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I Have Misophonia: Why Am I Always Tired and What Can I Do?

If you have misophonia, you may find that you feel tired a lot. I’m not saying that you are “tired” of having misophonia. That’s a given. I am talking about something else…physical fatigue.

I have often wondered if I was the only person with misophonia who feels physically fatigued much of the time, or if others felt this way too. While it would certainly be better to conduct a study about this, I decided to collect some anecdotal information to start with. So, I began asking others with misophonia how they felt in terms of their physical energy.

I was not surprised to find that many other people with misophonia feel fatigued much of the time. In addition, like me, people with misophonia often feel as though they are “up and down” throughout the day. That is, people with misophonia feel awake when they should be asleep and asleep when they should be awake, and seem to vacillate between surges in energy and lapses in energy throughout the day.

Even though the research in misophonia is in it’s infancy, recent studies (e.g. Kumar, et al.) demonstrate that it is very much brain-based. In addition, other studies (e.g. Edelstein et al., Schroder et al) reveal that people with misophonia experience autonomic nervous system arousal upon exposure to trigger sounds.

What does it mean to experience autonomic nervous system arousal?

The autonomic nervous system (ANS) controls many organs and muscles within the body, unconsciously, without thought or effort. Within the ANS, the sympathetic nervous system’s function is to prepare the body to deal with a threatening situation by either “fighting” the danger or “fleeing” from it. When this reaction is triggered, the body is flooded with hormones that give a boost of energy. When the sympathetic nervous system is aroused we may feel an increase in heart rate, and we might notice our palms are sweaty. How the body attempts to combat this reaction (in order to return to a calm state) also involves the ANS. The para-sympathetic nervous system, the other important part of the ANS, puts on the brakes so that the body can relax back into a calm state.

This means that periodically throughout the day, every day, a person with misophonia experiences physiological “ups and downs”.

Put simply, this is exhausting!

The misophonic response taxes the body physically as well as emotionally. In terms of emotion however, it is important to remember that an emotion is an elusive term and it is very difficult to pin down how emotions are formed in the brain.

However, with misophonia it is apparent that continual accelerations of the body’s stress response are terribly draining to the individual.

What can I do about this?

Take small breaks throughout the day whenever you can. This sounds almost trite. However, it is incredible what small breaks can do for someone who is overloaded by auditory stimuli. Finding a place in which you can escape from the sounds that you over-respond to brings the body back to a calm state (or homeostasis). All sensory information is cumulative. That means that the feeling of “overload” adds up. You might notice that you feel worse at the end of the day than you did at the beginning of the day. Similarly, you may wonder why your child “is fine at school and then comes home and falls apart”. This again, is the cumulative effect of auditory stimuli accelerating the nervous system, causing continual stress on the system.

Exercise. While exercise may be the last thing a tired person wants to do, it is very import for someone with misophonia to try. Why would exercise help someone with misophonia? This may seem like an odd connection. However, certain kinds of exercise can bring in the parasympathetic system, which turns down the stress response. The exercises that are useful are those that are either “weight bearing” or include some form of resistance (Pilates, using resistance bands while exercising, etc.). While this doesn’t help you directly in the moments you experience misophonia reactivity, this will bring down your overall nervous system arousal. This way, you are at least starting at a lower level and may find that your system is a bit less sensitive to sounds. And, as I always say, a little goes a long way with misophonia.

Give yourself (or your child, or loved one) a break! If you or your misophonic child feels tired, know that this doesn’t reflect a weakness or a personality flaw. This is not laziness, either! The body and mind are truly over-taxed because of misophonia and this causes fatigue. A person with misophonia may need a little extra sleep than others, and may need the small breaks mentioned above.

Misophonia Treatment Institute offers new treatments that can provide relief from the symptoms of Misophonia which are very effective for many people. Visit MisophoniaTreatment.Com for more details!

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Misophonia: Why some sounds drive you crazy

Sharon Stephenson talks to sufferers of a condition where eating in a communal situation or travelling with others is nearly impossible.

It was the soup that did it: a steaming bowl of broccoli and blue cheese that sent Lisa Milton* into a blind rage.

“I was on a first date and the guy couldn’t eat his soup without slurping,” says the 32-year-old Wellingtonian.

Lisa asked politely if he could eat more quietly. Then she asked less politely.

“There’s no way to eat soup without making a noise,” he replied, telling her to back off, only using different words.

That’s when Milton’s heartbeat quickened, she became extremely agitated and felt the burn of pure white rage.

“I leapt up from the table, slapped him across the face and threw his bowl of soup to the floor before running out of the restaurant in tears.”

