better. I might wake up inflamed and with a terrible headache- but it won’t distract me as much in the moment.
Basically, if I start matching the noise then it downgrades but still hurts on the backend.
I have classic misophonia, but for me the visual triggers didn't follow the auditory ones -- if anything it was the other way around, the first trigger I can remember having was the sight of someone jiggling their leg.
You might consider meditation, not in the context of a retreat, but just generally. I learned it (TM) at 13 and have played around with it (including in the context of psychedelics) a fair bit. I never really do it any more but it feels like a kind of training for, “letting things go.” Numerous studies seem to support this(stress after movies…). Whenever stressful things happen, I tend to experience a sort of imagined long deep breath followed by a moment of serenity. Again, I have not meditated in 20 years (but I have meditated to the ultimate point of losing my ability to locate my “self”).
Sound is the one sense that we can't control. With few exceptions no one can make us taste, touch, smell or see things. But anyone can make a noise that we don't want to hear, which seems like a breach of our contract with society to "live and let live". A loud motorcycle on the street is like an invasion of privacy and drives me ballistic. Yet, last year a friend who is a photographer was desperate for a ride to a motor cross event so he could get some action shots. I agreed, to drive and help with the gear, dreading the experience. However once I got there, I realized I had voluntarily entered "their" world and I had no right to expect them to consider mine. Didn't change how I feel at home but for that day, I was fine.
This does very much sound like a 'trapped priors' problem. When I was younger, I had a very strong dislike for kids being loud--especially crying babies. I was the guy who would shoot eye-daggers at the parent with the crying baby on a plane. Later though, after my first born came along, this sort of magically went away. Now, when I hear a baby crying on a plane, I instinctively check to make sure it's not *my* kid that's crying--even if I know it can't be--and after I confirm that's not the case, it's totally fine. If anything, I feel sympathy for the parent that is trying to console the baby. Is it relevant that I was harshly disciplined as a kid for Being Too Loud? Probably!
If you are looking for solutions to this, my two cents are that interventions that get at trapped priors may work, e.g., meditation (though beware side effects!) Misophonia also worsens with stress, so addressing stressors should also help with the symptoms, if not necessarily the underlying cause.
Finally, and just a shot in the dark here, if you are experiencing more of this than usual these days, your new family additions almost certainly have something to do with it. If you think it would be helpful--or if anyone is curious--I'm happy to share some things I did to address a similar issue when my twins came along.
dissociative (recreational or medicinal) drugs might help break the loop?
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9685534/
I have done dissociative drugs only ever, once. But the lesson from that of "things can be pretty loopy and not what you expect" formed a mental dyad in my mind with the general "be kind to others" upbringing value system / Christianity, that results in a robust and resilient loop on my mind of "assume positive intent" when faced with people or situations I don't like.
Things are annoying to me but rather than hitting the five nodes of frustration + anger + guilt, I hit one of the two nodes "trippy/random" or "be kind" and it reverberates with the other one
I know a few people who dramatically lowered their startle response by taking low-dose sublingual ketamine. Seems adjacent to that maybe, lowering some irritability/activation threshold.
Having a 2-year-old has alerted me to just how *loud* the world is all the time. She complains about the heater vents, every passing car, airplanes miles up in the sky, people talking (not terribly loudly) across the street.
Admittedly she is more sensitive than most (she's an only child in a quiet house and both her parents have at least a little noise sensitivity). But I'm beginning to suspect that "being able to put up with loud noises, all the time, without cease" is actually the aberration. In other words, that people go through intense conditioning at a young age (maybe not in a deliberate way) to tune out or otherwise deal with the irrelevant sounds, and when that conditioning fails it results in constant alerting which leads to annoyance/anger/migraines.
In my (zero research done or read) brain, it would look kind of like this:
Modern Child: "Hey There's a zooming sound outside"
Modern Parent: "It's just passing cars."
Modern Child's brain: "Car sounds are not a danger to us. When we hear a sound we will use some heuristic to determine if a sound is a car sound and if it is, we will not escalate to conscious awareness."
Medieval Child: "Hey there's a zooming sound outside"
Medieval Parent: "Wot creature be this that blazes and roars?! A demon come hell-by, to punish our sins?!"
Medieval Child Brain: "Ok so cars are a big deal and I should alert if I hear one in the right context, even if it's pretty far off."
You can see this in watching culture clashes sometimes! I've got a friend from a more sheltered upbringing who flips out every time they hear a loud pop or bang at night, thinking it's a gunshot. Other friends who grew up actually hearing gunshots can literally subconsciously go "oh that's a car backfire, no biggy."
Parents probably are unaware that part of their job is this aural conditioning, and do it even when they don't mean to. A tired parent (especially a misophonic tired parent) may snap at a kid for chewing too loudly, so kid learns "actually, loud chewing is apparently an alert-worthy sound since all the adults in my life say so."
I suspect part of this conditioning is context. Footsteps in snow aren't alert-worthy, but you've learned chewing is, so you only get annoyed at sounds when context tells you that it's a chewing sound. Even worse, let's say tomorrow the chewing sound was replaced with a pleasing melody. It wouldn't help because the point of your young conditioning wasn't to teach you which sounds are annoying, it was teaching you which situations require your attention. So you still get the "hey! Attention!" buzz when you hear the pleasing melody now. This could also explain why it's enraging when a friend does it but not when a stranger does. It'd be kind of the equivalent of telling your friend you have shell-shock and them still insisting on coming to your house and shooting off fireworks in the night.
Medieval parent—ha!
I spent college in a ground floor manhattan apartment next to a bar open til 4am most nights. I put ear plugs in but singing, fighting, and screaming 15 feet from one’s pillow is still rather audible!! I love love love the energy of NYC and never got that mad at it. I would only call to complain if it got to be above a certain threshold thru earplugs, like the night before an exam. (Shout out to scum of the earth yuppies who would move in above legendary dive bar music venues of UNESCO-level significance and notoriety and then threaten to have them shut down!)
When I visit the world’s safest and quietest suburbs or rural areas, the silence or near silence at night fills me with abject terror. Negative misphonia?
Maybe the lack of car sounds suggests that there has been a zombie apocalypse? Parts of LA were profoundly unsettling during the pandemic for lack of traffic (among other reasons).
I feel rage whenever anyone talks semi-loudly within 50-ish feet of someone sleeping (even in another room). Never thought of this as unusual until now.
Does it also happen with people you really like/love? I suspect not. So it's related to your attitude to the offender. Try distancing by thinking of them as "interesting specimens".
Interesting specimens are for study, not killing. That's othering.
"people who hate Donald Trump will laugh along with a lookalike Trump impersonator."
No, I find Trump impersonations irritating in the same way, though not to the same degree, as the original, and I generally avoid watching them. It's the manner of his speaking, and not just the content, that irritates me, though I couldn't say for sure that the manner didn't become irritating because of the content.
I avoided George W. Bush and his impersonators for the same reason. Once I saw Bush speaking on a TV in the arrivals shuttle from Heathrow to London, and I was incensed that I'd just flown 6000 miles to get away from this guy and here he was.
I haven't felt that way about other presidents whose policies I opposed. I liked Nixon and Reagan impersonations and even attempted them myself.
Interesting! I have had a really strong disgust response to the spoken words of every single president in power during my lifetime -- along with all other prominent U.S. political figures of any persuasion -- and have always avoided live news for that reason.
There's something about the extremely high bulls*it factor of how politicians speak that is intolerable to me to listen to any amount. It feels so deeply cringy and embarassing and distressingly pretend all at once. It feels like being subjected to an endless toxic stream of lies or dreading when the next obscene lie will come along. I can't do it. I read about politics a ton though and can handle reading quotes from those same politicians without disgust.
I can watch live speeches or interviews of foreign leaders speaking in a foreign language, including ones I speak. Which seems kind of like how people are more affected by sounds their loved ones make than strangers. It feels to me like the spoken words of U.S. politicians directly implicates me in some way that I have trouble getting distance from.
I don't like loud sounds, and loud seems to be a range that most people notice but aren't bothered by. I can't enjoy a rock concert, and some restaurants are too loud for me.
I'm pretty sure I'm enraged by excessively loud motor vehicles, while I just strongly dislike construction that's as loud.
Same for me exactly.
Is there a term for misphonia but for smells?
Absolutely driven to distraction, despair, and anger by the scent of gardenia, including the subtlest note in perfume across a room.
If someone leaves a banana peel in an office trash can (as opposed to the kitchen trash where non-sociopaths put it), I can smell it 20 feet away and cannot mentally function so much as to send an email. Doesn’t have to be overripe funk or starting to rot.
I enjoy eating bananas. And would consider myself above-average tolerant of novel or strange bordering on disgust-reflex inducing smells (I have lived in a country notorious for big smells, occasionally quite unpleasant ones).
My younger brother who was socially awkward and I had to constantly protect from bullies (up to and including getting the shit kicked out of myself) was hypersensitive to all kinds of smells! And his coughing and retching made me absolutely crazy, I just wanted him to flip a switch and turn off the histrionics. My mother would react as if we were being gassed to death at the slightest trace of secondhand smoke (or nail polish chemical!), outdoors, across a football field, usually during the most sublimely enjoyable play session on the most gorgeous spring day. (Is this why I disproportionately enjoy my once- or twice-a-week cigarette?)
Road rage is like a misophonia experience on wheels.
