Misophonia Muscle Relaxation Training

About Misophonia Muscle Relaxation Training

This app is designed to help your greatly reduce your misophonia by developing your ability to relax muscles when there are triggers. Misophonia is a condition where specific stimuli (triggers) cause an extreme response. Your response to triggers includes both emotional and physical reflexes. This app allows you to develop the neurological/physical skill of relaxing your muscles on demand. When your muscles are relaxed, misophonia triggers are less severe and will fade away. But relaxing your muscles is a skill that must be developed through practice, practice, and more practice.

With this app you will be guided through Progressive Muscle Relaxation (PMR) sessions. We call this Muscle Relaxation Training, because that is what PMR accomplishes. Doing Muscle Relaxation Training actually creates new neurological connections that allow you to relax specific muscles on demand. Yoga, traditional mediation, mindfulness meditation, and PMR all help you achieve a state of deep relaxation, which reduces stress and improves your overall health and well-being. But only PMR creates growth of neuron fibers (dendrites) that make the connection from the thought (relax calves) and the muscle neurons of the calves.

Here is what happens when you are triggered, based on our research and treatment of hundreds of people with misophonia.

TRIGGER -> MUSCLE FLINCH REFLEX -> EMOTIONAL REFLEX -> PHYSIOLOGICAL DISTRESS

If you relax the muscle of your reflex before and through triggers, then that muscle reflex will decay. As the muscle reflex decays, the emotion reflex also decays.

The app includes two sessions with variation in the muscles used. We suggest you alternate between these. You can select one of six music options to help you relax and one of six background noises. For a quick start to reduce your misophonia, we suggest you complete three session every day for two weeks. After 14-20 sessions, you can start Sequential Relaxation and Total Instant Relaxation (Ragdoll).

Advanced (paid) features allow you to customize your training sessions to focus work on the areas you need most. You can add or delete muscles from a standard session and then save it as a user defined session.

Additional advanced features include 1) multiple voices, 2) control of the tension time, 3) control of the relaxation time, 4) options for beginning and ending the sessions.

For best results, we suggest you do three muscle relaxation training sessions each day for two weeks, then decrease to two sessions per day for the next two weeks. After this, you can reduce to one session per day. We suggest you continue to do one session per day as this helps you overall health and wellness.

After you have completed 14-20 relaxation training sessions, you should Sequential Relaxation (SR) and Total Instant Relaxation (Ragdoll) sessions. Do three SR sessions per day and five Ragdoll sessions as practice when there are no triggers.

To reduce your misophonia, relax whenever you are tense, immediately after triggers, and relax before triggers and hold that relaxation through the trigger. This can change your brain to reduce your future misophonia reflex.

Help with Sleep: If you have trouble going to sleep, then you can do a relaxation training session in bed with the lights off. This will usually help a person go to sleep quickly. With the advanced features, you can select an ending that promotes going to sleep (if you can stay awake long enough to get to the end of the session).

Misophonia Muscle Relaxation Training is part of the misophonia treatment method developed by behavior scientist, Thomas Dozier, and has been the method of helping many people greatly reduce their misophonia severity. Tom is the president of the non-profit Misophonia Institute, owner of Misophonia Treatment Institute, and author of Understanding and Overcoming Misophonia. See misophonia.org and misophoniatreatment.com.