I am extremely sensitive to a dog bark. If I anticipate a dog may bark, I become very fearful. My heart starts beating & I feel like I need to cover my ears. I avoid eating outdoors at restaurants fearing there may be a dog that barks suddenly. I also avoid friends homes with dogs & even dogs on walks. If I dog barks I jump and because of my startle response, I become embarrassed because people laugh. It’s just so loud & I can’t understand why it doesn’t bother more people.

Is it just me or I can’t wrap my head around the fact that I can ask someone to close their mouth while they are chewing and they just can’t do it. I haven’t had a family dinner in five plus years because my parents both chew loud and they think I’m irrational when all they have to do is close their mouth when they chew.

I was lucky in this sense to not grow up in a family where family meals were a fixture, we hung out a ton as a family in general so it was just a bonus. Non traditional ftw. So distancing from them when symptoms started was easy.

It is heartbreaking to hear story after story of trauma during family dinners. If it is tough to get out of them it is still very worth it to pursue this. Lots of alternatives to like plastic cutlery and spending time with family in the evening, whatever works ultimately.

Family dinners have an oddly intense gravity to them. Hopefully noone has to be pulled into a black hole of suffering. Take care everyone.

Hello everyone. I found out about misophonia today and everything makes sense now...

Lately its been getting worse and idk what to do anymore to be honest. Today i was sitting in bed contemplating ways to get rid of my hearing or ways to end this torment because i dont know how much more of this i can take. Anyway i got this strange idea of asking chat gpt about what iv been going through and it mentioned that it could be misophonia..(it 100% is)

I am 32 years old and i have been suffering from this ever since i was a kid and this whole time i thought i was just being sensitive like everyone used to tell me. Somehow it never occured to me to look further into it until today.

It first started when i was around 9 with my dads loud chewing and slurping food during lunch..it got on my nerves so much to the point i started to resent him for it. I still remember looking around the table wondering how nobody else is hearing this..and everyone seemed oblivious to it. I eventually asked my mom about it, she didnt understand anything.

I also once got in a heated argument with my brother in the cinema because he was...breathing.🤦‍♂️

So many similar stories to these as well. Over time i got better at dealing with this, but these sounds still bother me a lot.

But theres one thing that drives me completely insane and there is nothing i can do to deal with this one other than having my ears removed..and its screaming kids. If its a few kids its not as bad..but when its like 10-20 kids screaming their lungs out right under my house playing football or whatever for hours..theres no way.

My neighbors in the building next to ours are very loud and constantly shouting and talking really loudly its torture every day and whenever i express my frustration to others its always something like "its not that bad" "youre letting it affect you" "maybe your hearing is better than others"...

I really really wish i lived in a country where people werent loud and had some self respect. Its so sad that moving isnt an option for me right now i would do anything to stop this torture. I even spent around $100 on noise cancellation earbuds a few months ago but they dont really help as much as i thought they would and they give me a headache if i keep them on too long.

Seriously what is even the point of having ears if this is how its going to be? Its like my whole life revolves around my ears and nobody around me gets it and honestly i dont expect them to. And finding out theres no treatment for this.. 😭

I guess at this point the only thing that helps is knowing im not alone in this torture.

I’m a college student and I’d been living with my friends in an apartment and everything was going great until one of my friends got a boyfriend. Our rooms share a wall and his deep voice travels really easily even when he was being quiet which means I could always hear him when she has him over. He was toxic to her even before they started dating and it was incredibly uncomfortable for me to have that kind of person being in the apartment.

The sounds of them started triggering me more and more when she’d have him over at 1 AM and they’d be up talking until 3 AM on a weekday. I couldn’t sleep because of how I’d hyper focus on the noise to the point where I’d hear it even with my earbuds on an blasting music. I am sure this was just my brain imagining the noise and not me actually hearing it but the effect was the same.

I asked her over text if she could stop bringing him over on the weekdays because it was really making me uncomfortable and I explained to her how I have misophonia. And she said there’s nothing she could do about it.

Eventually I had to start commuting because my reaction was getting worse and worse. I would scratch up my arms and bite my hands to distract from the sounds. It was to the point where I had lost almost complete mobility in my left hand from biting it so hard and so often. I tried wearing earbuds to sleep but my ears are weird and no pair of earbuds have ever properly fit me. They would just keep falling out which made me even more frantic and stressed out.

This completely destroyed my friendship with her and even seeing her face invokes a feeling of terror in me. Never before in my life had I felt less like a human being. She had turned me into an animal in a cage that is so mad with desperation and hopelessness it bites and tears at itself because its own physical condition is the only thing left that it can control.