Philosophy class essay exam in college c. 1975, the saboteur next to me was using an unsharpened pencil, dragging it on the paper heavy-handed caveman style, dull arrythmic cursive scratching, noisy rapid sawtooth strokes, and poking the table top to dot the i's. I was prepared for the test, but not for the parasitic assault in my head.
Thankfully no laptops used in those days -- incessant finger tapping drives me nuts, too.
I'm in a long-term relationship with another misophonia sufferer and we don't mind accommodating each other's requests to stop one thing or the other. We avoid conflict because we understand what the other person experiences, and we still playfully make fun of dissimilar triggers.
Jake Eaton: “After all, everyone hates the sound of chewing”
Whut.
you don't?
Nope. It strikes me like saying, "After all, everyone hates closet doors."
intriguing! wait so, say you have a dinner guest with rather loud chewing habits, you are not in any way bothered?
Well, I can’t say that definitively. But it’s never happened, nor even come so close to happening that it seemed remotely possible. Maybe I’ve just always dined with really civilized people?
Even if I *had* ever encountered someone whose chewing annoyed me, that’s still quite a long ways indeed from “everyone hates the sound of chewing”.
Same, has never happened to me either. I do have a sensitive gag reflex so if kids get food all over their mouths, I will gag, but that's a different thing I think. No anger associated with it.
One thing I notice is that my misophonia improved the more my generalized anxiety symptoms improved. I think there’s a correlation there.
This makes a lot of sense to me -- something about overall background activation level of the nervous system. If you bring it down, the threshold for reacting to a whole host of stimuli should come down.
2024 Survey question:
"How much do the following problems negatively affect your life: noise"
Scott, any interesting conclusions resulting from this question?
Also, it's not in the survey, but I wonder if there's a positive correlation between noise sensitivity and musical talent in one's close relatives.
Great read. I hate noise also particularly from those closest to me. I just thought I was weird. Maybe not.
Perhaps this is one of the downsides of having a single personality in our heads (which, going by the bicameral mind post, might be fairly recent)
You could try looking at r/tulpas and creating one that really likes noise. Possibly it's harder to get stuck in these sort of loops with several personalities in your head, because even if one personality dislikes noise, another personality might not. (Suggestion only semi-serious)
I have something like this too. I used it as an empathy pump to understand what microaggressions feel like (minus the political aspect). It's not the act itself that is bad as much as the fact that someone could've easily avoided it but chose not to.
Flat mate listens to music and it bleeds through the thin wall? It's fine. Can't expect someone to wear headphones in their own room.
Flat mate leaves the music on, locks the room and goes out? Now this is a problem, but maybe they're simply not aware of it.
Now if I tell them about it and they go into my room to check how it sounds like and say "oh come on, you're barely hearing it, never bother me about this again"? That's much worse. IT'S NOT HARD TO TURN THE SPEAKERS OFF WHEN YOU GO OUT STEVE. WE DON'T HAVE TO ARGUE ABOUT IT, YOU CAN JUST TURN THE SPEAKERS OFF. And that's when I start fixating masochistically on the flat mate's microaggressions towards me so that I could hate them more thoroughly.
I thank god that the sound that makes me suffer and faint is rare and easy to avoid. Can't imagine what hell my life would have been if it was as common as chewing.
Styrofoam breaking
An internal narrative about why your suffering/displeasure/anger/sadness is justified is incredibly common, natural, understandable, relatable, normal, etc. (I do it all the time.) But I think it *always*, *100% of the time* makes things worse for you and often leads you to behave in ways that make the world a worse place for others (which easily ties into many feedback loops). ***Regardless*** of how "justified" your emotional reaction actually is.
See the parable of the second arrow.
Of course even if this is true, it's very hard to avoid.
As I was reading the post I kept thinking about how mindfulness is supposedly just the ticket for breaking the cycle on these sorts of things, so I was glad to see it mentioned.
Seems to me like the evo-psych explanation here is it's a desire for dominance and control more than anything to do with the actual sound
I actually tend to think it‘s exactly not dominance, because a psychology that is particularly mindful of dominance hierarchies would not come up with an „unnecessary“ vulnerability that rivals could exploit.
Tom Dozier has developed an empirical treatment methodology based on progressive muscle relaxation that seems hokey but worked almost immediately for my son. By observing over zoom while my son's trigger was activated, he was able to identify a specific muscle that was contracting involuntarily in direct association with the misophonia response. Once he pointed it out, it was obvious and I could see it too. I had been extremely skeptical up to that point, but was quickly convinced. A few sessions of PMR focusing on this muscle reduced symptoms dramatically. For details see: https://misophoniatreatment.com
I'm really curious if the McGurk Effect desensitization works on things that are widely considered unpleasant sounds, like fingernails on a chalkboard.
I recently discovered (or perhaps tricked myself into thinking I discovered) a misophonia-esque thing I experience. For a long time I thought I disliked anime TV shows in general, but recently I watched some with dubs instead of subs and discovered that in fact the thing I dislike is the fact that in the original Japanese, the female voice actors frequently speak (and squeal and make other noises) in extremely high pitches, and that that makes my skin crawl and I hate it. I've experienced "I hate very high pitched human voices" before plenty of times - I'll be listening to a song and enjoying it, then the singer hits a very high note and I hate it, then it goes back down and I'm back to enjoying it. Now I'm watching dubbed anime, where the English language voice actors have what I consider "normal human voices" and I'm enjoying it.
Is this related to the phenomenon where people specifically hate the word "moist"?
The way I've understood my misophonia is there are certain sound qualities that trigger some physical reaction, and my righteous indignation about the people making the sound amplifies my distress. But there is still some underlying physical reaction there that is not just emotional.
What misophonia feels like to me is the nails on a chalkboard feeling. If someone were doing it repeatedly and deliberately you would feel angrier... But even once, by mistake, done by a stranger is going to trigger goosebumps.
I wonder what level of discomfort two people with misphonia would have if they agreed to eat together.
The other person would fully understand your position and suffering, but you both agreed to bear it for the duration of the meal. I would guess it would be uncomfortable but not anger-inducing?
Curious if your partner started doing one of these things do you think you'd ask them to stop? Do you think you'd just try to put up with it and suffer? Would you invest more time overcoming it? Leave it they didn't stop? Excuse them but no one else?
I did not realize that the general idea "people are annoying; they breathe and blink" can be divided into individual components such as only sound.
For me, any unwanted sensory input creates a sense of betrayal. It is a statement of team disloyalty (where team could be family, students in class, group at work etc).
The logic goes like this:
- We are a team. We have goals to accomplish together.
- To accomplish goals, we need to pass information and synchronize effort.
- Synchronize effort means sometimes we all talk, and sometimes we are quiet so we could listen to something important. Sometimes the room is well-lit for reading, sometimes dark for rest. Aromatic candles are for weddings and spa retreats, healthy living space smells of nothing. Etc.
- If you don't agree with this, you are basically not on the team, or you think I am not.
- Don't you dare tell me to just deal with it. I agree to stop my offensive behavior instantly, but you think you can just do whatever you want?
And you are saying I am not a team player?
- Aaargh, smash, other sounds of Achilles walking away to stay in his tent forever.
> For me, any unwanted sensory input creates a sense of betrayal. It is a statement of team disloyalty.
Yes! Behind the anger is fear. Your closest allies are hinting that they are not.
You are allowed to express your opinion on trivial matters, so I assume I also have that right? No? Here are my two cents::
A certain part or percentage of the brains resources are allocated to detecting sounds that might indicate danger. Some sounds (roaring maybe?) will definitly get our attention. It makes sense that unnatural sounds (scraping fork etc) trigger us, since they could indicate danger.
It forces, us to act on emotions. It makes us switch from system 2 to system 1.
Everything that signals danger works this way. Demagouges wants us to switch from 1 to 2 (feel, not think) and use various tricks like escalating the speed in which they talk, simulating someone who is panicking or otherwise signaling danger. People with guttural voices can do this easier than the rest of us, since it sounds like the guttural growls of a predator. You know who I'm thinking of.
My adrenaline is triggered by sudden, high, sudden sounds! Someone coughs loudly and aggressively! Makes sense that it aggravates me, right?
For some people, certain sounds gets coded as worthy of attention by the same system and forces them to switch from system 2 to system 1, which causes stress and an adrenaline rush. It is usually when we try to focus or concentrate and need the brains resources for something else, that such sounds causes the most stress. That makes sense if we think of it in terms of allocated brain resources.
I'm of course writing this because I don't think any of the worlds leading experts or doctors have thought about this. I must be smarter than them. :)
> Something about that resonated with me, and since then I’ve been the same way. Was I always like that, and his comment just called my attention to it? That’s not how I remember things, but who knows?
This, and the preceding paragraph, is a potential information hazard for misophoniacs like me. Please consider altering this.
i don't know. I think a common thing is the perception of annoyance or disgust at being inflicted on more than the sound, then. It's not just a bad sound, its an attack that triggers fight or flight, and that might be closer to anxiety as someone else said.
the flip side of misophonia is ASMR though, which is those same scritchy sounds to evoke pleasure. That I can't get. like lip smacking on a microphone.
i also think anxiety is a lot more common than people think; a lot of people may operate under constant stress in general, and may be too specific on self-diagnosis. like chewing sounds on snow is because snow is calming to people; snow is peaceful by default and doesn't annoy you unless driving.
I had misophonia as a kid, and still have a much milder version of it. Like Scott, I’ve ruminated a lot about how it works.
