Nearly 20% Adults May Have Misophonia – Significant Negative Responses to Sounds
neurosciencenews.com
neurosciencenews.com
Also, if you have a straight piped Dodge Challenger, I assure you your neighbors hate you.
I like fast cars and fast motorcycle, but I hate obnoxious ones. For any street/strip car there's no reason to eliminate the catalytic converter or mufflers. Because the sound is largely about the resonance of the pipe length you can have exceedingly fast cars producing lots of horsepower be reasonably quiet especially at idle and residential speeds.
I had a heavily modified trans it was very fast It was a street legal car that I also took to the track for racing. It did have some technically off-road parts like long tube headers and other things that provide performance but it still had catalytic converters and mufflers. Between idle and about 3,000 RPM it was only slightly louder than stock not obnoxious at all above 3,000 RPM usually in the 5,000 to 6,000 range it sounded like it had an open exhaust system due to the residence value of the exhaust piping.
So anyway your neighbor is a jerk just to be a jerk and I would begin to lodge complaints with the police until they send someone out there especially if they leave for work at the same time every day and pull them over. Same thing for those Harley-Davidson idiots that want to put on straight pipes.
In my state, motorcycles aren't subject to any regulation at all at the machine level. I walked in and registered my 70's two stroke yamaha in minutes.
In California their emission requirements are much stricter and it doesn't matter if your car is classic or not all factory emission systems must be present. Now if you have a non-California version of a car that you bring into California it needs to comply to the emissions of wherever it was built but if you have a California version of a car that would have been stripped of its air pump and other things those need to be restored in order to get street legal in California.
Don't confuse the testing requirements with the requirements of the federal and state law.
It depends, but the muffler is what mostly reduces the noise. The difference between an OEM cat and a removed cat isn't always that much in my experience.
Elmer's signature catchphrase is, "Shhh. Be vewy vewy quiet, I'm hunting wabbits"
It may be illegal in Mississippi but there's no state inspection or emissions testing to catch it. If I recall, there's a few other states that don't have inspection or emissions testing also.
Needless to say, I was not writing a letter of my compliments to his supervisor.
The problem is the modification of adding aftermarket off-road use only emissions equipment. Especially if it's obnoxious to the neighbors.
Are you sure it's straight pipes? An aftermarket exhaust system will not typically remove the cats and mufflers and can still be ridiculously loud.
- Leafblowers. And it feels that their users are the kind that like to rev a 250cc constantly. Not to mention the pollution of a 2stroke engine.
- Trucks backing up. (Newer ones have a much less penetrating noise)
- People honking at all hours of the day
- People closing their car and hitting the close button 23 times as they walk to their apartment, which causes the car to honk every time.
- People who remove straighten parts of their exhaust.
- The guy with the super cool looking Mustang who refuses to put the car in Quiet mode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klS4PFaAUk8
- The Amazon van that beeps every time it goes into park, because it passes by reveres (D -> R -> P) so it beeps. And you think he would park once. But no, every house, 10 houses in a row, break to standstill, put in park, BEEP, stop engine, unbuckle seatbelt, get out, deliver package, get back in, seatbelt, start truck, put it in drive, BEEP, drive 30 feet, ...
- My neighbor downstairs who believes the door MUST be slammed for the lock to work.
I'd love to go and live on a remote patch somewhere. But my employer requires me to be within 30 miles of the office.
Edit: more
- People using speakerphone outside while standing in front of houses
- People (maintenance workers especially) leaving their engine idle for no good reason except AC. That big V8 in that F-350 sounds so low that I can hear it 2 blocks away.
- People
- The crazy for mounting stolen school PA megaphones on cars and push bikes, often just to play Celine Dion.
- Flat smoke detector beeps. If I can’t find the damn thing after 20 beeps, please just catch fire. I don’t want the house anymore.
The person who makes a device that mutes noise for your home (or even just bedroom) will transform cities for the better.
