As a kid I used to sneeze with my mouth into the open. sniffing the weird stench which came along and pretty much grossed myself out most of the time. As I grew, I started squeezing my nose every time I felt that familiar tinkle come about. A friend once told me how his relative was admitted into a hospital due to the "recoil" (sorry for the army term there) of this action having killed too many of his brain cells.
I don't know how true that fact is but, for the past fifteen years at least, every time I've had to sneeze, I automatically clinched the few muscles around the area to pretty much reduce the impact of the sneeze. To my conscience, if squeezing my nose with my hands was bad, not using my hands and still trying to stop it was pretty safe a thing to do. The other day an elder saw me do this and advised that I should just let it out to clean my nostrils blah blah blah.
I tried a couple of times but went back to my nose muscles exercise routine. After the topic was brought up, for some weird reason I have been very sensitive towards people sneezing around me. If someone sneezed into their hands, I would avoid hand contact cause of the germs probably layered onto his/her hands. I got super grossed the other day when a PRC immigrant sneezed out loud further down the cabin on the train. About 10 secs later I smelt that weird smell I was used to as a kid. He made my morning.
I think it's weird how over the years I have become a slave to my mind. If my brain can't accept something, I just can't change it no matter how hard I try. Eg: If I eat something and puke once, I never try it again cause for some reason If I ate it again, I would mentally keep reminding myself of the previous incident and would end up puking in the end.