Hi, everyone – lifelong misophone here, daughter of another misophone. I have serious problems with repetitive high-pitched noises, bass sounds such as music outside or neighbor sounds, and breathing sounds. My mom’s version focuses more around mouth sounds, but she shares the repetitive noises thing with me. We’ve both developed a lot of coping mechanisms over the years, but I’ve recently found something which does a far better job.
I know I’ll sound like a spokesperson for Bose here, but hand to God, I promise I’m not. Bose recently came out with a thing called Sleep Buds. I took an interest in them because I had been considering buying specialized hearing aids for tinnitus sufferers which pump pink or white noise into your ear, but they’re somewhere between $2,000 and $4,000 across the board, absolutely unaffordable. The Sleep Buds are $250, and they are, if anything, better than the hearing aids, because you actually can sleep with them in, unlike a hard hearing aid or noise-canceling headphones. They use bluetooth to play a selection of white/pink sounds in your ear, and they have a battery life of about sixteen hours.
With the ear buds in, but not turned on, the volume on the world is turned down already. Played softly, the ‘downstream’ track eliminates crackling, gurgling, and whistling from speech sounds. Played at mid-range, eating noises are eliminated. Played at the highest level, I can’t hear anything but the very loudest noises, for instance, a door slamming right nearby. Snoring, chewing, snorting, clicking, all of it GONE. My husband played Youtube videos of my most rage-inducing sounds, and I couldn’t hear them. Guys – I could not hear them at all. I don’t even need them in all the time, because having them nearby and knowing I can put them in whenever I need to is a stress reducer by itself.
To some, $250 is a lot of money, but I can’t say this fervently enough: the salvation of your sanity is worth this price. Please get it, get it now, and find out what it’s like not to have your system soaking in adrenaline all the time. It’s like getting to leave hell at last.