For me, the abhorrent sound was silverware clattering or scraping. I got the biggest doses of the sound in restaurants, where staff was hastily bunching and dumping and placing silverware while clearing and setting tables (my family did not eat in quiet, high end restaurants). Hearing the sound made me have vivid images of silverware scraping or bumping my teeth, and the combo of the sound itself plus the imagined tooth sensation was so acutely unpleasant that my arms would break out in goosebumps and I would sometimes shudder involuntarily. And yet, oddly, my imaginings of silverware bumping my teeth did not involve the idea that this would cause pain. For some reason, the idea of silverware hitting my teeth was horrible in itself, the way the idea of a swarm of harmless insects running up one’s arm is for most of us, including me. Away from restaurants there was much less real life silverware racket going on, but I still encountered a few things. One was my parents cutting food with a knife and fork in a way that caused the 2 utensils to rub against each other. This too would make all my skin tighten with disgust and horror, and the hair of my arms would stand up in goosebumps. The other was accidentally bumping one of my own teeth with a metal utensil. That was horrible, in a worst-fears-come-true kind of way, and even now, several decades later, accidental tooth-fork taps and scrapings sometimes give me an electric shock of horror and a case of goosebumps. I have always preferred to eat with plastic utensils and often did, but made myself stop doing that a couple years ago because of concerns about tiny bits of plastic remaining in my body.
And yet, oddly, during the era when my misophonia was peaking I had braces , and was neither more nor less bothered than other kids by the orthodontist putting metal bands on my teeth, which often hurt some at the time and usually caused soreness afterwards. The misophonia was oddly specific. To bother me, the metal on my teeth had to be silverware, and it had to be tapping or scraping on them. Also odd was that I abhorred the idea of silverware tapping or scraping even though I did not imagine it causing pain. And I dreaded exposure to my trigger far more than I dreaded mouth pain. I did not, by the way, feel anger at people making silverware noise that bothered me.
When I ruminate about my odd sensitivity I don’t get very far. It seems to me to be very similar to the aversion to snakes or to insects or to smells of organic rot that most people have. It has that same inborn, impossible-to-override quality. I think aversions to snakes, bugs and rot must be inborn tendencies towards alarm and aversion that were advantageous for survival back when life was more physical. Why, though, do a good many people have mouth-related aversions like mine? An aversion to certain tastes might also be the result of evolution — maybe having it protected people some from eating toxic things? But what’s the survival advantage of an aversion to the sound of others’ chewing, or to light, harmless contact between teeth and a metal?
I have wondered whether useless mouth-related aversions like mine are to useful ones, such as taste sensitivities, as sexual kinks are to sexual appetite for that act that produces babies — something about the wiring for the evolutionarily useful thing being very close to a bunch of other wires, and with the result that many people get crossover effects.
It's impossible to watch silent footage of someone chewing without involuntarily imagining the sound of that person chewing. For anyone with 'good' auditory imagery, imagining the sound of someone chewing has exactly the same hedonic value as listening to someone chewing.
Noise is worse when my attention is on it, and much more bearable when I am distracted by deep pressure or proprioceptive input, or when I am thinking about a topic that I am really interested or doing some task which places high demands on attention and working memory. Also the same noise might be either pleasant or unpleasant depending on what mood I am in. The same applies to just about any other type of qualia.
Getting angry at noise is not an unreasonable reaction. After all, if you take one randomly chosen second in your life, the probability distribution for how happy you feel during that second is much more greatly affected by what noises are going on around you during that second than by, say, whether you have cancer or whether your mum died yesterday or whether you are currently starving to death. I had anorexia as a teen, and I can confidently say that being close to starvation has very small negative hedonic value compared with having to put up with the noise on the school playground. I don't think that it is unreasonable to say that unpleasant noises are the single greatest cause of human suffering. Uncomfortable tactile sensations come a close second and if it were possible to change social norms around so that everyone could wear their clothes with the seams on the outside inside of on the inside then the QUALYs saved would be enormous.
Disclaimer: I have not personally experienced the qualia of a neurotypical person so I am trying to guess how much noise annoyance NTs experience based solely on their behavior. I'm hoping that some NTs here give their perspective on how much noise affects their day-to-day happiness levels.
I think this thought piece unintentionally pinpoints the neurobiological basis of intellectualized thoughts, indeed the complex subjective origins of what preoccupies the mind and the attitude people take about issues in general. Objectivity in the strictest sense of the term (meaning no personal bias) is an illusion. The issues that interest our thinking mind and the attitude we take about issues are very likely downstream of the same inscrutable neurobiological processes that underlie misophonia. What we feel or doesn't feel or couldn't feel are all baked into what we think or couldn't think of. It is in this sense that the theories that thinkers and scientists passionately defend like gospel are product of their subjective experiences (or personality).
What a topic. I suffer from misophonia. In the last 5 years, I've sought to gain a better understanding of it. I've participated in research studies, attended online seminars, tried psychological treatment, tracked my symptoms, and just thought a whole lot about it's effects on my life.
You've covered so much ground that I've thought about. It'll be hard to fully organize my thoughts, but I hope this popcorn assortment gives you some more to think about.
Researchers have recently proposed "misokinesia" as a related condition. It explains the flip side of misophonia, the fact that it's not just sound but also movement. I am personally affected by both hearing and seeing people chew. But I'm also affected by other sounds (slurping drinks, sniffling noses, mouth breathing, fans clicking, clocks ticking) and unrelated movements (my children waving things near my face, people hovering behind me, people pacing around the room).
Back to misophonia.
I'm also more affected by people in my close social circle. I think there is a combination of a conditioned responses. One aspect of the condition is that you're accustomed to this person making the offending noises. So before they even start, there's a creeping anxiety about the sensations you're about to be subjected to. Then there's also an anger response, which I think is also fear related. This person probably knows at this point that you are affected by the sound. The fact that they don't control the sound threatens your sense of safety and that triggers anger. It's this astonished sensation that someone in your safe space refuses to help keep you safe.
I think that there are similar responses to strangers, but more so when there's a pattern to how groups of strangers will act. Some cultures habitually eat louder, and I tend to get more anxious when I see them in a dining space. People tend to chew popcorn in a movie theater or gum on an airplane, so I anticipate this and feel the anxiety creep in before I've even arrived at the location. Likewise, when angry feeling arises from the actions of strangers, it's likely when those people are violating social and moral rules. A sense of, how could they not understand that this behavior is unsafe or unacceptable.
From my experience, desensitization and flooding don't work. More time exposed to the stimulus makes it worse. More time spent thinking about the stimulus makes it worse. Traditional Cognitive Behavioral Therapy techniques don't work, in fact it only seems to make it worse. Like your friend experienced through meditation, the more I'm able to turn my mind to thoughts other than the stimuli, the more I'm able to dampen my reactions. Blocking out the sound with noise cancelling headphones is good, but turning on some baroque lute (with a strong and predictable rhythm) is even more powerful at reducing my responses to the stimuli.
On a related note, sound therapy that features erratic noises like chimes makes my reactions so much worse. There's an element of my brainwaves being thrown into chaos and needing to be restored to order.
I'm also extremely bothered by the sounds that are just within my periphery but not entirely discernible. I interpret this as a survival instinct. It feels like compulsion to understand 'what is that sound?' like identifying the tiger stalking in the jungle before it pounces. Once I identify the sound, the affect is lessened, but not entirely and not for all sounds.
In some cases though, knowing where the sound is coming from is not good enough. There's a compulsion to continue to find the source of the sound. I think this stems from the safety signaling. If the sound comes from a threat, then vigilance would dictate that you don't let the threat out of sight or it might sneak up on you.
Chewing and slurping, and sounds that relate to being eaten by a wild creature basically, are always a trigger for me. Talking sounds can be a mixed bag. For instance when someone speaks just on the edge of my ability to hear, it can heighten the effect. I think this has to do with my senses revving into high gear to parse out the meaning of the sound. I've tested this theory by feigning that I can't understand and require the information repeated. Getting in this habit greatly reduces the overall effect, especially long term.
Some groups, like Duke University, study misophonia as an emotional condition, putting it in the realm of psychology. While I think that repeated exposure leads to psychological symptoms, much of this is the result of anticipating the distress and then ramping up the fight or flight system to prepare for the confrontation. I also think that there is a physiologic aspect, yet I haven't seen much crop up in the scientific literature about this. My hypothesis range from sensory processing disorders to a disorder of the cranial nerves that run through the ear and also modulate other nerves in the face. This latter idea comes from my experience with clenching my teeth. I have lost teeth by clenching at night while listening to my husband mouth *breath* (not snore). It feels like either I'm trying to force my mouth shut, as though doing so would help him do so, *or* that I'm trying to close my ears which triggers the same nerve to close my jaws.
As for when and how this arises, there's anecdotal evidence that misophonia arises sometime around 8 years old. This is also the point when most people start retaining their memories. I myself remember these symptoms starting around this time and they've never gone away.
One very interesting thing I am learning here is the association with *anger* in the misophonia. When Scott wrote it, I just assumed he was projecting misophonia on himself when really he was probably dealing with something else. But now to hear you say it adds credence and makes me wonder if I'm missing something.
Although I only learned about the term recently, I would describe myself from suffering from misophonia, but I have never felt anger because of it. I think?
My largest trigger is styrofoam, particularly the screechy kind used in packaging. I feel no fear or anxiety seeing it. I can force myself to handle the material. But hearing it causes goosebumps and pain (likely from my muscles tensing so tight I hurt myself). Scraping on ceramic plates or chalkboards doesn't really bother me that much, but styrofoam, whoa.