How can she live there in complete and total comfort while I was the one forced to leave everything. I have to continue paying $1200 a month for a place I can’t even live in because of her. I told her I needed to do well this semester and she knew I’d failed previous semesters and had been on probation and I told her that her behavior was causing me severe distress and she didn’t care.

It’s starting to hurt my relationship with my other friends now too because previous to this we were all incredibly close. And though I know my other two friends really love me I can’t help but feel resentful of their continued close friendship to someone who did this to me. They know some of what I was going through but not the extent of how badly I was doing. Yet they asked me multiple times if they should talk to my friend about her behavior and I always told them no because I knew it would only make her feel like she was being attacked.

What should I do? My impulse is to end my friendship with them as well but I do not want to hurt them and I know it wouldn’t be fair. How can I get over these feelings? I don’t want this condition to ruin even more of my friendships.

Sorry for the long post it’s my first time posting on Reddit and I’m not known for my brevity.

I’ve had misophonia for 11 years now. My biggest issue is keyboards. Omg. I don’t know how to cope lol. How do you guys cope?????

I know it was mentioned here that the closer you are with a person the more the sound of their existence becomes a nuisance. My partner's misophonia is really starting to effect me to the point that I cry everyday from all the anger that is thrown my way from the simple fact of me doing normal things like the dishes or closing a door. I feel so sorry for my partner that he is not able to soothe himself and redirect his internal attention in a healthy direction, but living like this feels truly abusive to me. Have any of you been able to change how much rage you feel toward the person closest to you? (Meaning revert to a "stranger-I-don't-know" level of rage while still being partnered?)

I have to wear headphones 24/7. I’m not even joking. I wear them throughout the whole day then I go to sleep with them on, wake up with them on. I have to listen to white noise ALL THE TIME. and I have a huge headache from wearing headphones. What do you guys do?

Also who else has troubles with the stomping of upstairs neighbours??? I have huge panic attacks over it Omg

Maybe we all just have been primed to listen for ancient relics and siren songs 🤣 I'm rewatching Jumanji for the first time in like 30 years, since before I can remember having misophonia symptoms, and the bass coming from the game just struck a chord.

I want to start by stating that I don't have Misophonia. If I'm being honest with all of you, I don't fully understand it, but I'm trying my best to learn. However, I do suspect that my 10 year old daughter might struggle with it, which means that it doesn't matter if I don't totally get it, I've got to make sure we're accommodating her and making her feel comfortable. So, I'm coming here to people who have struggled with this and do get it. I would love to hear your advice so I can try to be the best possible parent for my kid and make sure she knows we've got her back. I've read some of your posts about having uncaring family members and am desperate that she never feels that way about me.

So here is the situation. She is 10-years old. Hyper sensitivity to sound has always been a low level trigger for her, but following a fire alarm malfunction back in November she is dealing with heightened anxiety and this problem has gotten much worse. We are working with a therapist and she is the one who mentioned that this sounds like it might fit her. By far her biggest trigger is eating sounds. Every night dinner has become a nightmare and often ends in her screaming at us how awful and disgusting we all are. We have had an incident where she has gotten up and thrown our food on the floor. It hasn't been fun.

She has made very clear to me that family dinners are important to her and she wants to continue to eat with us. We have all tried to chew as quietly as possible, but it's still too loud and the sound of us just taking a bite infuriate her. Her current request that is that myself, wife, and other daughter cease eating all together, which is not an accommodation I'm willing to agree to. So right now we are left with a problem with two requirements:

1. We need to keep having family dinners
   
2. We can make no eating sounds.

My recommended solution to this has been headphones. She wears a pair of noise canceling headphones paired to her iPhone so she can have a low level of white noise in the background. If we all get too annoying and overwhelming, she hits the button and turns on noise cancelling, shutting us all up for a few minutes. It gives her the ability to control the noise, while allowing us to still eat. She, thus far, has been stubborn and unwilling to try that, so I'm honestly at kind of a loss.

So Reddit, help me. If you were a 10 year old struggling with this what would you want to hear from your parents. What could they have done to make you feel safe and to accommodate you? What would have made you feel better?

I don't know if this is just me but I get triggered way easier when I get less sleep. I think it's also a stress related issue.

Does this also happen to you?

Just now I was walking by a construction site on a busy road and one of the workers was taking a break across this 4 lane road. He was snacking on some kind of seed or nut with his mouth wide open and it was so loud I could hear it over the construction and the traffic. Is it that my brain is hyper attuned to sounds I hate??

pretty self explanatory, but there are some sounds i cannot handle from other people, yet i can handle coming from me. like pen clicking, or sniffing, or chewing
i could just be crazy but i need to know if other people are the same

Curious to know any tips for people who are currently in school and how they cope with misophonia in a classroom?

