Treating Misophonia with Professional Hearing Care

I recently had the chance to join Dr. Stephanie Grace from Phonak and Liz Bonis from WKRC to chat about the brief history of misophonia and hearing care during their Listen to This segment.

I’m so glad I had the chance to spread the word about misophonia, its brief history, and how it can be treated with the help of professional hearing care, including prescription hearing aid technology.

What Is Misophonia?

Misophonia is a sound intolerance disorder characterized by a strong negative response to specific sounds, like repetitive noises of chewing or typing.

It has been shown to report higher levels of stress and trauma for those who have it; while its exact causes are unknown, we believe that it’s connected to auditory processing abnormalities, mixed with concerns about emotional regulations.

As a term, misophonia is fairly new; it was introduced by Dr. Jastreboff and Dr. Jastreboff, two related doctors that worked together to learn more about it in 2001. Misophonia was previously lumped under a more general term of hyperacusis, which is an increased sensitivity to certain sounds and finding environmental noises extremely stressful and upsetting.

There’s a lot of unknown factors to do with misophonia, since it’s such a new term and requires quite a bit of interviewing and deep diving to diagnose it among other sound intolerance disorders.

How Do You Diagnose Misophonia?

It’s difficult to differentiate between finding a noise stressful and finding it so annoying that you start to actively avoid it.

For example, hearing your coworker click a pen incessantly can be annoying, but if you have misophonia, you feel like you’re about to tear your hair out from that clicking noise!

Misophonia manifests differently for everyone, which is what makes it more difficult to diagnose; that clicking pen could bring a fear of hearing the noise, or annoyance, or even physical pain upon hearing it. When the irritation becomes an emotional response, there’s more likelihood that it’s misophonia.

How to Treat Misophonia with Prescription Hearing Aids

With the help of advanced hearing aid technology, you can help avoid the emotional response to these intrusive noises. 

On WKRC, Dr. Grace showed off some Phonak hearing aids that can help correct your hearing to avoid hearing as many noises as possible that could trigger your misophonia. 

Phonak hearing aids have the ability to produce sound therapies within the hearing aids, so you can listen to that – and not your coworker’s clicking pen.

How Flex Audiology Can Help

At our clinic, misophonia testing falls under our tinnitus screenings; we can happily take a look at your ears and chat with you to find out if you have misophonia. 

Make sure to request me for your screening, as I can specifically check for misophonia and see what’s going on so you can get back to hearing the life you love without the stressful noises you don’t need to hear!