Beyond that, music (especially with lyrics) played at a low/background level where I have trouble understanding what they are saying, clocks ticking, and to a lesser extent windchimes in the background all really bother me. The sensation is qualitatively different than styrofoam. I find it hard to concentrate, and I will generally turn off the music / leave the room, but I suppose I haven't found myself trapped in a situation with an offending sound.
Scratch that, dripping tub, couldn't fall asleep due to it, angrily got up, but I blame the sleep interruption there!
So maybe what I have isn't misophonia since it just bothers/hurts me and doesn't particularly enrage me or force me to flee? And I'm not immune to rage, try to make small talk while I'm doing deep concentration reading/writing and I have (to my shame) flown off the handle before. Or maybe there are related symptoms that express differently to different people (and different stimuli?!)
If I like someone, and I hear them chewing, it is calming and relaxing to me. If I hate someone, and I hear them chewing, I become enraged. I think the sound is sort of triggering some pre-existing emotional complex, like the trigger word "Ronald McDonald."
This seems less like misophonia than like an extreme case of Bitch Eating Crackers.
I have stopped sitting in the silent compartments in trains, even when I need to sleep or work during a trip. Experimentally I found out that it was a lot easier to ignore twenty people talking loudly in a normal wagon than that one rude guy whispering into his phone in the silent area.
When I was younger, I had a misophonia-esque response to the sound of breathing. This was miserable - you can't exactly scream at someone for having the audacity to be alive within earshot. It's faded as I've gotten older, which I think largely has to do with being able to change my auditory environment at will.
As a misophonic person, I am very pleased to see an article that resonates with me, even if it doesn't help with the issue. For me CBT worked partly, mostly the part where you have to delay avoidance behaviors
Thank you!
I actually do not think Scott's problem is a great example of misophonia. It seems to be a sort of.hybrid, part unusually high sensitivity to racket made by people, part unusually low sense of fellowship with random other members of our species. Lest you think I'm making a harsh judgment about Scott, I should say that I am about like he is about noise, though in my case it's mostly racket when I'm trying to sleep. But like Scott, I grow mental hate structures about people who wake me, and then chronic anger at those people makes me way more vulnerable to any noise they make.
A couple summers ago there was construction on the house next door, and the workmen always started way earlier than my usual waking time. I pictured them doing irritating things like leaving one of their noisy machines running pointlessly while they stood by chatting. I imagined them shrugging and sniggering triumphantly if they somehow knew how much they were bothering me. I'd often look at the window at them after they woke me, and never saw a single piece of evidence that they were making noise they could have avoided, or were actively contemptuous of the people whose sleep they were disturbing. And yet I kept on looking, somehow hoping to see them doing something clearly unfair and inconsiderate. All I ever saw was blokes working, with every appearance of being utterly oblivious of people and points of view like mine. I'm sure I would have been much less bothered by their noise if I'd found it easier to mentally inhabit their point of view. But I am for sure below average in the basic feeling of fellowship I naturally have towards strangers.
> unusually low sense of fellowship with random other members of our species
That sound like it should have a short and punch psychological name... does it?
I don't think there is a name of the kind you have in mind. Common language has more: loner, self-absorbed, unfriendly. But the low sense of fellowship is strongly associated with 2 diagnoses: Schizoid Personality Disorder and Autistic Spectrum Disorder.
Later edit: oh yeah, also Obsessive - Compulsive Personality Disorder, though a lot of professionals I know think that’s really just one possible
presentation of high functioning autism.
I wrote about my own experience (recently) in really coming to terms with my misophonia, and, for the most part, fixing it. I wrote a post on here about what the triggers were for me, what I remembered causing it (as you have yours), and how I was able to basically retrain my nervous system in responding to the sound. Now when I hear chewing, even really egregiously loud chewing, it's at worst very unaesthetic, like someone playing bad music. I still have a little work to do on it, but I can more than tolerate chewing sounds, often the sound does not register in my conscious experience.
What you might not like to hear is that I don't think you can just logic your way out of it. There's something more imagistic going on with the association than just "priors that aren't updating", and I really believe that if that's your entire view of the mind, you are not going to make any progress in "fixing" this. Even if it's how the brain actually works, it's not the language the mind speaks in to you. I do agree with you that there is something that feels like a tangling, a knot, and that it can be untangled. But it has to be done imagistically, in the imagination. This, I believe, is why CBT is not effective, nor is any sort of exposure therapy.
Hoping this doesn't get lost in the comments:
https://substack.com/home/post/p-154568600
This was really lovely to read, thank you.
The left/right hand dialoguing is good stuff! Somewhat adjacent to internal family systems -- bringing a kind self to younger parts and opening up an ongoing relationship there where healing can happen.
Regaining a sense of choice seems key. I could sit here, I could leave, I'm not trapped here. There are so so many experiences in childhood in which we are trapped both physically/logistically and emotionally (no room for our anger). Awful stuff, and also as you discovered, we have resources in us to heal those injuries and bring that younger self who was hurt into a more present-day connection with us as grownups who have power and choice and new perspectives. And who can validate the feelings that got trapped back there and had no safe means of expression.
Glad you got something from it!
I think for me the left/right hand dialoguing really helps step out of the body/ego/individual and into experience as a dialectic. It's like, near psychedelic level for me in communicating with myself.
Definitely the sense of agency, and the untangling of what made me feel trapped in the first place. Getting to go back and choose who is "correct" in what situation and re-writing those memories was what finally got my nervous system to calm down.
Halfalog https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=halfalog seems like a common instance of this.
Could this be an addiction? I have a milder form of this, and the story about straining through earmuffs for noise to get mad about resonates for me! This combined with the mentions of righteous anger, and overblown anger in general make me think some chemical like dopamine (?) may be involved in this response and this turns into an addiction. It seems obvious looking at society that righteous anger, outrage, and frustration are addictive mental states. They're so arousing and immediate and compelling. I'm not really up-to-date on the best addiction treatments for behaviours like this but I wonder if a treatment along those lines would be more effective.
I'd say more OCD than addiction. Thoughts are really sticky and rumination runs on, finding more and more material to stew on.
I know in my case, everyone should be glad its not a free country because if it was, the punishment visited upon those with straight piped cars, big stupid trucks, or Harleys would be entirely disproportionate.
this means there must be a subjective moral component, because a tractor that is objectively five times as loud as a douche wagon ram doesn't trigger the same response.
I have about the same level of misophonia that you have, but I have had some success with the following:
1. I have successfully applied CBT to OCD, by trying to be OK with not being OK with noise. As they say in OCD, "that which you resist tends to persist", and so I stopped fighting my negative reactions and letting myself be as upset as I need to be.
2. Using Reddit/Internet therapy did help, as I learned that how people react to sound is based on intensity, duration, one's attitude towards the source, whether someone is in a pensive phase (such as lying in bed) or busy, and whether you can do anything about the sound. Even for people without misophonia, this subjectivity must be affected by the same parameters, just to different intensities, and maybe with a different texture of neurosis. Even a neurotypical will say that some sounds "drive them insane", but for a misophoniaac, it may be a different kind of "insanity."
3. After moving to San Francisco, I spent some money getting custom earplugs from Kaiser, but in speaking with my audiologist, she brought up the point that using noise cancellation can increase your sensitivity. And so when I use a device, I'll ask myself first, "Will this get the desired effect?" If there is high-pitched construction outside, then playing white noise, such as a YouTube video of a Boeing 747, will effectively mask it. But if it's bass-y, then the sound will "punch through," and so I'll find myself searching to see if I can still hear the source. In those cases, I won't use masking because I know it will backfire.
4. Acclimation does happen, though, it just takes a lot longer. But every time I move apartments, those first two weeks are pretty challenging, even with quiet places. But then I eventually get used to many of the sounds.
Other notes:
5. I've experienced some positive "social contagion" aspect, but in real-time. I notice if I'm with a group of people I'm entertaining, and the sound of foot-fall on the ceiling comes through, I'll somehow pretend it doesn't exist because some leadership instinct kicks into me that wants everybody to emulate how chill I am.
6. There appears to be some super-cycle aspects to my attitude. I lived in the Mission once with lots of footfall above and sounds coming from the alley, but it didn't bother me as much until I could afford to move out, then it really bothered me, because "I could change things" again.
7. Big city vs. medium city seems to be like night-and-day. A lot of people will move out of big cities because of noise, even if they're not misophoniacs. I lived in Austin for 12 years, when it was a medium-sized city, and just the rate at which you would get an A or A- soundscape in your living situation was so much higher than in SF. If you think rent in the City is expensive, wait till you add a quiet requirement to your search.
I'd say I have a similar level/type of misophonia. Do your recommend the custom earplugs? Is the level of sound insulation better than deeply inserted foam plugs?
The custom fitted ones are great, especially if you ask for fully solid ones (some are partially hollow to allow some sound to pass through). They’re much better than deeply inserted foam plugs. The foam ones always seem to wriggle out a smidge, letting a lot of sound in. Even when they’re fully secure, though, they don’t block as much as the fitted ones. The fitted ones are solid masses. The foam ones always have at least some air to allow for elasticity. So I have a pair of the custom ones, plus I have an AirPods Pro. I keep the custom ones by my bed in case there is some construction noise in the morning and I can’t go back to sleep. Or I bring it to rock shows. Otherwise, the AirPods cover me for day-to-day use, such as subways or airplanes.
I will probably get some custom solid ones then, thank you!
