Minimise Misophonia with Hypnotherapy
Image by Kristina Flour
Trigger Warning: Please note descriptive examples of trigger sounds are given in the first paragraph titled ‘What is Misophonia?’
After that all triggers are given the generic term of ‘trigger sound’, ‘trigger noise’ or ‘trigger’. without any description.
WHAT IS MISOPHONIA?
Misophonia is a condition characterized by strong emotional or physiological responses triggered by specific sounds. These sounds are often repetitive and commonly include chewing, swallowing, lip-smacking, sniffing, ticking or tapping sounds. People with misophonia may experience intense feelings of irritation, anger, anxiety, or disgust when exposed to these trigger sounds. Misophonia is a very real and frustrating condition for sufferers.
WHAT CAUSES MISOPHONIA?
Misophonia is believed to involve an abnormal processing of certain auditory stimuli in the brain. The issue is not the sound, but the individual’s perception of the sound.
THE CORE CHALLENGES FACED BY CLIENTS WITH MISOPHONIA
Becoming fixated by the trigger sound, amplifying its effect
Escalating sensitivity and alertness to the trigger sound
Irrational and uncontrollable emotional response to a trigger sound
General negative outlook regarding the prevalence and magnitude of triggers in day-to-day activities
THE BRAIN’S ROLE IN HEARING
The brain’s role in hearing is a complex process. In simplified terms, the brain understands sound by converting vibrations picked up by the ear into neural signals, which are then processed by the auditory cortex and other parts of the brain. Our brain gives meaning to what we hear, and this process is called auditory perception.
Hypnotherapy is useful as it works to alter the way the misophonic client perceives the sound they have become hyperreactive to.
WHAT IS AUDITORY PERCEPTION?
Auditory perception is the process by which the brain interprets and makes sense of the sounds detected by the ears. The sound vibration is the information, but it is the auditory cortex in conjunction with other parts of the brain that co-ordinate and attribute meaning to the sound the ears process. The process is both physical (transference of the vibration within the ear) and cognitive (the process of naming and understanding what the sound means).
One of the most critical functions of hearing is to recognize threats. However, it is the perception of the sound—what we believe the sound signifies—that determines whether it represents danger and how we should respond.
WHAT DOES THE HYPNOTHERAPY PROGRAM DO FOR INDIVIDUALS WITH MISOPHONIA?
The four part program helps individuals with misophonia transition from feeling irritated and distracted to achieving a more regulated, commonplace, even impartial response by using hypnotherapy to alter the thought patterns that lead to fixation, hyper-sensitivity, hyper-reactivity and hyper-alertness.
WHAT IS THE MINIMISE MISOPHONIA HYPNOTHERAPY PROGRAM?
The Minimise Misophonia Program is a four-part hypnotherapy program consisting of four one-hour sessions. In each session, we uncover one of the thinking styles (cognitive styles) that support misophonic thinking and misophonic responses. Using hypnotherapy, we adjust the relevant thought process to minimize the misophonic response.
There are four main Cognitive Styles supporting Misophonia and these four styles contribute to fixation, amplification, hypser-sensitivity, hyper-alertness, and irrational emotional response.
The Minimize Misophonia Hypnotherapy Program, is an exclusive, specialised, all-natural and uncomplicated four-stage hypnosis program crafted specifically for those with heightened auditory sensitivity. Each hypnosis session runs for 50-60 minutes, making the MM a relatively short treatment time. Recordings of each session are provided for the client to listen to and keep.
HOW DOES THE MM PROGRAM HELP MINIMISE THE FOUR COGNITIVE DISTORTIONS THAT SUPPORT MISOPHONIA?
Cognitive Styles
Cognitive style refers to an individual's preferred way of processing information, thinking, and solving problems, characterized by patterns of perception, memory, and decision-making. While some might describe it as a 'personality trait,' this is an oversimplification.
Our senses are continuously bombarded with information that the brain must decipher. To filter all the stimuli without becoming overwhelmed, the brain makes predictions and shortcuts, known as cognitive styles. This process leads many thought patterns to become automatic.
