Inevitably, every time my family sits down at the table for dinner my husband turns the volume up on the TV.
He’s not normally a super sensitive kind of guy. He doesn’t have a ton of pet peeves or annoyances.
But something about the sound of us chewing (especially my children who tend to eat like a pig from a trough) drives him insane.
It’s not that I’m particularly fond of their animal-like eating habits, but the sound pushes a button in him that is very different.
Do you know someone like this? Because guess what.. it has a name.
It’s a real condition called misophonia.
And actually, it involves a whole lot of irritating sounds, not just the loud chewing.
However, almost 80% of it does involve the mouth in some way: popping gum, slurping, etc.
Misophonia means “hatred of sound.”
When the person is bothered by this sound, their heart can start to race, they’ll become irritated, and sweaty kind of like a panic attack.
The “trigger sound” a person dislikes can even cause aggression and the hatred is so profound that sometimes even just an image of the act can cause trigger it.
There isn’t a real reason for why some people might have misophonia and others don’t.
Like a lot of things in our life, it could have originated from something in your childhood.
If it is a big enough problem that you would like to try and change the behavior, you can always look into CBT as treatment.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for this basically means you expose yourself to small irritants in short amounts of time and build up a tolerance for it.
Liz is a just a mom trying to keep it real about how little she sleeps, how often she gets puked on and how much she loves them. You can find her here every day writing about real-mom moments.
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