Thanks for sharing. Some of those info might help our teenage daughter. Switzerland's largest city (400k people, 1.5 Million in the greater area) just made the use of leaf blowers illegal most time of the year with some seasonal exceptions. In Europe it's always about finding the right compromise of personal freedom and the general good.
I think there's a big connection to one's basic feeling of safety. If the people closest to me can't be bothered to accommodate a minor quirk of mine, can I really count on them when I really need them? I'm not saying it's a rational inference, more like a feeling of broken unity. We're not a team anymore, and that's fucking scary. That would explain why one keeps scanning for signs that it's happening under the headphones and the white noise - you're scanning for a serious threat to your future well-being!
I've never thought of calling it misophonia, but I have a strong aversion to the "radio voice", the kind of perky and unnaturally intense speech that radio speakers tend to use. Probably became salient for me when I was living in a student dorm and getting rudely woken up every early morning by some neighbor's radio blaring news and shit. To this day my home is a TV and radio-free zone, and I find myself becoming alert, and getting ready to be angry, if someone close to me clicks a youtube link and some guy's pushy voice comes up. Yet if it comes from another house, it's only a minor annoyance, without the emotional overtones.
Yes, „basic feeling of safety“, „you‘re scanning for a serious threat to your future well-being“, that sound very plausible to me.
Sounds like you have not tried putting the ear plug and construction headphones on only one ear at a time. Or lie with your head on a cushion with either ear pointing up, to see if that makes any difference. Trying this would narrow down the location of the trigger between primary and secondary auditory processing.
When I had a very similar problem, the reaction was not anger but euphoria; yet this turned out to be focal epilepsy (caused by a tumor in my primary auditory cortex) which can produce either. Trivial to check, just get an EEG and trigger yourself during the measurement.
So you know something to be true that you refuse to believe. That is irritating, even enraging. The mechanisms are myriad.
Would you ever try a week long mediation retreat for science? I think a lot of us would find value in "how sticky" that intervention is.
The last time I went to the cinema the small audience was basically perfect and respectful. Except one guy opened a pack of mints or something and it made the slightest rustle and if I had a gun I may have happily shot him then and there.
When I was about 15 I vocalised my annoyance at my friend who habitually made a sort of wet lips-parting sound when he chewed. I didn't know that misophonia was a thing and I was trying to explain that it was actually physically painful to hear. Anyway my other friend who was there said something to the effect of "no it's not, you just want to put other people down". I look inside myself and know this is basically wrong -- I'm generally very hard to annoy except for a few things like this. But having read this I wonder if my other friend was not completely wrong. I'm certain it's not about "putting others down", but it may have more of a social element than I thought.
Another recent, related development: I watch a lot of cooking videos and there's this sort of trend to make them ASMR, especially if they originate in east asia (?). This apparently involves lingering on shots of creamy stuff being stirred, poured etc. and turning the upper mid frequencies way up on the EQ. This also triggers my misophonia and sets off a chain of thought that ends up like "I can't believe they didn't consider my misophonia when making this second-rate ASMR" which obviously annoys me even more.
What's interesting about this is that I can feel the social element of misophonia here. But I'm certain the annoying sound was the starting point of it. I didn't know things being poured could be misophonic until I heard the ASMR-ised monstrosity; so it is, for me at least, something about a certain range/distribution of frequencies that starts the chain of mental events.
(To be clear, the whole video will be misophonic because they apply the EQ boost to the whole thing. So even chopping and blending will trigger it. I'm not about to go and test it but I suspect even just the ambient noise in the video will sound annoying to me).
A large percentage of the comments are of the form me-too: People's racket bugs the hell out of me. They are so inconsiderate! Maybe I have misophonia too?
I actually think Scott's problem is either a pretty unusual case of misophonia or not misophonia at all. The cases of it I have seen (I'm a psychologist) all involve sensitivities that are hard to relate to. They have that in common with most phobias and OCD issues I have encountered. The person tells you what's bothering them, and it's bizarre. They are sure their lips are too thin, and that strangers are covertly staring in disgust. They are afraid there is AIDs tainted blood in Russian dressing, because it's pink. They can't bear the squeaking sound of styrofoam containers rubbing against each other, it gives them a vile dry feeling in their mouth when they hear it. Are they *crazy*? Nope. They all say, "look, I totally get that this makes no sense." And they do. You get the feeling that whatever path led them to their preoccupation, it's some odd one, probably one with unusual neurological pinnings, not one of the familiar ones such as imitating admired people, striving for social or career success, pleasing parents, etc.
So Scott's bete noir lacks that weird quality. Everybody can relate to it. It is also just not a common one among people with misophonia. 95% of people with misophonia have a thing that has to do with the sounds mouths make, and lots more have things relating to throat and nose noises.
Here's a chart of things bothering people with misophonia. https://imgur.com/a/x8pYBpN
It's from a 2020 study of 779. people with misophonia.
Misophonia: Phenomenology, comorbidity and demographics
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0231390#pone.0231390.s003
I'm not saying it's not legit, and hasn't called real suffering --- just that I'm not sure it's best thought of as misophonia.
FWIW I, besides being a psychologist, am also someone with a thing very like Scott's about being inordinately bothered by other people's racket. I also had misophonia that was pretty intense up to the age of 20. The thing that bothered me was had that bizarre, how-does-that-even-work quality: the noise of silverware being rattled together. Hearing it did not make me angry, and I was not even able to say what bothered me about it. I just found the sound intolerably unpleasant. It made me break out in goosebumps and shudder involuntarily. When I was little, I also cried. The experience of being horrified by that noise was *very* different from being bothered by noisy people when I wanted to read or sleep. The latter made sense to me, and involved familiar feelings of annoyance. The former was much more intense, but made no sense even to me.
> It is also just not a common one among people with misophonia.
The chart you posted has "music neighbors" as highest in the category of "ambient sounds" (59%), so wouldn't this make it fairly common? Party noise is a widespread complaint in r/misophonia too.
Yes, I saw that. All I can say is that based on my observations and my own experience with misophonia, annoyance at the miscellaneous racket other people make is a common experience. Seems like most people can relate to it, and the difference between people regarding thatkind of noise is mostly one of degree. But there’s a set of things that both the person with the problem and those that hear about it experience as odd. My misophonia about rattling silverware felt odd to me. “Classic” misophonia, distress about odd noises, just seems different enough to me to suggest it works in a different way. Notice that quite a large fraction of the commenters here describe experiencing what Scott does. Is misophonia then quite a common disorder? Meanwhile, a scattering of people report being bothered by mouth noises and other odd things. I think those people have something unusual and diagnosable going on.
Possible typo in "Again, that’s now how I remember things". It would make much more sense in context with "not" in place of "now".
It might partially be about control?
I noticed that i hated music played out loud without my hands being near the volume control, that I previously loved while listening to it with headphones on, fingers touching the volume-control on my phone.
The headphone is another thing. >I< listen to music with my headphones on and feel queasy playing it out loud, and I get second-hand queasy when someone else does it. A feeling that my preferences should be normative.
Up until now I wouldn't have thought of myself as having misophonia, but the reaction you describe reminds me exactly of my reaction to snoring. I've spent hours before literally seething with rage as I try to sleep in a room where someone is snoring. For me though, if anything this seems to be much more lenient for those closer to me. I think the rage comes from a disgust because I associate snoring with fatness/laziness, whereas since the people I know who snore aren't fat or lazy, I can have them literally in the same bed as me snoring in my ear and it has no effect.
Also contrary to your description, as I start to think of this reaction as being under the label "misophonia", I feel like it loses power over me, rather than me identifying with it. Partially I think this might be that I am realising that snoring is not "objectively the most annoying sound in the world" to other people like it is to me, and also it reminds me of my brother, whose misophonia over metal forks on teeth I always found melodramatic and fake. Now I feel like my own reaction to snoring is melodramatic and fake, and the righteous anger doesn't feel so righteous anymore.
This reminded me of something Dan Carlin mentioned offhand in the Hardcore History episode, "Painfotainment". Talking about the history of public torture, he mentioned that in the days of public executions, there's no record of anyone vomiting at the sight of blood, or fainting at witnessing death. Sensitivity to the sight of torture seems to be a modern phenomenon. Whether that's because something about modern culture creates the response, or because pre-modern cultures naturally suppressed an otherwise normal response, I think the implications are similar.
I had always assumed something like vomiting or fainting after witnessing gore were involuntary - and it's possible they are, even so - but what's fascinating is the possibility that there's some social/cultural input that can influence involuntary responses.
I find it terribly unjust that noise defeats quiet so absolutely.
19 people on a bus who want quiet and are quiet + 1 noisy person who doesn't care either way = 20 people on a noisy bus.
Both of these posts were interesting...getting a little more insight into the particular dynamics of why my bugaboo sounds result in <s>annoyance</s> let's not beat around the bush, straight-up rage. In some ways, it's good to have a differentiating handle beyond just "lol, autistic sensitivity issues", which even in relatively friendly groups can come across as Speshul Snowflake whiny. (If one person literally has stronger sense of hearing than everyone else, it's difficult to be accommodating while not also thinking that person's kinda crazy, I can't hear The Thing...) Unwanted bass thrummings can GDIAF, unnecessarily intrusive public phone calls/media sans headphones can eat an eggplant, people dragging or scuffing their shoes as they walk makes me want to break faces. Earwormey music too, because by design the torturous stimulus will keep playing in my head even after the original sound has stopped.
Wouldn't it be great if there was a universal Master Volume knob for reality.exe and sometimes you could just reach over and...turn it to zero?
