Imagine you’re in a classroom and people are walking by. One person drags their shoes as they walk, creating a grating scraping noise that makes your skin crawl. The person sitting next to you keeps clicking their pen, and, finally, the seemingly never-ending general chatter in the classroom makes you want to either punch someone or walk out the door. Then you put on earplugs or noise-cancelling headphones and you feel like you can stay a little longer.
This is the average experience of someone with Misophonia.
Definition
According to WebMD, Misophonia is a disorder in which certain sounds trigger emotional or physiological responses that some might perceive as unreasonable given the circumstance. Basically, it means certain sounds in regular day-to-day situations really annoy or frustrate you, sometimes to the point of triggering your fight-or-flight response.
When you look at the Greek, miso means “hatred” and phonia means “about sound”.
I wanted to cover this topic because Misophonia is officially not recognized as a disorder yet anywhere, including the DSM-V (the officially recognized repository of mental disorder diagnoses), despite causing significant discomfort in day-to-day life.
Symptoms
Studies have identified the following responses as symptomatic of misophonia:
Irritation, disgust, anger
becoming verbally aggressive to the person making the noise
getting physically aggressive with objects, because of the noise
physically lashing out at the person making the noise
taking evasive action around people making trigger sounds
Note that not all sounds trigger misophonic patients, just certain ones, and they vary across individuals.
Everyone gets irritable at times when they have to hear the same sounds over and over again, but if you find that you get irrationally frustrated on a regular basis and lash out on others, you may need to look into it.
Biological Causes
Anterior insular cortex (AIC), the area of the brain involved in processing emotions, was found to have greatly exaggerated reactions when Misophonic individuals were exposed to a trigger sound.
The Default Mode Network (DMN) is a group of interconnected brain regions that are active when you are awake, at rest, and not engaged in a specific task. Increased connection between the default mode network (DMN) and the AIC was discovered in the study, which may elicit associations and memories.
Myelination is something that facilitates the conduction of nerve signals in your body. Misophonia patients' nerve cells were more myelinated in some brain regions than those of the general population, which may contribute to higher levels of connection, thus causing the strong reaction to certain auditory stimuli.
Managing Misophonia
The most common way people with Misophonia deal with their condition is wear noise -cancelling headphones or earplugs. If you can’t hear anything, there’s no problem, but it also makes you look weird and hampers your social life. It just helps cope with the symptoms.
Commonly recognized treatment plans include sound therapy with an audiologist, and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy where your therapist helps come up with effective coping strategies. I guess CBT is the solution to everything.
And like with everything, leading a healthy lifestyle where you get enough sleep, water, nutrition, and a lack of stressors, helps a lot.
References
WebMD Editorial Contributors. (2022, December 18). What is misophonia? WebMD.
So Quiet. (n.d.). What is misophonia?
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Dresden, D. (2023, November 10). What is misophonia? Medical News Today.
LA Concierge Psychologist. (n.d.). The Default Mode Network and ADHD.
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