Levi Tebbutt was seven years when, one night at dinner, his mother’s eating noises had started to rankle. His heartbeat quickened. He felt trapped. And then, snappily, he mimicked the cursed sounds and blurted out that he’d had enough of his mother’s loud breathing and her endless crunch, crunch, crunch. This didn’t go down brilliantly.13 years on, and Tebbutt’s problem has never really gone away. Mealtimes at home are still quite painful. “Initially, I didn’t like the eating noises some of my family were making,” he says. “Over time, I gradually became increasingly stressed about the noises and it built up to a point where I was ready to run away the second I saw someone preparing food.” That first fiery outburst had signalled the onset, he now believes, of a condition known as "misophonia".Translated literally from the Greek as "hatred of sound", this term doesn’t really do justice to the true complexity of the condition it describes. After all, there are sounds we all hate, sounds that distract us almost universally – the scratching of a nail down a blackboard, for example.For Tebbutt and other misophonia sufferers, however – who have been labelled "misophones" – certain everyday sounds can quite easily trigger an episode of panic or rage. Beyond finding these repetitive, often bodily sounds a tiny bit gross, misophones are seized with anxiety when they hear them. In the moment, they can think of nothing else.Tebbutt’s triggers now include slurping, lip smacking and wheezing noises too. “In practice, this means I need other noises to drown [them] out,” he says, before describing his typical fight-or-flight response, which normally kicks in within a couple of milliseconds of hearing any one of these sounds.“Inside my head, I feel angry. I get an adrenaline rush. Half of me wants to run away while the other wants to scream. It’s extremely stressful and I absolutely cannot sit there and do nothing while a triggering noise is made – whatever it is, I have to respond somehow.” Now a student, Tebbutt wears earphones or hoodies to avoid the sight or sound of other people eating.Although the term "misophonia" was coined back in 2001, the condition has only really come to public attention in the past few years, which is partly down to an article published in the New York Times in 2011. Since then, legions of self-diagnosed misophones have thronged to dedicated Facebook and Yahoo support groups, Reddit , and various makeshift forums and research-collation sites like Allergic To Sound The prevailing tone across these pages is one of simple surprise that fellow sufferers actually exist. Because misophonia is yet to gain substantial ground in the medical community, most sufferers were used to their problem well before even knowing there was a word for it. For this reason, one Australian researcher has gone as far as describing the phenomenon – our awareness of which is very much driven by google searches and throwaway memes as an " internet disorder.