Age and experience grants a little more control over the *reaction*, but honestly the trigger threshold seems to get worse, not better. So it's not encouraging that most of the standard desensitizing therapies don't seem to work much among even mild Hooked On Misophonics. But also liberating, in that Science(tm) now shows it's "not my fault" to a great extent, and I shouldn't feel endless guilt over not being able to overcome this particular flaw through Sheer Willpower. (I have had some promising results with prazosin, but obviously that's not a realistic option if I need to be alert and awake otherwise.)
I'm not sure if I have misophonia but when my neighboring farmers make high-pitched noises at night to scare away wild pigs, it's so debilitating that I once got out of my house at 2 AM on a cold night in full anger and confronted one of them about it. The noise was so distressing that I ended up talking to local authorities about the late-night nuisance. I don't think anyone else in the neighborhood has issues with this specific noise but it disturbs me to my core.
As someone on the autism spectrum, I would describe my sensory issues as a form of schizotypal thinking. I experience life through a social persecution model. I try to achieve things, and various forces conspire against me to prevent me from achieving them. Therefore, whenever I am in an unfamiliar environment, my brain automatically tries to fit the environment into this schema: I am trying to achieve something out of being in this environment, and various aspects of the environment (the bright light, how that guy is chewing, so on and so forth) are conspiring against me to prevent me from achieving this. Obviously I don't anthropomorphize the environment on a conscious level, but this is how my brain subconsciously processes it.
> Nobody loves chewing noises, [...]
Speak for yourself!
Anyway, for what it's worse is that ADHD meds made me way more tolerant of noises and more able to block them out / ignore them.
From understanding, misophonia is at least partially genetic, at least to a degree that 23andme is able to predict it. So it can't be all "fake".
That said, I am pretty sure I didn't have predisposition to misophonia, but got to some degree "infected" by it by my wife, who always had it. While before I didn't notice e.g. people chewing, after my wife pointed it out to me a few times, I started noticing it by myself and hating it.
Or, as very common for genetic causes, misophonia is related to/ favorised by more general trait(s) that are genetic. Social conformism, ability to control emotions, emotion intensity in the first place, social paranoia....
Like Scott said, many if not most people are annoyed by chewing sounds (and bodily sounds in general), and by relatively loud sounds emitted in public but not a public message per se (I think it's a kind of public proclamation of power for homo sapiens, hence music or honking are much more annoying than wind or global traffic noise). But this general annoyance becomes rage-inducing pain for some (and only in some circumstances).
Maybe it's the fake feeling those annoyance are deliberate and targeted toward the victim (i.e. social paranoia). Because when it's not fake and indeed totally deliberate, misophobia is not a fringe phenomenon but the actual norm (and probably the natural primate reaction to a clear social challenge). Just look at the donkey popping noise in the cab in Shrek 2. Crazily funny, because any homo sapiens (and I guess most primates) understand instinctively it's not just a popping noise but a challenge.
You should talk less, think less, and try more mindfulness instead. You are surely a very skilled talker, but silence is also a really good thing. And also, psychotherapy — not "science-based", just regular psychotherapy, with, you know, empathy, responsibility, observing your feelings, all that stuff.
EMDR worked for a lot of people, according to a French psychologist specialized in misophonia. But it seems like it only worked for misophonia caused by a specific event one can remember.
Beta blockers have been found to work, incidentillaly, on someone who had misophonia.
I suspect it's a power gain stuff, or more accurately, a way to regain power in situations you are at a disadvantage: getting absolutely mad-angry got you what you wanted in the past , i.e. get rid or control the behavior of annoying people (the crazy opponent wildcard you need to even chances in many game theory setups where you have a power disadvantage compared to your opponent) and/or get the support of bystanders so they stand with you in the conflict. So getting mad-angry got selected as a good reaction in some circumstances.
Of course you can fake it, but I have observed that for anger (or emotions in general), faking it and actually feeling it is not that different, including to yourself, and less and less the more you do it.
The difference of reaction if it's a total stranger chewing, or a close person, basically push me a lot toward this interpretation.
A good discrimination thing: would you react the same if it's an officer chewing, or a clearly dangerous guy in a shady area restaurant, with a lot of friends and nobody else around? Maybe you will feel the same but hide your anger? But as I said, hiding anger is not that different to not being as angry in the first place. Or not being angry at all if you are not into introspection :-)
With that interpretation, this kind of phobia/bad reaction to mildly annoying social stuff is greatly increased by victim joker card approach to social relations, and by any positive reaction to tantrums (by kids or adults). On the other hand, it should be greatly decreased in societies where loosing your cool is always a sign of weakness and almost never a winning move.
It should thus become more common those last 2 decades in western societies...
I suffer from this too, and appreciate this account. For me it started after living next door to obnoxious neighbours; I became hypersensitive to signs that it was about to become worse, and now even quite minor noises are unbearable. Before then I think I was quite normal. I lived in student accommodation and was quite tolerant of normal student rowdiness. But I'm also quite neurotic, and I wonder if that made me more susceptible.
An even simpler explanation: there is a set of neural pathways in the brain which is hypersensitive to the perception of a certain kind of stimuli. Not the sensory pathways themselves, but something farther upstream, closer to but just prior to consciousness. Something that the conscious mind perceives as sensory stimuli, but actually consists of some of that but combined/interacting with other things, like a hypersensitive emotion center.
Say your brain is producing random low level spurts of anger, your mind will start looking for something to attach it to/explain it with. Due to your own unique life experiences, that happens to be certain types of people making provocative background noises. I think something similar happens with schizophrenic hallucinations--the neural voice simulator is randomly overactive, so one hears voices, and attributes that to something in the external environment (in the case of schizophrenia, something that isn't there, but perhaps this condition is less extreme than that).
It seems to me that this would be something very difficult to impossible to control with mere conscious will power. Maybe you could train yourself out of it, but even that isn't certain. Try training yourself out of tinnitus for example (a condition where the brain creates the simulation of a sound that isn't there).
Perhaps you could redirect the anger toward something else (a punching bag in the garage might work). Relaxation techniques could help moderate the behavioral response. But you're not going to reason your way out of it, hence the low efficacy of CBT.
Commenting here just to push back against the social norms of "don't make noise when other people are present" which some commenters here are trying to establish. Nope, that's not the norm. I don't care about chewing, music, whistling, etc. Just live and let live. I much more prefer the norms of "do whatever you want as long as it's not really really loud for others" and I'm talking about music at a loud concert type of loud. (I don't mind street musicians though)
Huh! I experience a bunch of righteous anger in this way where I terminally want people to suffer and I hadn't realized how many of the cases are sound-associated. It's not all sound-based, there's a generalized righteous-anger-thing that applies in unrelated situations too, but it's unusually common for norm violations that look like needlessly bothering nearby people with noises (revving motorcycles, construction crews starting at 8AM in the morning, etc).
I don't know if misophonia is the right term here, because I'm not intrinsically averse to the noises outside of the moral context? E.g. if you tell me I accidentally wandered into a motorcycle-revving parade where everyone signed up for this experience and the motorcycle-revvers are providing a service to everyone but me, I don't find the experience of hearing it any more aversive than the raw sensation, which by itself is extremely minor. (Or if I wander across someone revving their motorcycle in the middle of the woods, where they could have reasonably expected no one else to be around.) And it never triggers for my friends having fun - only when it seems like the perpetrator is pretty flagrantly disregarding the preferences of people around them for minor personal benefit.
I resonate with this. I can remember being on the last day of a 10-day silent meditation retreat and hearing the person next to me clearing his throat every 15 seconds drove me insane for an hour. Made clear to me how little progress I had made during the retreat.
I am like your father- if a noise startles me during certain phases of sleep (especially the first 1/2 hour or so) then I am instantly wide awake and it takes a while for the adrenaline to wear off enough to be able to fall back asleep again. The noise can be very low volume - even right at the threshold of hearing - and it has the same effect. I am almost certain that this is a physiological rather than psychological response. I am also hypersensitive to noises during other phases of sleep, but if those wake me up then I can usually fall back asleep pretty quickly.
Interestingly one of my daughters has exactly the same sensitivity, the other is unaffected.
If you are also like this, I would strongly urge you to try to find a quiet place to sleep even if that means moving. It is hard to appreciate how big an impact getting frequently woken up can have on your life while you are in it. But once you can get setup so that you can usually sleep though the night and get caught up on your missed sleep, it is amazing how much better will you feel.
Supporting anecdote: my gf has misophonia. If I do ANYTHING while we're on the phone (like get a glass of water) she goes nuts. She claims that she only developed it after dating a guy a few years ago who had it. He yelled at her so much for making noise that she internalized it and now does the same.
Also I'm not generally misophonic but if a neighbor's music invades my house I sometimes lose my mind. My tolerance is very context-specific, though. I currently live in a nice, quiet neighborhood and about once a month I have to hear muffled band-practice sounds from a neighbor. I notice but it doesn't enrage me because my brain classifies it as reasonable behavior - it's rare, during the day, and I know it'll be over soon. My last neighbors where COMPLETE methed-out assholes and would make noise constantly. Ten times a day I'd have to listen to their car stereos blast for 30 seconds while they parked or left. I couldn't STAND it - it was the primary factor that led me to move - I think because it made me feel helpless in the face of aggressive behavior (both they and the police ignored my complaints). I felt out of control and therefore got enraged - I fantasized about burning their house down. With my current situation I don't feel that way because I trust that they're reasonable people and if I really had a problem that they would respond to my complaints. So I have misophonic reactions that very consciously require a cognitive loop ("those assholes!") to activate.