Ice cream trucks with their stupid music
Construction
Buses, trucks, trains, planes
Loud music
Speaker phone conversations in cars, with the cars speakers turned to max
Foot stomping on non-carpet floors (in levels above you)
Cockatoos screaching
The 20% number also aligns with the percentage of highly sensitive persons in the population. Seems like this is a subtrait of HSP.
https://www.amazon.com/Macks-Moldable-Silicone-Putty-Plugs/d...
Ear plugs.
It's not rational, it's not something I have control over. It's something I deal with and largely have built techniques to try and lower the stress of.
I'm aware this is fundamentally a "your brain is wired different" issue, and so I'm never sure what the etiquette should be on asking others to chew with the mouths closed.
Many cultures don't have any concerns around slurping/chewing with mouth open, so meal times in mixed company are often quite hard for me. Add on the stress of trying to figure out whether I should even mention something (and make everyone else uncomfortable) is bonus stress on top.
The only exception to this rule is people who snore at hostels. I hate them rationally
If someone reading my comment does this, please know that in every dorm there could be people fantasizing about your death
This drives me insane to the point of internal anger and disgust, but there's litte I can do about it. Nobody else gets it when I politely ask. I just have to bear the pain.
I'm susceptible to a few types of sounds I loathe:
- food/eating/mouth noises
- off-key singing
- chalkboard scraping (I think most people have an aversion to this)
The strong feeling of displeasure for these sounds has been with me since a very young age and has never gone away.
Same, except I can feel hatred bubbling up from the pit of my soul.
Also, when people talk and you hear their tongue moving around, touching the saliva coated interior of their mouths. The old people in Ken Burns' WWII documentary were the worst about it.
Any gross noises from the patients and they attack the patient with suction and then watch with satisfaction as the phlegm/saliva fill the transparent suction tube.
Its exactly how you described
I think it is very similar to road rage, which can normally be defused by communication or sympathy.
Is this like one of those "some people go to Walmart in pyjamas" things? That honestly sounds ridiculous to me.
Forced work from office
Coworkers who have insatiable need to socialize, look for opportunities to chit chat, party
Meetings where people talk over each other
People who prefer calling to offline async comms
....
On the other side are us introverts who also have ADHD and misophonia
If I have to hear one more “click-clack-click-clack” of people playing a ping-pong match while I’m trying to get work done, I’m worried I’ll end up in the newspaper the next day.
Horn honks while in my apartment: oh my, hear the sounds of life out there!
Horn honks while I'm on the street: did ta really have to honk at that person? Asshole.
When I was in college I used to get woken up by them constantly at like 7 or 8am. It made me miserable. With 5 neighbors and more still close hiring landscapers it would be frequently.
I noticed a lot of towns and neighborhoods are banning them. Could look into it for your town. They actually pollute alot, there are electric alternatives that suck but aren't as bad.
I once went so far as to purchase really expensive (for the time) noise cancelling headphones and write them off as a work expense. My boss, in a windowless office directly behind me, would slurp and half stop breathing while eating lunch. It was get headphones or check myself into inpt therapy. This was before “wfh” was allowed, too.
- the sharp beeping sound made by my elevator as it passes every floor. Ironically this apparently is an ADA requirement though most elevators I ride have a much more muted sound which doesn’t bother me. - the beeping sound made by trucks when backing up, esp those that are so loud I can hear it inside my apartment.
What baffles me about the in-town residential neighborhood where I now live -- where kinda-rotting old houses sell for a few million dollars, and apartments that would never pass regulations rent for thousands of dollars -- is that people put up with gratuitous racket:
* So many various trucks (e.g., even maintenance worker pickups) with ear-piercing backup beeps. Sometimes I log these, and it can be every few minutes. I'm skeptical that they save anyone -- I'd think more likely they they wake people up and cause fatigue/grogginess accidents that way, cause stress and lost productivity for WFH, and damage hearing of those around them.