The brain applies this to all stimuli, including auditory information. A cognitive style is a habitual and automatic pattern of thinking that, being programmed into the subconscious, is rarely questioned or tested. For instance, positive thinking is a cognitive style where one generally thinks optimistically, which may or may not be accurate, but it leads the individual to have a generally upbeat frame of mind.
Cognitive styles are learned or developed throughout life and are malleable. Misophonia, a condition marked by an extreme reaction to specific sounds, is associated with certain cognitive distortions linked to specific cognitive styles.
To understand how cognitive styles affect individuals with misophonia, let's examine how particular cognitive styles predispose an individual to the cognitive distortions that result in this condition.
What is a cognitive distortion and how is it related to misophonia?
A cognitive distortion occurs when a cognitive style is misapplied, affecting the individual’s ability to cope effectively with their situation. For example, a person with a positive thinking cognitive style might overlook negative or harmful aspects of their environment, leading to poor risk assessment and potential harm or disappointment.
Almost every cognitive style requires a reality check to test its usefulness in a given situation. With a cognitive distortion, this check is missing, leading to an imbalance in thinking. In simple terms, a cognitive distortion opposes balanced thinking strategies and clouds the individual’s ability to accurately assess what is happening around them.
Most forms of obsessive behavior are rooted in cognitive distortions. Cognitive distortions cause individuals to magnify their focus on what they expect, overlooking environmental stimuli that contradict their expectations, similar to an overly positive thinker. This is also known as cognitive bias, and it occurs in everyone to some extent. In cases of obsessive fixation, individuals lose the ability to realistically evaluate the object of their obsession.
In the case of misophonia, the individual distorts the perceived threat or offensiveness of the trigger sound – it is their perception that is distorted, not the sound itself. This explains why misophonia can transfer across various sounds without logical explanation, as the condition is largely a distorted subconscious process.
Since auditory perception is a subconscious process and hypnotherapy targets subconscious patterns, hypnotherapy is an effective method for balancing cognition and reducing fixation.
So how does cognitive distortion affect misophonia?
The main part of the brain that processes sound is the auditory cortex. The auditory cortex is perpetually filtering, filing, and categorising sound to make meaning of it. It develops short cut responses to what it can reasonably expect from what it hears.
In the case of misophonia, some of those automatic responses are misfiring, causing cognitive distortion of the trigger sound - it appears louder, or more threatening than it would be for another person.
The sound isn’t the problem, the cognitive distortion of the sound is the issue.
Hypnotherapy works on the subconscious cognitive distortion to reset the way the brain filters and understands the trigger noises and this is why hypnotherapy is a useful approach to minimise misophonia.
WHAT ARE THE CHARACTERISTIC COGNITIVE PATTERNS OF MISOPHONIA?
1st Cognitive Style: Emotional Frame of Reference
Individuals who operate from an emotional frame of reference, use their feelings as the primary measure of events in their world.
Cognitive Distortion: Subjective Referencing
Misophonic individuals often rely heavily on their emotions to gauge the level of threat or offensiveness, rather than consulting objective evidence to assess the actual degree of inconvenience or danger.
Missing Cognitive Check: The ability to switch in and out of subjective and objective measures.
When an individual with an emotional frame of reference anchors their perception to their feelings alone and then believe these feelings to be the only valid gauge of what is occurring, they begin distancing themselves from accurate evaluation strategies that individuals without obsessive tendencies naturally employ.
This reliance on emotion-based data, devoid of real-world measures, sets the individual on a path towards fixation. If a sensation feels intense and no contradictory evidence is considered, it inevitably seems drastically disturbing to them. There is no balanced measure available to regulate the individual’s para-sympathetic nervous system.
Hypnotherapeutic Intervention: Hypnotherapy works on the subconscious imbalance by introducing a new step, allowing the client to access objective awareness to include all relevant information for a more-rounded perspective. This enables the misophonic individual to better manage their emotional response. The upside is, this is probably a skill they already use in other areas of the life, but for some reason they have ceased applying it in regard to the trigger sound.
2nd Cognitive Style: Precise Nature (Attention to Detail)
You may have heard the saying, "What you focus on, you magnify." Focusing on a problem that cannot be changed will almost always amplify the problem. You may have also heard the phrase, “What you resist, persists”. Having the capacity to determine what is most important, threatening, or offensive and how to change it, is a useful skill. So is the ability to recognize when something cannot be changed and then removing attention from it onto something else. Sometimes, individuals with an exacting nature, can lose the aforementioned steps and get lost in “shoulds”.
