Thank you for having a site that explains my specific problems. Its nice to know that there is at least 1 person that has the same condition I have!!!!

Hello, I found this place through a Twitter search after a crushingly frustrating and disappointing online ‘group therapy’ session for folks with tinnitus or ‘sound sensitivity’. I’m looking for other people who suffer with these issues and sharing what has helped us; I’m not looking to be patronised by clinicians who have never dealt with this stuff in their lives.

So I have the full suite of ‘sound sensitivity’: I have hyperacusis, filtering problems, nonexistent habituation and over the past 6 years or so, reading up on the symptoms, I’ve developed fully-blown misophonia.

My trigger sound is an unusual one: music. Specifically bass and and rhythmic thudding like a drumbeat or a heartbeat or footsteps. (It’s hugely frustrating because many years ago I used to be a musician – sound sensitivity works both ways, I used to have an extraordinary ability to pick up, recognise, duplicate music) I cannot cope with the sound of a radio. Someone playing a car stereo outside my window is enough to send me into a meltdown – last week I lost control and tried to beat up a van. It genuinely frightens me, how badly these kinds of sounds affect me.

How on earth do you cope with this? (Hence why I dropped in on the “coping” thread before introducing myself.

That’s really interesting (and actually quite reassuring) to know!

Because the overwhelming majority of material I’ve read on misophonia concentrates on what my parents used to call “Mouth Music” (usually food- or breathing-related sounds). So even the little information there is, just doesn’t seem to mention the trigger sound that plagues me. Maybe we should have a thread for people to compare trigger sounds – and see how common music / bass sounds are as a trigger.

I’ve found that Brownian Noise is much better at blocking bassier sounds than White/Pink Noise. (But the problem is if I turn the Brownian Noise up loud enough to cover car stereos, the covering noise can actually trigger my hyperacusis, so it’s swings and roundabouts.) I do have a pair of construction ear defenders with special bass-response which filter out a lot of the sound – but a) I cannot use them all the time, especially not in my own home and b) as you point out, they don’t help when the sound is loud enough to be shaking the windows / house.

Thank you for making me feel less alone in this, though! Most misophonia support stuff doesn’t cover anything except the Mouth Music.