Quirks or phobias that afflict you in frequent ordinary situations

Four months old, and have flown at least once a year ever since. I started to be a little bit afraid when I was ~22, and it’s been a serious problem since I was 25.

Nose whistling grosses me out. Not intentional whistling with your nose, but that whistling noise that a nose makes when air is moving past a booger or some… obstruction within the nasal cavity somewhere. Eeech. There’s usually enough background noise to cancel this out, but when my employees are taking tests, a movie is just about to start, or I’m crunched in with people in an elevator… I’m usually pretty grossed out.

I’m also scared of loud noises, but it passes quickly. I’ve burst into tears because a friend of mine yelled for his dog to get in the house and I wasn’t expecting it. Eee!
My husband , however, has a zillion of these. He feels like he’s gonna crawl out of his skin over the following common occurances:

  • Sound whose origin he has not yet determined

  • Anyone’s breath touching him

  • Sniffling, coughing or even the very mention phlegm or boogers.

  • Muffled bass (Like… someone next door blaring a stereo or a car driving down the street with sub-woofers pounding)

  • Snoring

  • Muffled talking (that bloohblooohblooohblahbloo noise you can hear if someone is talking in the other room)

I sometimes wish I could revoke his ear privileges.

Okay, my theory just went down in flames. :stuck_out_tongue:

I have a bridge phobia that was born when I spun off an icy bridge one night in Amarillo, Texas 20 years ago. I have no problem with level bridges, only those that are very steep. Living in South Louisiana, you can’t go very far east or west without encountering one. There’s one in Lake Charles, Louisiana that’s still my nemesis. As I drive up the bridge, the angle seems to get steeper and stepper until I can almost feel myself losing control and rolling backwards. I have to drive to Houston fairly often, and I’ve driven 50 miles out of my way to give this bridge a miss.

ETA: It’s a shame, too, because I use to love driving through the mountains (not in Louisiana, of course) and other high places, and now it’s a chore I just have to bear.

I think the twenties are a common time for people to acquire a fear of flying. Growing sense of mortality and all that.

And muffled bass drives me crazy, too. The person who invented the subwoofer is burning in hell.

Overpasses make me nervous, especially when I’m sitting underneath them. This stems back to the '94 Northridge quake when, among other things overpasses and other chunks of elevated freeways fell; living, as I did, about ten miles from the epicenter meant that said freeways weren’t far away.

I don’t think this is unreasonable. They really can fall down, after all!

I’m self-conscious in social situations, so often I will try too hard to be entertaining and then I’m horribly regretful the next day for acting inappropriately. I’m a weird combination of shy and bold and the average person doesn’t know what to make of my efforts to lower the social boundaries. Occasionally, though, someone will think I’m bright and witty, which is what I’m hoping for. It’s terribly embarrassing and I can’t seem to control this tendency.

I have a pretty bad needle phobia stemming from a traumatic experience when I was seven or eight. This in itself doesn’t affect me in everyday life, but as a sort of weird generalization from that, I can’t stand anyone touching me in the inside-elbow part of my arm, and I can’t sit or stand with that part of my arm facing outwards, because, you know, someone might stick a needle in it! Or, you know, touch it, or look at it, or something. I really hate getting my blood pressure taken at the doctor’s because they have to touch my arm there, and I tend to freak out a little if someone takes my arm and touches the inside bit.

I’m also a little bit neurotic about staircases ever since I fell down one a couple of years ago - I was unharmed except for a few bruises, but I keep being horribly aware of how easy it is to trip and fall down them, and how I may not be so lucky next time. I can and do walk up and down stairs every day, of course, but if I let myself think about it too much I get all weird about it.

I often have problems descending stairs. If there’s a continuous handrail and the stairs are large and evenly-spaced, no problem. But if that’s not the case, I often end up convincing myself that I’m gonna trip. I also sometimes have problems walking on downward slopes, even if they’re not stairs.

But when it comes to climbing up stairs and slopes, I resemble a mountain goat (only I’m uglier).