It might be at the pointy end of the behavioural spectrum, but Milton’s reaction is actually a neuro-physiological disorder called misophonia, where auditory stimuli – and sometimes visual stimuli – sets off a classic fight-or-flight response.

Howick-based psychologist Louis Van Niekerk, who works with misophonia patients, says the little-known disorder can be triggered by particular sounds that are often bodily related or repetitive in nature.

“People with misophonia can be driven to outbursts of panic, fear, disgust or rage simply by the sounds people make going about their day – chewing, slurping, sniffling, throat-clearing, humming, tapping and so on,” says Van Niekerk. “It’s not just someone being dramatic or angry, misophonia is an immediate, uncontrollable brain-driven response to stimuli. When people hear the sound that triggers them, they want to get out of the room and if they can’t, they want to attack it.”

The term misophonia, which is believed to be linked to OCD, was first coined in 2002 by Margaret and Pawel Jastreboof, a husband-and-wife research team from Atlanta’s Emory University. Translated literally from Greek as “hatred of sound”, the term is sometimes also referred to as selective sound sensitivity syndrome.

In 2013, researchers at Amsterdam’s Academic Medical Centre found that when misophonia sufferers heard certain human sounds, they exhibited “a pattern of intense anger, impulsive reactions and worry about losing control”. The most common irritants were eating sounds, such as lip-smacking, chewing and swallowing; breathing sounds including snorting and sneezing; vocal sounds such as throat-clearing or humming; and hand sounds, such as typing and pen-clicking. Environmental sounds such as dogs barking, dishes clattering or lawn mowers can also cause sufferers to explode, while visual triggers include someone jiggling their leg or fidgeting with their hands.

“The cause of misophonia is unknown but research suggests it can start in childhood, when sufferers may make a negative association with certain sounds. This can generate fear, irritation or rage for the rest of their lives,” says Van Niekerk, who treated his first misophonia client eight years ago and estimates he’s seen about 35 since then.

Many sufferers, he adds, are often affected by those closest to them. “So while someone eating on a bus or in a cafe might not bother them, when a family member eats too loudly it can send them into a rage.

He tells me about a 13-year-old client who was enraged by the sound of her father rubbing his moustache. “She simply couldn’t cope with him touching his upper lip.”

For Milton, the realisation that something wasn’t quite right started in her early teens.

“At meal times, the sound of my family chewing would bring me out in a cold sweat. It got to the stage where I wanted to reach across the table and strangle my father, who was the loudest chewer in the world. I would either have to wear ear plugs or eat in another room.”

Naturally, her family and friends assumed she was neurotic at best, insane at worst. “They couldn’t understand how normal things, often things they couldn’t even hear, would make me tense and disgusted. I’m sure there were many times they were ready to drop me off at a psychiatric institution.”

That’s when the guilt would kick in. “I felt guilty for asking people to stop doing something they weren’t even aware was a problem, guilty for being such a bitch and guilty for missing so many family meals.”

Milton pushes her hands through hair the colour of udon noodles and tries to explain how misophonia affects her.

“You know how horrible it is when someone runs their nails down a blackboard? Well imagine that sound completely consuming you so that you can’t hear, think or see anything else. It starts off annoying, then becomes distressing until finally it’s unbearable. You have to either stop the noise or run away from it.”

Ironically, Milton realised her aural agony was more than just a personality quirk thanks to an American talk show.

“I was watching Dr Phil one day and saw a woman talking about how she couldn’t cope with the sound of her husband eating. It was a relief to finally be able to give this a name and to realise I wasn’t alone.”

Milton and her long-time partner (“he’s an incredibly patient man and, no, he doesn’t slurp his soup”) are property developers, although she also works from home as a part-time freelance technical writer.

“I can’t work in an office with other people. I left my last job because of a co-worker who ate crackers and celery all day. I literally wanted to kill her.”

She also can’t go to the cinema or theatre and tries to avoid flying wherever possible. “I have noise-cancelling earphones but travelling on any kind of public transport is still a nightmare.”

Every time a clock ticked, I cried’: Woman with misophonia describes rare condition that means simple sounds drive her crazy

Awkwardly sitting on a squishy grey chair in front of a therapist in his small practice room in Edinburgh, I knew that it was time to get help. I’d always had a serious problem with repetitive noises, and yet I felt like a fraud sitting there.

Therapists’ rooms are spaces for people with real issues, I thought to myself, and my problem isn’t even recognized as a registered medical condition by the NHS. There are few statistics, few experts on the condition and I’m more than aware that there are far worse problems that I could have in life.

The thing I remember the most about sitting in that practice room wasn’t what either the therapist or I were saying, because I could hardly focus on that.

