Do clicking, tapping, chewing irritate you? Misophonia might be to blame

Have you ever felt irritated by a person next to you chewing, drinking, clapping, clicking nails or making any sort of similar noise? If yes, then you might be suffering from a disorder called misophonia. Actress Melissa Gilbert, known for playing Laura Ingalls on the TV series Little House on the Prairie, recently revealed that she has suffered from this condition her entire life.

Misophonia makes a person angry at everyday sounds. Melissa told PEOPLE, that while shooting for the show, "if any of the kids chewed gum or ate or tapped their fingernails on the table, I would want to run away so badly."

Melissa says she felt "absolutely miserable and horribly guilty" for feeling so hateful towards the people she loved.

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Several years later, she learnt that what she was experiencing was because of a neurological disability known as misophonia. In this condition, simple noises and sounds provoke strong emotional, physiological, and behavioural responses. The person experiencing them also feels unpleasant but finds it hard to fight them.

Gilbert says she "sobbed" when she found out that it had a name and that she "wasn't just a bad person".

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Gilbert recalled that even with her family, she was thought of as a fussy and rude kid. She says she used to glare at her "parents, my grandmother and my siblings with eyes filled with hate."

Feeling guilty inmisophonia

The actress says feeling guilty for the reactions is a major part of the disorder. "I really just thought that I was rude. And I felt really bad. And guilt, which is an enormous component of misophonia, the guilt that you feel for these feelings of fight or flight. It's a really isolating disorder."

Even her kids bore the brunt of her disorder, and she has never allowed them to have gum.

Menopause, she says, made things worse. She became angry more easily and reacted intensely. "As the estrogen leaked out, the anger seeped in and it started to really affect me on a daily basis with loved ones."

Despite learning about the disorder, she didn't know it was treatable. When she found out last year, she reached out to Duke's Center for Misophonia. They responded saying, "There's help. You're not alone."

She underwent 16 weeks of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, where she learnt how to self-regulate and exercise self-control. Gilbert says the problem isn't going away, but now she knows how to react when she feels the anger coming.