Hypersensitivity

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Mild Asperger's syndrome often includes hypersensitivity to sound, light, pain, temperature and touch.

I have lots of problems with sound, clocks,people eating,and my dogs just to name a few. What are your major hangups when it comes to hypersensitivity?

I have a sensitivity to people talking and high pitched noises.

I can often hear all of the individual convorsations going on if their are many people talking about different things

I despise the noise people make when they're eating.

I have problems with all my senses except taste and maybe that too, but I just don't eat things that I don't like, so that is not generally an issue.

The ones that most bother me are high pitched sounds and disgusting smells.

The high pitched sounds feel like a physical assault and totally break my stream of thought and concentration. Screaming children, certain dog barks, the breaking sound of subway trains in New York--these are excruciating.

The other big thing is odors. My olfactory hypersensitivity is intermittent and unpredictable. It seems to always be on when I have had too little sleep, but sometimes it just comes for no reason I can find. I think of it as a preamp for my sense of smell. Now the volume is set to 11.

The subway is a nightmare when my sense of smell is hyper. Perfumes, urine, feces and ketoacidosis from self-digesting homeless people are among the worst.

Sometimes a similar thing happens in cars. I can very clearly smell the body odors of each other occupant, and it sometimes seems that they never learned to wipe thoroughly after using the toilet.

It is quite disturbing. I can usually deal with the others-- wear dark glasses, not wear the wrong fabrics, etc, but the hypersensitivity to smell is just hard to deal with. Fortunately it's intermittent.

I imagine this must be what lithe world is like for dogs all the time. I am very glad when that sense is not hyper.

This.

This too. Or even just swallowing water. Eugh.

It's all especially bad if I'm having a particularly 'autistic week', which is when all my work-arounds and techniques to deal with these things just fail for some reason.

Weirdly enough, when light, sound and touch become very overwhelming, my sense of smell and pain almost disappear...

Bright light.

Complex (conflicting) sounds (e.g., noisy restaurant or social gathering)

Smells...especially BO and halitosis (unless I've had lots of time to get used to it).

I think its very strange that the sound of eating does not bother me, most of the time. Personally I only eat food that crunches, if I can help it. But squeaking sounds can send me to the verge of tears, meltdowns, etc. I got touch sensitivity to certain things like the skin of Kiwis the feel of bananas in my mouth and certain smells.

My son has this too.

His most frequent comment during meals or snacks: "Please chew with your mouth closed!"
His second most frequent: "Please stop smacking!"

This is called misophonia:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/06/healt ... .html?_r=0

http://www.squidoo.com/do-you-have-misophonia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misophonia

YES!! !! It doesn't matter who is eating, or what they're eating, but it just turns my stomach and grates on my brain, if that's a description. No matter how politely they try to eat, it's the slurping, plopping sounds inside their mouths, and the rhythm of the jaw creaking and crackling, I guess.

Charles

I have trouble with city sounds. Un-muffled motorcycles taking off, squeaking brakes, horns, and people blasting bass from their car. It takes me a long time to desensitize to it and fully rid myself of excess tension when I'm out and about. There's also that deep ground rumbly sound if you live anywhere near a large bridge with a lot of traffic. It's interesting though that I'm not bothered so much when I purposely subject myself to rather harsh and dissonant sound in some of the music I listen to.

Even worse is people who burp and fart.