All I could hear was the sound of the clock on the wall. Tick, tick, tick.

Every time the clock ticked it felt as though a small insect was stinging me. At first it was irritating, and then slowly my irritation turned to anger and then that turned to desperation to escape.

Then finally I was sat there for what seemed like no reason desperately trying to hold back floods of tears.

WHAT IS MISOPHONIA?

For as long as I can remember, certain sounds and movements have stirred an intense emotion in me that can only be described as a combination of total rage and anxiety.

Although for most people the condition begins in puberty, I can’t remember a time in my life when I haven’t been driven mad by certain noises.

The innocent sound of someone breathing slightly too loudly or absentmindedly clicking their pen makes my blood boil. Even the sight of someone twirling a piece of hair around their finger makes me shudder and cup my hands around my eyes.

I’m forever changing carriages on train journeys to get away from triggers and I often have to wait until a film has been out for a while before I go to see it at the cinema as I want to minimize the risk of being sat in front of someone loudly chewing.

I suffer from a condition called misophonia and it seems that I’m not alone. According to Dr Pawel Jastreboff, an audiologist and leading researcher on the topic, misophonia might effect between two and three percent of the population.

But if so many people suffer from this condition, then why has nobody heard of it?

Misophonia, also known as selective sound sensitivity syndrome, is a little known and largely under-studied condition.

The word misophonia translates quite literally to ‘hatred of sound’ and was coined in the year 2000 when the married couple, audiologists Drs Pawel and Margaret Jastreboff, noticed that the symptoms of some of their patients didn’t fit the descriptions of any existing audiological conditions.

Some people were having a strong emotional response to the most subtle sounds that other people might not pick up on, but at the same time had no problem with louder noises.

‘I know very well that in the medical field if you do not create a name for a new condition, the condition does not exist,’ Dr Pawel Jastreboff said.

And it seems he was right, for in the years that followed the birth of the term more and more people began to come forward as sufferers.

The condition has gained a little more fame lately, especially across the pond as American TV show host Kelly Ripa came out as a sufferer and, last month, MTV aired a ‘True Life: I have Misophonia’ special.

When people with misophonia hear one of their trigger noises or see a trigger movement, they are filled with emotions such as anger, disgust and hatred. The feelings then disappear as quickly as they came when a person is removed from the trigger.

It is not only noises that cause issues for misophonics, however, and repetitive motions can be equally as distressing. The sound of loud typing on computers drives me mad but I can easily plug in my earphones to drown out the tapping.

But the sight of someone’s fingers moving over their keyboard is much harder to avoid and this can aggravate me so much that, on a stressful day, I might have to cup my hand over my eyes or sink into my chair and pull my hair around my face.

Misophonia also seems to be more pronounced in me when I am stressed. On a good day I can be only slightly irritated by noises that on other days might make me come close to standing on a chair and screaming.

Misophonia Treatment Institute offers new treatments that can provide relief from the symptoms of Misophonia which are very effective for many people. Visit MisophoniaTreatment.Com for more details!

Misophonia Sufferers: Scientists May Have Found the Root of Your Pain

Ever wonder why some ordinary sounds drive you crazy? It’s called misophonia, a mysterious affliction in which seemingly harmless sounds unleash anger, anxiety and, in some cases, panic attacks in some people.

If you’re one of them, neuroscientists at Newcastle University in Britain say they may have found an explanation for what ails you.

In a report on the latest study published Thursday in the journal Current Biology, the neuroscientists say that brain scans of misophonia sufferers show that particular sounds, like eating and drinking, cause the part of their brain that processes emotions, the anterior insular cortex, to go into overdrive.

That region in sufferers was also connected differently, compared to normal brains, to the amygdala and the hippocampus, areas that are involved in recalling past experiences, said Dr. Sukhbinder Kumar, the lead researcher from the Institute of Neuroscience at Newcastle University.

“We think that misophonia may be heavily connected to recalling past memories, because people with misophonia have had very bad experiences,” he said in a phone interview Friday.

The research opens up the possibilities of future therapy for those afflicted with misophonia, a term coined by the American scientists Pawel and Margaret Jastreboff in 2001.

A survey of nearly 200 misophonia sufferers showed that the average age at which they first became aware of the condition was 12, Dr. Kumar said.

“When they hear these sounds, it’s like their attention is completely absorbed by the sounds, and they can’t do anything else,” he said. “They’re triggering a recall.”

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For the study, the team used an M.R.I. to measure the brain activities of 42 people with and without misophonia while they were listening to a range of noises.

The sounds were categorized into neutral ones like rain; unpleasant sounds like a crying baby; and trigger sounds that were mostly linked to eating, chewing, drinking and breathing.