* Almost daily early-morning Dumpster trucks working outside my window, making more racket than you'd imagine, when there's a few ways it could be improved dramatically, but regulation enforcement can't even get them to stop breaking the law about how early they wake up people.
* Announcements of the frequent street cleaning here start at 7am, and go for hours. They involve a truck driving through the streets, blaring on a loudspeaker so people can hear inside their homes: "Street cleaning! Cars on the {even|odd} side of the street will be tagged and towed! Street cleaning!" And repeat intermittently for hours. The loudspeaker trucks are a bit like we've been invaded, and are ordered that curfew is in effect. Also note that we're supposed to be walking-friendly, and a lot of residents don't even own cars, so there's also some pandering-to-car-owners resentment on top of the agitation and lost sleep.
* Car horns that honk as people get in and out. My building alone has about 100 people in it, and other apartment buildings and houses surround our parking lot. These frequent car honks wake up people, interrupt and I'd guess background-stress people in their homes, and desensitize people to the car horn sound as an emergency alert that should grab your attention because something life-threatening might need your decision and action in a fraction of a second.
* Leafblowers. So much leafblowers.
I've started to make some effort on these, but with all the crazy-expensive real estate here, and a city government that in some ways is very progressive and very well funded, I can only guess why these problems haven't been solved already. I speculate that part of it might be heavy real estate ownership by investors, serving a market of transient captive university students. For the non-transient residents, like myself, one of the barriers to getting involved is that these aren't the only, nor most important/urgent, problems demanding our time.
The dump drunk, every morning... they raise the dumpster, and do a couple of back-and-forths to get everything out. BANG-BANG-BANG. Then they put them down. BANG. Roll it back. BANG. Back up the truck. BEEP-BEEP-BEEP.
The car-honking is also I find so rude. You get 1 pass. If I'm picking you up and you're not outside, you're walking. I am providing you a curtesy, so you better not waste anymore of MY time.
Leafblowers are the absolute worst, and I live in SoCal. You're moving DIRT. You're not REMOVING it, you're just MOVING it to the street.
That dirt from the leafblowers includes clouds of pollen, mold, feces, fine particulates, pesticides, etc. :)
(That some poor recent-immigrant landscaping workers carrying huge gas leafblowers all day might also be destroying their hearing, and breathing those clouds themselves, (PPE imperfect or nonexistent) only makes me feel worse. Sometimes they work in groups of 2-3 leafblowers at a time one one property, I suppose for speed or billable hours, so they're also getting noise and clouds from their fellow workers. I can't get mad at the most immediate person/people involved, since they're being scrod much worse than me.)
So I'm using an additional trick: a white noise generator, an electric fan room heater ... without the heat. Only the fan which needs to be loud enough so it cancels out outside noise but not so loud to become stressful in it's own way.
I'm so used to this fan noise that I can't even sleep without it.
And don't get me started on ambulance sirens. The physical office where thankfully I don't have to work anymore on a regular basis is right on the way of ambulances going into and out of the city. I've calculated on a statistical base considering the number of people and life/death probability that it's an average of 2 minutes and a maximum of 5 between ambulance passes and reality has proved me correct. Funk ambulances and funk their sirens. I hate them deeply and wish they would all die. I don't care for the people in those ambulances, I cared for about the first 2873 siren passes, afterwards I realized I care more for my own mental/hearing sanity but noone gives a shit about me and sirens keep going.
I can't wait to move out, which hopefully happens soon.
On another note, I taught English overseas in Shanghai, China from 2007-2013. When I arrived, I learned that in mainland Chinese culture, slurping your noodles is considered a sign of respect to the chef. I somehow made it 6 years there. Not so much because I loved it there, although expat life is fun. It was mostly because I was in a transition period in my life and didn’t know what to do next.
TBH, hearing that 20% of people are similarly afflicted is a relief. Misophonia is an incredibly lonely situation for me. It isn’t talked about much, I’ve never met anyone who also claimed to have it, and when I told my stepdad I suffered from it, he had never heard of it before.