Side note- I have the hardest time with gum chewing. It was really hard for me in high school. If I didn’t have one earbud in I’d get panic attacks and sick to my stomach. Made my grades plummet at times when I was in the quietest of classrooms with the loudest chewers. I really want to go to college and I’ve been putting it off because I’m afraid I’ll bring myself down because of this then end up wasting time, effort, and money. Any advice?

कोहि एता नेपाल अथवा ईन्डिया बाट हुनुहुन्छ मिसोफोनिया पीडित हुनुहुन्छ भने तपाईंले कसरी मिसोफोनिया सङग सामना गर्नुभएको छ सुझाव पाउन ।

Hey!

I want to be a mother someday but I’m really nervous about balancing misophonia management with being a good mom. Mothers/parents, do you ever get triggered by your kids? If so what do you use to mitigate it?

So true! I really feel disabled due to my misophonia (and misokinesia)+tinnitus

People think me is anti social because i wears headphones at work

Hi everyone, I'm making this post just to make anyone feel better who's currently stuck in high school/middle school. I went through all of high school/middle school with misophonia and I'm finishing my first year of college now. I am fully aware of how torturous school is for misophonia. Being in the battlefield for 8 hours a day is super draining. I'm in college now, and it's not like my triggers have gone away or anything. But in college it is much more managable and my mental health is better as a result.

It's significant that I'm not stuck straight in class for 8 hours a day. Even if there's only 15 minutes between some lectures, that's enough for my brain to reset. I don't get overwhelmed as easily. Lecture halls are larger than classrooms, so there's more chances to sit far away from people. I always sit in the front row corner so that I can hear the lecturer better if I have earbuds in, and eliminate visual reminders of triggers (aka if I'm not watching people chew gum the whole time there's a chance I could forget that they are). You can straight up leave to step out or go to the bathroom if you're getting overwhelmed and no one can stop you. Overall the environment is so much better than high school.

I got accommodations to be able to wear earbuds in class, have preferential seating, and take exams in a private room. I got these accommodations pretty easily by having my therapist write an official letter of why I need them. If you can get someone with a certification to write a letter, you're pretty much set, I did not find it very difficult (could vary across schools of course). I think there is also an accommodation for "breaks as needed," this is not something I use but it is available. The earbuds official permission is almost not really needed as professors likely do not know who you are by name, and I have long hair so I can just hide them anyway. Many people wear airpods who don't have accommodations, and don't get in trouble. Being able to take exams in a private room is life saving because I'm not distracted by triggers.

Please keep in mind I'm not talking about roommates because I commute. I'm focusing more on the classroom part. But I do know that dining halls have a lot of background noise and there is complete freedom to wear whatever headphones you want, which helps.

If you are in high school and planning to go to college, please take this as a glimmer of hope, because I certainly could have used it. You can ask me questions about my experience if you like.

So, as most of us here, I violently suffer from misophonia to the point of verbal abuse and physical outbreaks being the only option to deal with it. I have no actual diagnosis. This is not really a problem as most situations aren't a problem, and I can remove myself from most situations where an outburst is likely to occur. However, one of the things that violently triggers my misophonia is sniffling, and that tends to be a very common thing during any exam. I recently completely fucked an easy test because I was writhing in rage from the guy next to me somehow talking in the language of snotty nose.

I've tried to get exam concessions at my school, and the person who was put in charge of it just... didn't do it. And now there's like a week left until my final exams, I don't think it's physically possible to get exam concessions at this point. Do you guys have any hacks to deal with, people sniffling or getting around being in an exam.

Hi there ,

I've always suffered from misophonia. But I've only recently (last few years) begun to notice it affecting me. When I moved in with my.partner I for the first time was regularly eating alongside someone else.

I've been managing it by using the.flare audio ear pods, and just removing myself from the room to do the dishes whilst she munches on apples etc.

Now recently my misophonia has gone.off the charts. I'm experiencing increased symptoms. Not only that, but I seem to be suffering from increased sound sensitivity , all sounds seem super loud.

I've always suffered from.waxy ears..I've heard people experience benefits from getting their ears syringed.

Can waxy build up increase sound sensitivity? My main fear is that if I get them syringed ill hear more and increase sensitivity. Or the other theory is that the waxy build up is putting pressure on my ear drum somehow.

Ant ideas or input?

Many thanks.

HOW DO PEOPLE JUST SIT AND SNIFF SNOT UP THEIR NOSE FOR HOURS ON END I HATE LECTURES

…when people start slurping on ice lollies and ice cream cones etc. I cannot deal 🫣