I appreciate this post, because I have a rage trigger that's totally unrelated to sound but I see a lot of the same patterns here.
I get unreasonably pissed about bad UI or poor functionality in software. I was born in the 80s and have been using computers since I was a child, but somehow in the last ~5 years I feel like nothing works anymore. Stuff like this just happens every day:
- You click on a sub-section of a webpage and it asks for a login. You put in your username/pw and it puts you back on the front page. When you click the place you wanted to go again, it asks for login again.
- There's some text in a textbox that you want to edit, so you click in the middle of the text to put your cursor in the right spot, and at first your cursor does appear there, but after a second, it puts the cursor at the beginning of the text.
- I see a comment on an article I want to reply to, but there's no reply button. I figure maybe I have to create an account? I go through the whole email rigamarole, and there's still no reply button. I check for a solution and people say "make sure to verify your email" which I just did.
- You click the "translate" button and it doesn't say "service not available," it pretends like it works, but just returns nothing at all.
- Discord shows you an image, but then when you click to see the full size, it starts loading the image that you were already looking at???
I could go on, but there's infinity of these now. And every time I grit my teeth. "Why. Why. Why are you doing this. Why is it like this. Why anything."
It becomes a self-reinforcing pattern. I'm mad that I wasted 10 seconds on something that should've taken 2 seconds, but I'm also returning to being mad about everything I was mad about any time recently. And, being a millenial, I associate "getting pissed at technology" with older generations, so it doesn't sit well with my self-image either.
I can feel you. In my late 40s now I just hate all the malfunctioning things wasting my valuable time. A 10 years older good friend of mine switched to apple tech a whole ago because he couldn't stand anymore all the crappy things not working together correctly. My wife is not a tech enthusiast like me and she hates bad tech all her life, that never changed. A lot of females feel the same, more then males, I think. There is even the acronym "woman's expectance factor" for tech solutions with good enough usability and reliability to get accepted by womem. So guess you and me just get older and the excitement about new tech just has worn out. Now our brains just account the costs of adapting to changes or new tech working differently way higher than the expected dopamine kick out of playing with a new toy.
Shouldn’t it be an inverted pentagram?
I felt similar more then 4 decades. Couple years ago because getting to sleep at night got even worse with endless thought trains and stuff my doctor prescribed me "eszitalopram, a mild medicine who will help calming your endless thoughts down. That will ease your sleep". It did and it turned out to me it's a widely used SSRI and antidepressant and it changed a ton of my then life long issues to the better. Turns out I might have had severe ADHD my whole life and upping my serotonin (not dopamine, what is said to be the cause of ADHD) improved everything so much. I hated noises, music, smells, smoking especially and tons of other things, I was overthinking everything, getting angry at random things and going into a lot of fights. And guess what? I stil don't like cigarette smoke the most time - but once I even had the impression it smelled delicious like roasted tobacco. What the f*...a ton of other annoying things and behaviours which bothered me a lot from random people doing tiny random stuff up to the upcoming thermal death of the universe - stopped as well. Not 100% - but it's easy now to just recognize a bad thought and tell to myself: stop it - and I stop.
Our teenage daughter is getting mad about chewing of her younger brother. And she hates the noise and feeling of walking over sand. She says she cannot stand both. And a lot of foods textures. And smells. And I got the impression it was better then she was a time on eszitalopram as well. Crazy brain chemistry...
A few years ago there was a study that exposure to street noise is connected with risk of dementia. I hated street noise before, but after reading the study I felt my hate was validated by science, and it made my misophonia so much worse.
Here's the study in case you, too, would like to develop (more severe) misophonia: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.n1954
Huh. This is me. I too have misophonia and have noticed that it's not entirely about the sound itself as much as it is about the social contract being broken or feeling threatened. It happens most strongly for sounds that have a visceral effect on me - someone shouting and being angry at their crying children, a motorcyclist with an unnecessarily loud engine in a residential area, but sometimes extend to much more innocuous sounds: people laughing in the office (can't they see I need to concentrate?) clattery keyboards (surely they notice that it's unreasonably loud) annoying coughs (why haven't they seen the doctor yet?) car horns (it's not going to get you there any faster, and I'm sure you're just using it to express your anger) etc. that trigger an internal monologue of varying unreasonableness. I expect the people who get annoyed by chewing sounds also have an unreasonable monologue which tells them that it is being done deliberately, or that the chewing people are being inconsiderate in some way.
The only thing I've found that helps is meditation. noticing the difference between literal sensation and my emotional reactions to it allows me to let go of the emotional reactions. It doesn't help with everything - I can't get rid of my visceral fear/anger reaction to a loud angry motorbike sound - but it helps a lot.
But why would only noise have such a network that creates trapped priors? Couldn't you draw this network for anything that bothers anyone? Maybe we do have it, and that's why each person is inordinately annoyed by something which "pushes their buttons"? Maybe I should try meditation with my somethings, since therapy didn't seem to make a dent...
My personal torture is hearing throat-related sounds, particularly those having to do with contagion, like coughing or sniffling. Interestingly, I first noticed it when I hit puberty, when someone coughed behind me in 6th grade and I suddenly wanted to jump out of my chair and strangle them or do literally anything to make them stop.
I didn't know at the the time, but misophonia is one of the first symptoms of approaching PMS during the luteal phase and there is research to back this up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgAXZ6LmZrI Now that I track my cycle, I know that the misophonia also correlates with compulsive cleaning and OCD symptoms and fixation on other "purity signifiers."
What do all these things have in common? To me, "disruptive" noise, injustice (particularly violation of social norms), OCD, germs/coughing, and sensitivity to stimuli all point to some underlying mechanism involving perceived order/disorder in information processing. Maybe it's not about the specific sensory input conveying the information--sound, sight, emotion--but rather the amount of "informational disorder" or "wrongness" inherent in the experience of perception that triggers the extreme negative response.
Well, shoot, you've rained on my parade a little. I had a bad case for any kind of mouth noises as a child...open mouther chewing, snoring, sniffling, or teeth sucking. Almost the entirety of my third grade journal that we were required to write in the first 20 minutes of class every day is dedicated to my hatred of the snorffling, sniffling, mouth noises of the kid who sat next to me, and how much I hated him. My grandma sucking her dentures also made me murderous, and snoring while I was trying to sleep out me into straight up serial killer fury.
However, this has gone away in adulthood. I was thinking it's bc my sense of hearing has dulled, so I'm just not that sensitive about noises. But I think it's probably just more likely that I have way more control over my environment now, and don't have to ever be in a situation I feel trapped in where I'm listening to these noises.
But I did have a rage recently, and in this case it was about the absence of noise. My Uber driver home from the airport drove me the entire 25 minute drive with NO music or radio or talking or any type. In a silent electric car!!! Just total silence, stuck in a car with a stranger. I was boiling mad. What kind of psycho just drives in total silence like that?!? At least put some low music on. There wasn't even any car hum bc it was electric. I could have just asked him to turn on music, but I was so bothered that any weirdo would NOT have any on that I kept waiting to see if he would truly just drive in complete silence the whole way. My fists were balled and shaking by the last leg of the drive, and I was so furious that I kicked my suitcase across the room and scared the dog, once I got back into the house.
So that can't be a noise irritation like I always thought misophonia was. It was obviously a noise triggered sense of anger and outrage that someone was doing something wrong and fucked up. Though in this case it was just silence. So are you saying basically that all misophoniacs are just major control freak jerks??
I suffer from targeted misophonia: I have a cabin deep in the woods, where I go to for peace and quiet. Unfortunately, I have a neighbor who is "a local" who presumably doesn't much appreciate foreigners in his town, and liberally uses his noisy ATV to buzz around my property for his own enjoyment, and I presume, my annoyance. A double-whammy.
Lately, he's also added some windchimes where the sound carries directly to my property thanks to the wind that's continually coming off the water. So, even when he's not buzzing around with his ATV, I get the "pleasant sounds" of a large windchime interrupting my enjoyment of natural sounds.
The windchimes and the ATV sounds have scarred me. I now get triggered when I hear similar sounds in *other* situations, even when I'm not in my idyllic cabin in the woods.
Everything Scott admitted to seems right here. It's something of an intersection of righteous indignation combined with particular aural sensitivities.
As a kid, I had a huge aversion to the sound of metal scraping metal. I have no idea where it comes from and imagining the noise makes me shudder a little bit, but hearing it in the real world is something I don't even notice anymore. I remember there was a time that we were out to dinner with my mom and grandpa, and my mom stepped away to go to the bathroom, and my little sister started scraping her silverware together to torture me and I was reaching across the table to make her stop, and then my mom came back and saw us fighting and punished both of us, which I thought at the time was extremely unfair. Reading this post, I'd have expected that to cause some kind of loop where every future recurrence of the noise causes me to remember that event, making me hate it more, etc. Fortunately that hasn't seemed to happen and the problem instead went away.
I had a similar situation where anyone touching the back of my head (or pulling the hair there) felt like torture, and that made me afraid to get my hair cut so my hair ended up growing really long. In 1st or 2nd grade, another student grabbed my hair and yanked on it while we were eating, which caused me to much distress I abandoned my food and was inconsolable for a while. I don't see any reason why this couldn't cause a similar kind of thought loop to misphonia, but if didn't and now I have no problem whatsoever with the back of my head being touched.
Both of these happening sound to me like some kind of classic ASD hypersensitivity issues. I wonder why I had those issues then, but don't now. Is that a common progression? I certainly don't really feel like I got less autistic, haha.
