Getty Images”If I see someone tapping their fingers on a desk, my immediate thought is to chop their fingers off with a knife,” an anonymous patient confides to a researcher.Another shares: “When I see someone making really small repetitive movements, such as my husband bending his toes, I feel physically ill. I hold it back but I want to vomit.”Sound familiar? If so, perhaps you too have a condition called misokinesia – a diagnosable hatred of fidgeting. Scientists are striving to understand more about the phenomenon that has no known cause, as yet. Getty ImagesFor the latest research, featured in the journal PLoS One, experts carried out indepth interviews with 21 people belonging to a misokinesia support group. Common triggers were leg, hand or foot movements – jiggling thighs, twitchy fingers and shuffling shoes. Pen clicking and hair twiddling were also triggers, though not quite as frequently. Often people reported some overlap with another more recognised condition called misophonia – an intense dislike of other people’s noises, such as heavy breathing or loud eating. It’s impossible to know exactly how many people might be experiencing misokinesia. One recent Canadian study suggested perhaps one in three of us might be adversely affected by other people fidgeting, experiencing intense feelings of rage, torture and disgust. I spoke with Dr Jane Gregory, a clinical psychologist at Oxford University in the UK, who has been studying and treating both misokinesia and misophonia. She told BBC News: “The two go alongside each other very frequently. Often people have both at the same time.”Although there is no good data, Dr Gregory says the conditions are probably suprisingly common. “Obviously, people have been experiencing it for a long time but just didn’t have a name for it.”The severity of people’s aversion to fidgeting varies, she tells me.”Some people might get really annoyed by fidgeting or repetitive movements but it doesn’t impact massively on day-to-day life,” she says. Others, however, may “get a really strong emotional reaction – anger, panic or distress – and just can’t filter them out”. Through Dr Gregory’s work, she tends to meet people with more extreme symptoms. Many are adults who have endured misokinesia for years, but some are in their early teens and experiencing it for the first time. ‘It just explodes inside you’SuppliedAndrea, 62 and from the UK, says she developed misophonia and misokinesia at 13 but that it wasn’t recognised at the time. One of her earliest memories of the condition is being distressed by a girl at school who was picking her nails.”Most of misokinesia tends to focus around people’s hands – what they are doing with their hands and what they are touching,” she says.Another trigger for her is when people partially cover their mouth with their hand while speaking – she struggles to watch and feels like her own mouth is becoming sore when she does.Andrea says the anger she experiences is explosive and instantaneous.”There’s no thought process in it. There’s no rationale. It just explodes inside you, which is why it is so distressing.”She tells me she has tried different strategies to manage her condition, but can’t block it out.Now she shields herself from society, living alone and working from home, and says her whole life is designed around avoiding the things that could distress her.Andrea says she has lots of supportive friends who understand that she s …