Some interesting things to look for here in the comments of folks describing their own experiences:
- occurrences are often much stronger with family members or friends
- occurrences are often stronger at home or in places that "should" be safe and controllable.
- the content of the sound is what matters (e.g. chewing, engines, tapping, etc), not strictly the quality of the sound (loudness, pitch, etc) -- that's a different thing called hyperacusis
- misophonia often forms in childhood
Anyway, for the many folks here suffering from it: yes, misophonia is real, but also, it is treatable.
I’m really struggling at the moment with this and have moments of utter desperation.
For example an old woman moved in next door who shouts when she talks in a language other then English (Mandarin) - literally all day from morning to night. The constant background noise drove me into depression - it felt like there was no escape. I work from home.
I knew things were getting serious when despite wearing ear plugs and noise cancelling headphones over them when trying to sleep, I could still hear her talking - which was impossible. I was hearing voices in my head.
Things have improved as after repeated attempts to communicate to her through translated messages (she doesn’t speak English at all), she keeps the windows shut on the side of the house that matches mine.
Now I no longer hear “her voice in my head” and the induced depression had lifted.
But the sensitivity to sounds remains and I enter fight or flight response constantly at home.
I suspect getting permanent tinnitus from a Covid infection was a compounding factor in the heightened sensitivity.
Any advice on how to get a grip on this situation would help.
I was also diagnosed with ADHD recently.
My treatment was basically a targeted form of Cognitive behavioral therapy.
The first big hurdle was to learn that I had developed 'toxic hopefulness' regarding the behaviors of others: I had taught myself to eat quietly (because as a kid I learned that was the morally correct thing to do), and so I believed that because I could do it, it was reasonable to expect every other person in the world to change like I had. This is why the sounds of the city -- sirens, cars, crowds -- didn't bother me, but a single person eating did: because I had attached a moral judgement to 'correct' eating as a child.
Now, when the whole world didn't change to eat quietly like I did, I developed deep-seated moral indignation, which I covered with anger (I am very much a 'flight' person in life, except for when my misophonia triggers, and I have an emotional reflex to 'fight').
And because I was embarrassed about that anger, I added a layer of anxiety, where I was hyper-vigilant to sounds that might set off a misophonic response, which, in turn, made me that much more susceptible to people eating, or anything that could sound like someone eating. It turns out the first quarter-second of most sounds (opening doors, engines starting, boots stomping, etc) can sound like the crunch of a chip to a brain that's anxiously awaiting eating sounds.
So, if I had to boil my therapy down to a few points (and for reals -- I'm not a therapist, this is just my personal experience) it was:
1) come to terms with my toxic hopefulness and accept that there are entirely predictable ways in which the people will never change to accommodate me.
2) learn skills to manage the emotional reaction to hearing a triggering sound. For me, this came down to variations on telling myself, "This activity is natural. It is okay for people to make noise while eating" while imagining a triggering situation. I started really simple, for seconds at a time, before building up to more intense imaginal situations.
Those two combine such that it took a stronger sound to 'trigger' my misophonia, and when triggered, I developed skills to managed my emotional reflex, which in turn made the hypervigilant anxiety about getting triggered go down, which made it harder to trigger a response, which meant the skills I learned were more effective, and so on in a self-healing cycle.
Hope that helps a little.
That makes me wonder if in a lot of places around the world the effectiveness of care and therapy is severely handicapped by the inability to communicate / articulate these nuances -- on the part of both the patient and the therapist. (Here in India for example we pride ourselves on having so many languages. Oftentimes this causes real practical issues too. For example in metropolitan areas like Bangalore -- local residents face challenges like being unable to communicate with their bank teller due to lack of a common language between both. Non natives from elsewhere in the country are also inconvenienced if not discriminated, excluded and intimidated basis language. In such a chaotic environment having a deeply meaningful communication channel with your therapist sounds almost like an impossible ideal.)