Two things have helped me be less bothered by noise:
1. C. 2017, for my tinnitus, trying a a mindfulness practice of paying close attention to the sound. Curiosity rather than judgement, so it was also also acceptance practice.
I think the sound became less interesting to my brain and so it was largely ruined out.
2. In 2007, spending several days near a call-to-prayer loudspeaker during Ramadan in Sumatra, which started before 4am and continued for over half an hour. The noise was loud enough to be physically painful to my ears, at least for the first few minutes. Left me exhausted.
But by the third night I was sleeping through it. And from 2009 I spent another 1.5 years in an Indonesian neighbourhood with sporadic loud noises at night (the security guard loudly whacking a metal pole on the street near my window to signify that all is well).
There was a deliberately practice of acceptance in these cases as well – I recognised that it was my reaction that was keeping me alert, rather than the noise itself.
But I'm still very bothered by the sound of people chewing with mouth open. Mainly if there is a sense that it's not going to stop soon – perhaps that is why it's less troubling When a stranger does it.
I have it with chewing, sneezing, and sometimes talking or music when trying to concentrate.
I've attended three meditation retreats and done tons of meditation. Had the same realizations as the article described.—it definitely helps. I can recognize sounds as, appearances in consciousness, feel the bodily sensations they associate with, and tolerate waaaaay more than I used to.
While reading the article, a lady at the next table sneezed. I muttered, "fuck you," out loud, and a feeling of rage accompanied by the thought "Do you want to get kicked in the face?" arose.
After reading this, I hypothesized that it should be possible to learn some sort of Voluntary Reverse Misophonia, in which the sounds of others induce a sense of gratitude, appreciation, and sympathetic joy.
I tried Reverse Misophonia a few times, and it was a positive experience. Listening to the sounds of the people around me in a crowd, it would normally be on the order of seconds of waiting to catch some laughter, and it is easy to feel relaxed goodness at the sound of laughter, even if you don’t hear the joke.
Pretty quickly, I got a tad annoyed when the people around me were being too quiet! But unlike regular misophonia, there’s no righteous anger (since nobody owes you their sounds), so I returned to peace easily.
I’m putting this experiment on hiatus out of concern that this mental-self-experimentation has limited upside for me, since I already like people and have a healthy mind. (the upside might include Nirvana, but I don’t care enough about Nirvana to try). And it has large potential downside (regular misophonia sounds awful. Plus, the “voluntary” part of “voluntary reverse misophonia” is a dealbreaker for me, and I don’t know if reverse misophonia will be voluntary).
I haven't got it as bad as you have (or did), but I've definitely got it. In my case, the overwhelming aversion is rooted in the sense that the people making the noise are being selfish, inconsiderate, and disrespectful. They are not sharing our common sensory environment responsibly. The same applies to chewing sounds. If other people can hear you chew, you shouldn't be eating.
This is a very fascinating post, but what actually was going through my head as I was reading was “Wow, no wonder Scott prefers quiet suburbs over busy cities.”
I feel like I’m sort of the opposite? Mild background noise is mildly relaxing compared to complete silence.
I think in most cases it has to be a combination of things. Your roommate might have cemented your identity as a misophone by pointing it out but that doesn't mean they weren't pointing out something real in the first place. Similarly, I used to be intensely sound- and light-sensitive to the point of construction headphones and heavy shades when I went outside, because those things would cause me intense pain. The Alexander Technique severed the vicious cycle that caused the pain - it was my flinching reaction that was giving me the intense headaches that would blow up into migraines, and I became able to control the flinch and smooth out the tightening of my muscles. I no longer have the extreme reaction (and accompanying avoidant behaviors, and accompanying self-identification as Somebody Who Cannot Tolerate Noise Or Light) that I used to have. AND YET... I still jump more than other people do at loud noises, I am still unable to differentiate sounds from loud background noise as easily as other people, I still get stunned and overwhelmed by noises more easily. (And similarly with lights, I am still more sensitive to/bothered by lighting conditions than your average human.) That was the thing I was reacting to that was giving me those symptoms in the first place. The fact that I can mitigate my outsized reaction to the stimulus now doesn't imply that I'm experiencing the stimulus the same as everyone else. My eardrums shake a certain amount and most people's brains go "noise" and my brain goes "NOISE" and sometimes "AUGH, NOISE" and that's just how it is.
Scott, ahm, this article hit home. I have observed many of the patterns you speak off. I mean, if you take all these patterns apart, it's just an exaggerated affective response. I have no idea what emotions are, but trashing the walls by trying to mimic the neighbors' idiotic sounds back at them is quite behavioral and affect driven. Apparently they drop things. I mean, so do I. I have to say, I try to be fair. When I drop things I have to hate myself as much as I hate the neighbors dropping things. And it works. Same result.
The most probable explanation is that you are the reincarnation of Charles Babbage.
Typo "Again, that’s now how I remember things"
I have the same kind of misophonia as you do, only somewhat worse, I think - I can't imagine living with a roommate on purpose [I've only done it once in my life and it was a disaster, and living with family even in a big space goes incredibly poorly], or abandoning my big construction headphones whenever I'm *inside*.
I have the exact same emotional profile of reflexive straining to hear the noise to see whether I should be enraged. I'm not saying it's not a personal identity thing for you, but for me it's not. I have nothing like your narrative history with it - for me it's just something that's been there for as long as I can remember. I acquired baggage when people reacted to my strong reactions to sound as a kid, but that's because I'm highly sensitive to other people's feelings [particularly about me]; I *know* their feelings weren't causing my strong reactions, in my case.
I have the thing where family members trigger me more. I also have the thing where I reflexively keep straining for sound at the edge of my detection to see whether I should be angry. I don't think it's fake.
My theory of misophonia, for a while, has been that the weird filiophobic rage response is a corruption or overflow of the brain's instinctive-behavioral *rape deterrence* pathway. For whatever reason, when the trigger sounds are heard, misophonics' emotional systems react like we're being sexually violated, even though the normal other observables that would correspond with that aren't occurring, so the reaction is "socially inappropriate". It's been found that misophonics have an unusually strong correlation between activation in the amygdala and activation in the insular cortex [which deals with gastrointestinal stuff, righteous anger, emotional internality, music and other emotion-producing sounds].
> Again, that’s now how I remember things.
I try not to pick at typos, but this one flips the meaning. Presumably it’s supposed to be “that’s not how I remember things”, as concluded the previous paragraph.
> I talk a big talk, but so far knowing all of this hasn’t helped me tolerate noise more, not even a little bit.
But you say you’ve improved, eg not wearing huge airplane headphones whenever you go outside. Did something different help? Or does this not represent an improvement?
If you didn’t know all this, you’d likely be much more caught up in your frustration and think / talk about it very differently. Instead you’re describing it with a great deal of detachment.
So maybe you’re saying the emotional response hasn’t blunted, but separately, you’re better at dealing with it?
(FWIW this is how I feel about flying. No matter how much I learn about plane safety, there is some core part of me that is sure my doom is imminent on every flight I take. But I live with this fear and take flights because I know it’s pushing me in the wrong direction.)
Wow, your experience with this is surprisingly similar to mine! I've never heard anyone else articulate it before.
I totally agree that there is something about the "inconsiderate-ness" of the noise that is part of the problem, and fuels a righteous anger. I used to fantasize about cutting the headphone cords of the NY subway riders who had their music turned up so loud I could hear it in their headphones.
I have historically been very sensitive to feeling dismissed or like my feelings are not validated, which makes me feel very angry. So the idea of "people make annoying noises and they aren't considerate of my feelings/needs to *not* hear those noises" fits very well as part of that pattern.
I've also noticed that I am very afraid of making annoying noises *myself,* lest someone criticize me for doing so. And I've seen in my life that I'm sometimes extra critical of people who do things that I am afraid to do. So I have been practicing doing this, in small ways, like playing a youtube short on the subway without headphones, so that others can (somewhat) hear it.
All in all, I have actually found some improvement in my misophonia (?) in the past few years, via:
1. Mindfulness in general and mindfulness of my own anger, specifically.
2. Working in therapy on self-validation
3. Practicing doing the things that I am scared to do (which relates in this case because I'm scared to make annoying noises)
To be clear, I worked on these things for reasons unrelated to misphonia, but I think it has ended up helping with that anyway.
Hope this helps somebody! Fascinating topic.
I'm late to reading this article and you probably won't see this comment now, but I recommend the book "Sounds Like Misophonia". It helped reduce my misophonia by at least 50% I would say. I just don't notice the sounds as much as I used to. When I do notice them, they tend not to be as rage-inducing as they used to be (depending on my current stress levels and other contextual factors).
I definitely think my misophonia is in some way related to the fact I grew up in a house with a father that did all sorts of incredibly annoying things with zero self awareness and absolute impunity. No one could call him out as he had an aggressive temper, especially bad when any fault was brought to his attention. I was effectively muted from expressing any legitimate negative feelings. When I hear someone eating noisily or talking too loudly with no social grace It is immediately triggering and brings up very strong feelings of being trapped and feelings of huge resentment that I, and other people, should have to put up with that person's oversized presence and undersized lack of awareness. I get it even with my kids, even when they were small and had no idea that what they were doing might be rude or uncomfortable. It feels like the personal has made a deliberate effort to slight me, like I'm being prodded with a stick. I know in my conscious mind that this is ridiculous but it is an emotional reaction from somewhere much deeper.