What Watching YouTube Is Like When You Have Misophonia

I have misophonia, and my hardest trigger is mouth sounds. Not loud ones: the small, wet ones. A lip smack before a sentence. Someone talking while they eat. And the place I run into them most isn't the dinner table. It's YouTube.

[Ange: one or two sentences on how long you've had misophonia, or when you first noticed it.]

What a trigger feels like

People who don't have misophonia often imagine it as being a bit annoyed by noise. Researchers describe it differently: the 2022 consensus definition calls it "a disorder of decreased tolerance to specific sounds or stimuli associated with such sounds" (Swedo et al., 2022), and the reactions it describes are strong, immediate and hard to control.

[Ange: describe in your own words what happens when you hear a mouth sound in a video. What you feel in your body, what goes through your head, what you want to do. Two or three sentences are enough.]

The videos I stopped watching

[Ange: the kinds of videos where it happens most for you. For example: commentary channels recorded with a close microphone, podcasts, tutorials, cooking or eating videos. You don't need to name any creator.]

The frustrating part is that it usually isn't the content. [Ange: an example of a channel or type of video you enjoyed but had to give up because of the sound, without naming anyone if you prefer.]

The workarounds

Over time I tried the usual tricks:

Captions and the sound off. [Ange: did it work for you? What did you lose?]
Skipping ahead every time it happens. [Ange: your experience.]
Turning the volume right down. [Ange: your experience.]
Headphones. They don't help here: they play the sound straight into your ears. I explain why in my guide to noise cancelling headphones for misophonia.
[Ange: anything else you tried.]

Why I built CalmEar

[Ange: what made you decide to build something, and roughly when. Keep it personal: the moment you thought "there must be a better way".]

CalmEar is a Chrome extension that detects mouth smacks and lip smacking in YouTube videos and reduces them as the video plays, while the voice stays clear. It runs on your computer, and the audio is never uploaded.

What it changed, and what it doesn't fix

[Ange: what you can watch now that you couldn't before. Be specific if you can.]

It isn't perfect, and I'd rather say so. It works on YouTube, in Chrome on a computer. It reduces mouth sounds rather than erasing every one, and some still get through, especially when they overlap with loud speech or music. [Ange: anything else you want people to know about its limits.]

If this sounds familiar

If you recognised yourself in this, you're far from alone: in a UK study, about 18% of adults had misophonia symptoms that caused a significant burden in their life, and most had never heard the word (Vitoratou et al., 2023).

A few things that might help next:

[Ange: a closing line in your voice, for example an invitation to write to you through the feedback page at /feedback.]

This article shares personal experience and general information. It isn't medical advice: if sounds affect your daily life, a doctor, audiologist or therapist familiar with misophonia can help.