The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Notes -
The new ACX post on misophonia" is interesting.
I don't particularly suffer from misophonia, and hadn't heard the term before, but used to be more sensitive than average to, especially, television shows. My former housemate would watch the Big Bang Theory, and I intensely disliked the voices of the actors, along with the voice actors from shows like American Dad and Family Guy. My husband likes to listen to the TV in the background, and mostly wears headphones for these shows when I'm around. My husband, meanwhile, is extremely sensitive to the sounds of the neighbors' vehicles, which he can hear through the rock tumbler, white noise machine, and multiple other people in the house.
Some of the comments are also reminding me of the times I tried sleeping in rooms with ticking clocks, and took the batteries of of the clock, then reset it again the next morning. I think once I tried to muffle a clock under a lot of bedding as well. This hasn't effected me lately, but that's probably just because timing clocks are no longer standard.
I was homeschooled for unrelated reasons, and I have often been confused by "sustained silent reading" regimes in some of the worse schools. A third of the kids mess around, making small noises, while the other two thirds pretend to read. Sometimes I would attempt to read, and as someone who likes reading, I always found it completely impossible for more than a page, which I would immediately forget.
Lately, I've recommended Virginia Woolf's "A Room of One's Own" a couple of times. Somehow it came up with my mother this week -- I think in the context of why I don't paint. It's not the same, of course -- reading and writing or painting in open spaces -- households and offices without walls, where it's normal and expected for anyone to talk about anything at any moment, and the person who ignores them and asks them not to is in the wrong. Both my husband and I find it rather demoralizing, and exhausting. We are angry that there is no viable way to signal unavailability to talk in a way that doesn't hurt others' feelings. I remember my father saying that he had "run out of words." I have to stop writing now, because my daughter has followed me through a couple of rooms, to talk about ladybugs. She has, as I wrote this, read out loud all the letters on my keyboard, asked for a dry erase marker, asked for a drink, and talked for several minutes about ladybugs. She is, of course, more important than writing on message boards. But I am tired. I'm not sure how to make things better and less exhausting.
Adding, since this is already stream of consciousness, that my mother does not have misophonia, either, but is also an introvert. She remembers, and sometimes mentions distastefully, how 40 years or so ago her roommate went on and on about the royal wedding. After 40 years, this is still an unhappy memory!
Chewing. In particular my wife chewing, a moment in which I feel as if I can hear every muscle in her mouth, movement of her tongue, excretion of digestive saliva, all the way to the swallowing. Caveat: I do not always notice this. Could it be the TV? She often has the television on as well so I think the mouth noises are muted usually, but when they aren't, all the sounds set me on edge. Or maybe it's just sometimes that it's so audible--meaning not always, but only some times, and at other times my mind switches off. I do not notice chewing in other people, though just recently my son ate a doughnut there at the table as I was typing something and it was as if he were suddenly chewing just like his mother. I nearly said something, but didn't--because really it's not his problem, it's mine.
Again, is this just me sometimes? Or is it them, all the time? Do people notice their noisy mouth-noising? Do I also do this and annoy other people? SA writes:
He also writes in that article about background noises. Something odd I've realized is that while background noise is ubiquitous in Japan--my rice cooker plays music when it's done, my bath plays an electronic riff of Canon in D when the bath is full, you hear announcers saying: "こちらは、男子のトイレ". THis means "This is the men's toilet." It goes on and on. In some train stations there are fake bird noises. I still don't know why (Someone here will probably tell me.)
None of it bothers me. But put me on a plane to the US with a bunch of Americans, or in a public space with Americans yakking on and on, or some random person yakking in English on their phone in Cleveland, and it's very annoying. Because I can understand every word, and have forgotten how to tune out the way I can subtly tune out Japanese speakers.
Also I had never heard of the McGurk effect mentioned in that article. Weird.
Anyway the chewing thing, maybe it's something bizarre about me, my wife, and, now, my son. Thankfully I don't worry about things too much, so I tend to just let it go because fuck it.
Based on the Asterix article, it sounded like chewing was one of the most common triggers, so apparently you're not alone. I can't really guess why, though. I would imagine that hewing used to be even worse, with older people losing their teeth?
I was once on a plane near some people who were in a Young Opera Performers program, which I know because they talked about that, and about the petty drama of their cohort, and about the clothing choices of some of their cohort members, all in very loud, clear voices that carried well through the plane. I can see how possessing a loud, clear voice might be a pre-requisite for being an opera performer, but did not at all appreciate their using those voices to go on about someone's clothing choices for half an hour.
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