Thankfully, the field has developed in the last decade, but I can only imagine that if people find themselves struggling to conduct day-to-day interactions due to language differences, then trying to talk about something as nuanced as misophonia responses would be unreasonably difficult, if not impossible.
I'm not exactly sure how to best deal with this but I'm almost at the point of moving out and breaking my lease. I have no idea how their neighbors on the same floor can deal with it considering it sounds more than twice as loud when in their floor hallway.
On the bright side, I guess I can consider myself lucky in that none of the other triggers in the article like chewing seem to have any effect on me.
EDIT: in case it matters: jurisdiction is NYC
This matters because noise codes are not uniform across the country. NYC's noise code contains general prohibitions[1] that specifically try to limit noise above 7dB from ambient baselines between the hours of 10pm to 7am. You mentioned that the parties occur within this time frame which would/should qualify for repeated noise complaints to NYC 311[2].
Now, whether repeated 311 submissions will actually result in any action is a totally different question, but at least you'll (hopefully) have a written record of the submissions that might be useful, someday.
But as they got older, they got annoyed by more sounds, usually mouth related. My dad's clicking jaw, someone eating chips at a birthday party, a baby talking gibberish at a restaurant, etc. If my sibling hears a sound they find annoying, you'll be sure to get a dirty look, screamed at, or they'll burst into tears. Sometimes it's all the above. I won't visit my sibling anymore because of their problem.
As unpleasant as it sounds, you have to desensitize yourself to these sounds. The more you avoid it, the more intolerable it gets.
Particular triggering noises? Kids playing basketball in the neighbor's yard, kids screaming during play, cars playing music with bass loud enough where you can hear the car rattling, and...coughing / clearing one's throat.
For most of these things, I imagine people also get annoyed with these sounds when trying to focus on work, as I do. But even if I'm doing something that I don't consider important (e.g. cooking, watching TV, etc.), my heart rate goes up and I get irritable. This all only irritates me when I'm at home. Maybe it's the feeling of not being able to change the environment around me (i.e. the feeling of being trapped as mentioned in the article)?
Emergency sirens set me on edge, but that's partly because I now live next to a busy crossroads and they're frequent, I don't think it's physiological.
I can also usually supplement with some music if I need to, to cover up that last 5-10% of louder sounds
I do not remember when chalkboards were phased out to whiteboards, but I have not seen one in quite a while.
edit: spelling
We can almost feel the chalk powder getting under our fingernails and causing an irritating feeling shuddering through our body.
Why is that I wonder.
What evolutionary past may have contributed to this aversion.
I can imagine for example someone naming their music band "fingernails on chalkboard" and having dismal sales because of this very phenomenon.
I wonder if there is an OPPOSITE example to this. Reading a phrase automatically causes distinct positive response involuntarily?
I use to hear it every winter when I went ice skating on lakes with friends. It has been over 20 years since I heard it. Now, the lakes where I live do not freeze enough for people to walk safely on it.
It is Ice Expanding, here is a youtube link of it.
PS: Though I was wondering in my post about just phrases as they are written and read, not necessarily as they are heard.
Velcro gets me. It sends a shiver down my spine, it's worse for me than nails on a chalkboard.
Slowly pulling velcro feels physically uncomfortable.
I can feel the noise in my head. Every small crackle.
All these neuroses popping up everywhere, I wonder if it's just too much sensory input.
When younger I'd dream about living in NY with the 24hr hustle and bustle and getting 3am pizzas.
As an adult it sounds like absolute torture and my dream is living alone in a cabin in the woods with minimal power and internet(and the latter wants fade daily).
Maybe it's all another symptom of slowly becoming the old man who yells at clouds.
When I'm sick certain sounds that normally don't bother me, such as the ding when Apple Messages gets a message, feel like they have set my head resonating and I can feel it expand and contract for a half second or so.
I think it is any high pitched sound with a sharp onset that will do it.