Jessica Simpson tunes out ‘destructive noise’ after Pottery Barn ad raises eyebrows for women
A woman says she wishes she had listened to the noise as a child, and not the TV shows
The sound that’s been bothering Victoria Simpson all her life has nothing to do with earphones or a speaker system. Instead, it’s the steady drone of “destructive” commercial TV commercials.
“I never understood it,” said the 27-year-old Victoria, who lives in Chicago. “There’s so many commercials for clothes, hair care products, all kinds of things — there’s no end. They’re always interrupting you. The noise makes me so nervous during the day.”
But she also said that just by listening to it with headphones, she didn’t realize it was a problem.
“I used to listen to it during school and do fine,” she said. “Now, I don’t know what to do — I feel like every commercial makes me do this in my head. It’s like I have to fight it.”
Victoria said she doesn’t really notice the noise when she’s in her living room in her Chicago home. Like millions of Americans, she’s listening to TV ads all day, often while cooking or cleaning.
The noise is so overpowering that it took Victoria months to discover that it was coming from TV commercials — and it’s made her unable to enjoy TV programs she had once devoted time to.
“It was a gradual process,” she said. “It was like an insidious thing: it crept up on me all at once and it was like — all of a sudden — I didn’t think I was going crazy anymore, that it was just a part of me.”
TV shows are just as bad, Victoria said. She doesn’t know if she’s ever been able to watch them without hearing that eerie, inescapable sound that keeps making her jump in her seat or her mind.
She’s not alone. A 2006 study by the Center for Marketing and Consumer Research at the University of Southern California found that most U.S. television viewers suffer from the disorder and that up to 13 percent of those experiencing it have been diagnosed with it.
But the problem of destructive TV noise persists and is often ignored out of embarrassment. What is the condition, what