Misokinesia is a condition marked by a strong negative emotional or physiological response to the sight of movements made by other people, such as fidgeting, leg shaking, hair twirling, and others. It is often described as a "hatred of movements" and can lead to feelings of annoyance, anger, and notable anxiety. The cause of misokinesia is unknown.

While misokinesia is thought to be quite prevalent there has been little awareness or research of it. Misokinesia may also often co-occur with misophonia.

I often associate these movements with ADHD (ADD) and repetitive movements link to the autism spectrum.

'Misokinesia' Phenomenon Could Affect 1 in 3 People, Study Shows. Noticing somebody fidgeting can be distracting. Vexing. Even excruciating   Science Alert - April 7, 2025

Noticing somebody fidgeting can be distracting. Vexing. Even excruciating. But why? According to research, the stressful sensations caused by seeing others fidget are an incredibly common psychological phenomenon, affecting as many as one in three people.

Called Misokinesia – meaning 'hatred of movements' – this strange phenomenon had been little studied by scientists until recent years, but was noted in the context of a related condition, misophonia: a disorder where people become irritated upon hearing certain repetitious sounds. Misokinesia is somewhat similar, but the triggers are generally more visual, rather than sound-related, researchers say.

"Misokinesia is defined as a strong negative affective or emotional response to the sight of someone else's small and repetitive movements, such as seeing someone mindlessly fidgeting with a hand or foot," a team of researchers, led by first author and psychologist Sumeet Jaswal, then at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Canada, explained in a study published in 2021.

Test results indicate that heightened sensitivity to fidgeting is something a large number of people have to deal with.

In a test study, the researchers ran tests to see if people's misokinesia might originate in heightened visual-attentional sensitivities, amounting to an inability to block out distracting events occurring in their visual periphery. The results based on early experiments were inconclusive on that front, with the researchers finding no firm evidence that reflexive visual attentional mechanisms substantively contribute to misokinesia sensitivity. While we're still only at the outset then of exploring where misokinesia may spring from on a cognitive level, the researchers do have some hypothetical leads for future research.