I hate driving. I always think death is imminent. (This means that I’m going to paying a stupid amount of rent come fall because it was the only place I could find within walking distance of work, and I’m not sure I even want to live in that town particularly, so I guess it affects my life a fair bit.)

I don’t like balloons very much either, but I don’t go out of my way to avoid them, so I don’t know if that counts.

I can’t bear to have anyone touch my abdomen – if you ever want to torture me, string me up by the wrists and threaten to poke me in the belly. I’ll cry within 20 seconds and tell you anything you want to know within 30. So when I worked with elementary school children who liked to tickle or hug me about the waist, I was always hypervigilant about where their hands were. The only time I ever lost my temper was with a kid who wouldn’t stop trying to tickle me in the stomach.

I also have a hard time dealing with insects with crunchy exoskeletons. The kids had a blast the day they learned this and chased me around the classroom with a grasshopper they caught. I knew freaking out was only adding fuel to the fire, but I could not make myself calm down.

Me, too! I also get inexplicably annoyed when I overhear laughter. If I’m talking with you and you laugh, that’s fine, but having to listen to a coworker down the hall laughing on the telephone drives me over the edge. Who knows why?

POSSIBLE TMI:

Anything having to do with going #2 in a place that is not my home.

I hate going to the restroom in other people’s houses. I hate going #2 when someone else is in the public restroom. When I’m going to be hung up for a while I get constantly worried I’m going to have to go and will not have a chance. I intentionally try to find restrooms out of the way that I feel will be less frequented, therefore more likely to be empty.

Nothing UNUSUAL going on, it’s just something I tend to be overly paranoid about.

The smell of eggs cooking absolutely disgusts me - to the point where I literally throw up in my mouth a little sometimes when I smell it. I hate the feeling of “microfiber” cloth - riding in my dad’s car, a 2006 Camry with ultra-fine microfiber cloth seats, is an absolute nightmare because I hate the feel of that fabric brushing against my skin (and the feel of it brushing against my clothes is even worse.)

So when I’m riding in my dad’s car and he decides to fry some eggs, I nearly pass out.

Not really as OCD as some of the other stuff here, but I bloody hate wasps. I can’t just ignore one if it’s in the room with me. It has to die. “If you ignore it, it will just go away” is not an option.

I can’t stand the feel of sandpaper and the sound of someone sanding or filing their nails makes my hairstand on end. What’s worse, my wife and I bought an 80 year old house in need of renovations. I would work on whatever and then when my wife was ready to sand I would go to the basement and play computer games until she was done, lather rinse and repeat.

Mushrooms of any kind.

I used to like gathering them until about age six or so, then transitioned into hideous phobia over the course of a year for no apparent reason. I still hate nature hikes except in severe drought or snow, and excuse myself to go to the restroom for a very long and very fake defecating session if there are mushrooms on the dinner table. I also refuse to patronize any fast food chains that carries mushrooms, which leaves Subway and In-N-Out in my area.

I’m also nuts about PC games. I loved Morrowind for the first fifteen minutes. Then I retched very, very hard. The disk’s been collecting dust since. And Everquest and World of Warcraft carry their own separate stories.

[Hijack/] Conversely, I find the sound of the fan above the stove immensely soothing and will run it at the drop of the hat. I often forgot it’s on, as it has such a calming influence, leaving me rather at odds with His Nibbs as he too finds it increasingly grating. Obviously our white noise needs are at odds with one another. The relationship is obviously doomed. :wink: [/Hijack]

Touched things need to come in even numbers. For instance, if I touch my mousepad, I need to do it twice. I won’t go Rainman style freak-out, but it will bother me until I touch it again. I’ve managed to convince my brain that one slightly longer-than-needed touch counts as two, so to other people it isn’t really noticable anymore.

I cannot walk down escalator stairs. If I’m in a place and the escalator stairs aren’ts moving I have to find a regular staircase or leave.

I have an an odd attraction and fear of heights. Things like hotel atriums and multi-level shopping malls. A weird fear, sweaty palms and a slight urge to jump. (Am I the only one?)