When exposed to the noises, those with misophonia showed brain activities different from those without the condition.

“The most dominant reaction is anger and anxiety, not disgust,” Dr. Kumar said.

But why those sounds, and not others, trigger such averse reactions remains a mystery, he said. The exact number of misophonia sufferers in the world is unknown, he said, because it was only recently diagnosed as a condition.

The affliction can be so acute in some people that they can’t stand living with their own families. Olana Tansley-Hancock, 29, of Kent, England, was just 8 when family meals became a real chore.

“The noise of my family eating forced me to retreat to my own bedroom for meals,” she told the team at Newcastle University. “I can only describe it as a feeling of wanting to punch people in the face when I heard the noise of them eating.”

Dr. Kumar said in a news release,“My hope is to identify the brain signature of the trigger sounds — those signatures can be used for treatment such as for neuro-feedback for example, where people can self-regulate their reactions by looking at what kind of brain activity is being produced.”

But the study’s findings will come as some relief to misophonia sufferers and reassure some who question the condition’s validity, he added.

“This study demonstrates the critical brain changes as further evidence to convince a skeptical medical community that this is a genuine disorder.”

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What we know about misophonia, the ‘hatred of sounds’

A condition called misophonia—where people adversely react to particular sounds, often with feelings of rage, terror, fear and panic—was first identified 20 years ago, but is only now starting to be better understood, as Dr Karl Kruszelnicki writes.

The human body is incredibly complex. We are still learning about it—in fact we are still discovering new human diseases.

So let me introduce you to what appears to be a disease so new that you won’t find it in your spell-checker, or your favourite dictionary. In fact, this ‘disease’ is so new it might not even turn out to be a real disease.

In people who have misophonia, the response to the trigger sound is a strange and extreme combination of rage, terror, fear, panic and anger.

It’s called ‘misophonia’—literally meaning ‘hatred of sound’.

Misophonia is a disorder of how your brain processes sounds, so you get extremely powerful negative emotions in response to some everyday sounds.

These trigger sounds are overwhelmingly generated by humans. About 80 per cent of them are related to the mouth, and about 60 per cent have a strong repetitive element. Trigger sounds include eating, chewing, footsteps, breathing, yawning, a cat licking its paws, and even the plosive sound of the letter P, as in ‘Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers’.

In people who have misophonia, the response to the trigger sound is a strange and extreme combination of rage, terror, fear, panic and anger. It seems to be related to the flight, fright or freeze response in the sympathetic nervous system, which has evolved to get you ready for dealing with emergencies.

In about 5 per cent of cases, the trigger sound leads to actual physical violence, while in about 25 per cent of cases it results in verbal violence. In most cases, though, the anger gets bottled up.

People with misophonia have insight into their condition. They understand that their aggressive reaction to a trigger sound is both excessive and unreasonable, and that the loss of self-control is unacceptable. So they often try to avoid the trigger sounds by all kinds of workarounds, including wearing noise-reduction headsets, which unfortunately cut out a whole bunch of other useful sounds as well.

Misophonia was first identified in 1997 by the audiologist, Marsha Johnson. She called it ‘4S’ or ‘Selective Sound Sensitivity Syndrome’. It was the married researchers, Margaret and Pawel Jastreboff from Emory University who first coined the term ‘misophonia’ around the year 2000. However, the condition has not been yet accepted into the Psychiatric Bible known as DSM-5, or the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition.

Related: Living with misophonia, hatred of sounds: What is it like?

On average, misophonia appears when you’re about 13, but it can turn over at a fairly wide range of ages. And unfortunately, it gets worse over time—you get sensitive to a wider range of trigger sounds over time.

This condition is quite different from ‘hyperacuisis’, where an ordinary sound appears to be excessively loud and painful. And also from ‘tinnitus’, which involves a ringing sound in the ears, but which is actually happening in the brain.

A relatively small study in early 2017 showed that people with misophonia had abnormally high activity in the anterior insular cortex when exposed to their trigger sounds. This part of the brain tells our consciousness what it should pay attention to—it integrates information from the body as well as from external sensory inputs.

The brain centres that process sound also fired up much more strongly in people with misophonia on hearing their trigger sounds. And brain scans also showed a remarkable degree of hyperconnectivity between the auditory systems, and the systems that process emotion.

It’s early days so far—especially for a condition that is not yet even officially recognised—but there are already some treatments that seem to work.

Both cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) and some brain training techniques appear to have some degree of success. Alcohol seems to make it better, while caffeine can make things worse.

But anything is better than nothing, when an innocent sound can be a trigger for another person’s bite.

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