The affected brain areas control how you process sounds and manage your emotions. Hearing and emotions are part of your brain’s built-in self-protection system. That’s why you feel and learn to associate emotions like anger, disgust and fear with threatening situations. The Flare Calmer earplugs don’t reduce sound. Instead, they reduce certain frequencies that the company says people find most irritating and distressing. In-ear white noise sound generators are another therapy. The idea behind these generators is to produce a gateway theory effect. The volume of the stimulus does not change, but with the added positive stimulus of a white noise, the outside annoyance appears to lessen.

Because we all experience sound differently – even two neurodivergent people or those with the same hearing difficulties – it’s challenging to find the right solution. You may want to use earplugs at night, or in specific, short-term situations. For example, when you are taking an exam, earplugs are appropriate.I use them regularly but, importantly, try to keep them in only when I need to – which is around an hour or two during the day. However, if you want to be able to switch between sound and silence easily, the best noise-cancelling headphones might be worth your money.

White noise machines can be brought into an office space or classroom to facilitate the use of a misophonia protocol. 1Noise sensitivity can cause serious distress and social anxiety. For many people, this means they are forced to wear earmuffs in public or use foam ear plugs that can be isolating and which could fall out easily. If you are triggered by noise, Loop Experience (Pro) noise cancelling ear plugs can help. How to Deal with Noise Sensitivity I was interested in whether I’d get the same reduction in noise with other high-fidelity earplugs or even foam earplugs with a hole in them. Voix tells me that, quite literally, putting most things in our ears would give us similar results – although I can’t speak to how comfortable they’d be. “Cigarette butts, and any of the passive filters you can see in the passive earplugs, will typically give you that same attenuation shape: a low-pass frequency filter that lets the low-frequency leak in, unfortunately.” Jérémie Voix says. Not long after, the tinnitus started. It’s intermittent and doesn’t always affect me. I went to specialists as it was believed that I had some form of hearing loss or difficulty, but was told I was fine.

The auditory and limbic systems and the autonomic nervous system (ANS) are responsible for the misophonic response. 3 Misophonia engages the limbic system in a powerful negative way, and over time a conditioned reflex is established. The reflex is the negative reaction to a trigger. Soon, every time the patient hears the trigger, he or she will have a negative emotional response.In more severe cases, the emotional and body reactions can feel overwhelming. The resulting fight-or-flight behaviors can be very hard — if not impossible — to control. You may behave without thinking because your brain is operating on self-protecting autopilot. That can cause you to lash out verbally or even physically at whoever or whatever is making the trigger sound. Patients who have misophonia react to specific sounds that occur in specific situations. For example, the sound of someone popping gum is a common trigger, yet the sound of someone popping bubble wrap is not a trigger. 1 The two sounds are similar, but the source of the sound is the stem of the emotional response. These are the only pair I can wear all day on calls while talking to people and around traffic without feeling cut off from the world.