For misophonia, especially if you’re late-diagnosed or undiagnosed, it’s important to keep in mind that you probably have been taught to ignore your sensory sensitivity and to suppress it as much as possible.

What this means is that you’re likely pushing yourself in terms of idk, I guess what I’d call your “sensory load”, before it even hits the point where it’s physically painful for you. Think of it in terms of music being too loud for a person but not to the point where it actively hurts them - this is still going to cause a person to become overwhelmed, distressed, exhausted, and to struggle with focus etc. This Is likely going to have a significant impact on your overall wellbeing as well as your experience of executive dysfunction and burnout etc.

When it comes to considering your sensory diet there are a few different strategies managing it, no matter what your sensitivity happens to be:

• Avoidance

This term isn’t a value-judgment btw. Avoidance is what people engage in when they don’t go outside in the peak of the Texas summer because it’s too hot - that’s not a negative thing, it’s just plain good sense.

Avoidance can mean scheduling things outside of peak hour for traffic or business. It can mean shopping during quiet hours or instead shopping online where possible. It can also mean removing yourself from an environment when you notice that you’re near your limit or moving away from the source of the sound.

• Mitigation

This is where you mostly have adaptive devices.

In my (admittedly limited) experience, over-ear noise cancelling headphones are more effective than in-ear ones.

There are also noise-filtering devices like Hearos, Loop, and Flare Calmer. If you regularly experience pain from the day-to-day soundscape then I’d lean more towards Hearos or Loop over Flare except in situations where it’s a particular pitch which affects you rather than the overall spectrum of noise when it’s at significant volume as Flare tends to attenuate and filter some frequencies whereas Hearos and Loop are designed to do more in the way of overall volume reduction.

There are also cheap knockoffs on AliExpress and similar sites as well as other lesser-known brands that are typically marketed to musicians and festival-goers which reduce volume while maintaining a reasonable level of fidelity.

For home use, if you don’t give a fuck about what allistic people think, or if you are so sensitive that it’s disabling then I’d recommend considering ear defenders (i.e. industrial ear protection). If you have tinnitus note that this may not be a good option or it may only be suitable in certain situations. As a strategy to reduce your overall sensory load, you might find spending some time wearing ear defenders at home at the end of your day helps you to decompress and refresh.

Earplugs are cheap and cheerful - they’ll definitely help but they muffle sound so you lose most of the fidelity. Good if you’re on a budget, if you want to carry a backup in your bag, or you want a lot of sound reduction but you want something more discreet than ear defenders for wearing in public.

• “Crowding out”

Idk what the actual psychological term for this is, if there even is one, but our nervous systems are only capable of receiving a certain amount of sensory input and this means we can kinda countersignal sensory input with other sensory input to crowd it out. (Someone with a degree help a comrade out, please!)

This probably seems abstract but in the simplest terms it’s something that is instinctive to people because even kids will do this when they are hurt - when someone injures themselves they will put pressure or lightly rub the area that is in pain.

In terms of auditory sensory sensitivity, the two examples I can think of are plugging your ears and humming or using headphones and playing sound through them fairly loudly.

Exactly what noise is going to be a question of what is most tolerable to you but you might be noise music, hardcore techno, doom metal, one of those ambient heavy rain tracks, or something else. Often the best place to start though is with is colour noise, with white noise being the most commonly known example but there are different frequency ranges associated with different colours.

Personally I find that white noise grates on my nerves pretty quickly and my favourite would have to be this particular track (disclaimer that you need decent speakers or headphones to get the value out of it because the loudspeaker on a mobile device isn’t going to cut it for the frequency ranges it hits), although that whole channel is a goldmine for different noise tracks so I’d encourage you to do your own exploration.

• Soothing

This dovetails into the point above because a lot of the stuff used to crowd out some sensory input is going to be soothing as well, although not always.

You can use your downtime to listen to sounds, tracks, or songs that you find particularly soothing as a way of decompressing and finding your centre after experiencing noxious auditory stimuli. This one likewise is quite personal and it may take some exploring before you find what hits the spot for you.

Last of all, it’s important to distinguish between what you find to be stimulating and what you find to be soothing. I know I’m conflating terms here so you’ll have to excuse me for that.

If we imagine a spectrum that runs from the things that we find most calming and soothing to the things that we find to be most stimulating or exciting, you’ll probably be able to identify what specific type of sensory input from the different categories (olfactory, gustatory, tactile, auditory, vestibular, proprioceptive and… idk I always miss one of them lol) you find pleasurable and then it should be pretty easy to determine whether that stimuli is more soothing or more stimulating from that point.

For example, you will probably find a range of auditory sensory stimuli to be pleasant but not all of it will be soothing so the rest are probably stimulating for you.

There’s a discussion to be had here about how if you readily identify more on one end of the spectrum vs the other then you’re likely to be considered sensory-avoidant or sensory-seeking for that particular sense. (For example, I am [legitimately tested btw] largely sensory-avoidant with the olfactory sense and largely sensory-seeking with the gustatory sense.) Maybe one day I’ll find the motivation to purchase the Adolescent/Adult Sensory Profile kit and “democratise” it, but that day is not today.

Anyway, I’ve rambled on for ages again. I’ll cut it off here. I hope that this helps give you some insight into how to better meet your sensory needs, especially with regards to auditory sensitivity. I should also mention that it’s worth considering reading Living Sensationally by Winnie Dunn - literally the Occupational Therapist who wrote the book on sensory profiles although that title is written for a lay audience so it doesn’t presume a level of pre-knowledge about like psychology or occupational therapy or anything.

The author has misophonia. The general strategy she gives for things is have a “quick calm plan” for when you’re overwhelmed, and “sensory soothing” strategies to counteract sensory overloads. For misophonia specifically, she talks about going to movies during matinees, and preferring to meet people for meals outdoors. She also recommends “seeking out silence after your sound sense has been triggered.” Generally, her advice for sensory triggers that are inescapable is to make sure you have alone time afterward, with an opportunity to treat yourself to something that soothes that sense. (She likes smelling lavender after experiencing an unpleasant smell, for example.)