What is misophonia? A cognitive neuroscientist explains

If you're on the misophonia side of TikTok, you may have seen videos like these. If you chew on my ear ever again, we're getting a divorce. But what is misophonia really? Misophonia is a condition where people experience very strong automatic reactions to certain trigger sounds. The trigger sounds are often human produced sounds, so like mouth sounds or typing on a keyboard or breathing, things like that. But how do you know if you have misophonia or if you're just annoyed by a sound? Honestly, I'm getting chills right now. The physiological experience I'm feeling right now, those chills, they're uncomfortable, but that's not misophonia. Oh, yeah. Yeah. That's the slurping of a straw. Again, a very common misophonia trigger. But again, looking at the woman's reaction to that sound, To me, that doesn't scream misophonia. To me, if this is a legitimate response, this speaks to misophonia again. Crying, feeling anxiety, getting really upset, that is a common response to a trigger. The key is with that impairment. If you can't leave your house, you can't hold a job, you can't sit and have dinner with your family, that's when it's going to cross the line to be a more clinical problem. Again, I often use the analogy of anxiety. We all feel anxious sometimes, but we don't all have clinical anxiety. We don't avoid environments because of it, and it's sort of the same with misophonia.