Cognitive Distortion: Fixation
Fixation is a two-step process where there is an inaccurate determination of controllability, followed by an inability to turn focus away. Psychotherapists refer to this as obsessive association and it is a consuming, self-perpetuating trap.
The individual with misophonia becomes transfixed with whatever sound is offensive and becomes attached to the meaning they give to the trigger sound and are unable to move their awareness off it.
Alternatively, an indifferent person would recognize that the noise is a brief unwanted distraction and return to doing whatever they are doing, effectively moving on and avoiding the fixation trap.
Missing Cognitive Check: Combining Acceptance and Dissociation Cognitive Skills
Individuals with obsessive tendencies often struggle to distinguish between what they can and cannot influence. When this is followed by an inability to disconnect, the individual may end up attempting to fix the unfixable.
Hypnotherapeutic Intervention: Hypnotherapy combines two cognitive strategies: acceptance and dissociation.
Step 1. Acceptance: Hypnotherapy focuses on activating a realistic assessment process to determine influence. Once the client has a better understanding of what they can control, they can either use objective means to reduce or stop the distraction or subjectively choose to shift their focus away from it. In other words, hypnotherapy embeds the cognitive sequence necessary to distinguish between attempting to fix something and fixating on it.
Step 2. Dissociation: Dissociation is a cognitive skill where the individual learns to deliberately shift their focus from one concern to another. The subconscious mind continuously separates what is important from what is not, identifying what can be influenced and what cannot. Once the mind determines what is important and can be influenced, it then considers the secondary process of choosing where to best place focus. This involves choosing between association or dissociation, essentially the deliberate shifting of focus.
Hypnotherapy works on recalibrating the subconscious process of association and dissociation.
Combining these two hypnotic strategies effectively breaks the trap of fixation.
3rd Cognitive Style: Present Orientation
Individuals with misophonia can become trapped in the present moment, overwhelmed by the offensive trigger, and fail to recognize that the noise will soon end, cutting them off from the possibility of coping with the sound as a temporary annoyance. This inability to disconnect from the present and consider the future can also escalate their emotional responses, such as frustration, anger, and repulsion.
Cognitive Distortion: Inability to see the temporary nature of an experience
Individuals stuck in a present-oriented mindset are unable to measure the lifespan of an inconvenience, which distorts the magnitude of the problem they face.
Missing Cognitive Check: Using time to gauge the magnitude and impact of an inconvenience
You may have heard the saying, “This too shall pass.” Fixation requires the suspension of the ability to view experiences as temporary.
Hypnotherapeutic Intervention:
Step 1. Introduce a useful subconscious check to measure the impact of a problem over time. Obviously, if something can reasonably be expected to be short-lived, its influence will be minimized. It is easier to cope with an inconvenience when you know it will be brief.
Step 2. Use a future perspective to dissociate. By using duration as leverage the client shifts focus from the present problem to a point in the near future where the problem is reduced or resolved.
4th Cognitive Style: Negative Expectancy
Negative Expectancy refers to the cognitive bias where individuals anticipate poor outcomes disproportionately. This bias can become self-fulfilling, promoting avoidance or resistance to the offensive trigger, which further amplifies its effect. Negative expectancy increases both emotional sensitivity and reactivity.
Cognitive Distortion: Overestimating the likelihood of a negative outcome or inconvenience
For individuals with misophonia, negative expectancy not only amplifies the impact of an offensive sound but also presupposes an inability to cope with the sound when it appears. This presupposition can become self-perpetuating.
Missing Cognitive Check: Realistic Expectation
The ability to use all available evidence, subjective and objective, negative and positive, to arrive at a balanced and reasonable expectation.
Hypnotherapeutic Intervention: Hypnotherapy recalibrates expectancy by introducing probability as the principal reference for predicting daily events. By fostering a perspective based on probability, it mitigates uncertainty and negativity, thereby reducing anticipatory anxiety and hypersensitivity.
Minimise Misophonia Flow Chart #1a
Minimise Misophonia Flow Chart #1b