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Comment by ehnto | Hacker News Reader

I live with an endless barking dog. It isn't mine, but it wakes me constantly.

If there has been peace for a while and it barks, I can feel my entire body change "mode" to stressed. It is uncanny. Even if mentally it hasn't bothered me, my body still goes into battle mode.

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I have the same reaction (physical) to a screaming kid. It has made raising my baby incredibly difficult (especially the first year). Mentally, I understand that it's just a crying baby and that's what they do, but physically I was shutting down - body tensing, a surge of extremely stressful energy rushing through my body and ultimately being left unable to function. My wife thought I was nuts and was just faking it. I tried searching for a medical explanation but came up short. The closest I would describe it as something I hear chronic fatigue people say -- not having energy to get up, no matter their mental state. I would sit there, practically paralyzed by stress, or whatever that stress induced.

I don't know about the paralysis but I once read an internet fact that stated our brains are innately wired to react to babies and children's screams in order to ward off potential threats to our retirement plans.

I believe it. I work in an environment that many people would consider stress inducing; I engage in amateur combat sports; however, when my six month old loses it, I absolutely get an immediate pulse raising stress reaction.

I've read articles that say that when they stress-test fighter pilots by having them do cognitive test while wearing headphones with different sounds, they usually mix in infants crying. It's one of the most distracting things for a person to hear.

For me, it wasn't when the kids started crying that was the most stressful, but when they wouldn't stop. You check their diapers, you check if they're hungry, you rock them gently, and even then sometimes they just wouldn't stop crying. After a while the noise would be so bad that I had to hand them off to my wife, and she did the same when she became too frustrated.

Funnily enough, it made me immune to other kids crying. Before I had kids I would get very irritated at noisy kids or crying infants in the subway. Now, I'm just happy it's not my kids and that it's someone else's problem!

In croatia there was a famous case of a judge ordering a dog not to bark at night.

*https://www.cbsnews.com/news/court-if-dog-keeps-barking-at-n...

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