The best way to treat misophonia is with a multidisciplinary approach (i.e. if an everyday sound (breathing, chewing, sniffing, tapping) causes you a severe negative response, misophonia may be responsible. e. Over time, the ultimate goal of sound therapy is to neutralize the trigger sounds so that the reflex response no longer occurs.
Before I reported this story, I wasn’t aware of how many people are struggling with misophonia or how much research experts are doing to find treatments and strategies to help us deal with it. While misophonia involves a negative response to specific sounds, hyperacusis involves a negative response to sounds due to specific characteristics.
How do I control my misophonia?
Since I was an otherwise calm and self-controlled child, it was bewildering that I would go from 0 to 60 in less than a few seconds, just by a small sound or movement. But in another way, if someone can’t just turn down their television a bit for a neighbor’s sake, then I feel like there’s also some guilt in both directions, but I know that we can’t control others’ behavior, and if the noise is in my own home, I think that’s a big part of the trigger for me. I think it’s because I feel completely trapped when it’s in my apartment and I’m something I can’t control. I was in some ways exposed to some things during and after my parents’ divorce when I was really young, and WOW, did I ever fall into patterns of thought and behavior to deal with them that were way beyond my ability to control or understand.
Can misophonia be treated?
People with misophonia experience this feeling regularly and sometimes daily in response to sounds that other people barely notice. Various strategies used in the open study for attention shift, counterconditioning, and relaxation overlap with other approaches to treating misophonia. If you have symptoms of both misophonia and another mental health condition, such as anxiety, OCD, depression, or ADHD, a doctor or psychiatrist can offer more information about medications that could help improve the symptoms of these conditions. Cognitive-behavioral therapy could be the answer for people who have serious problems dealing with noise.
Now, the Journal of Affective Disorders published a study in which cognitive behavioral therapy could be a serious solution.