Strong From [Our] Very Weakness

Dear @atlasistryingherbest,

Dear @6championshipdrive, 

Thank you for your question! Unfortunately I don’t have a great answer as far as the theaters go - I haven’t been to a theater in…in…

But I do have some tips for watching at home! My wife and I always have subtitles on whatever we’re watching just in case of people eating. In a pinch, we can just mute it and read the subtitles and not have to deal with noises! 

I’m sorry if that doesn’t answer your question very well :/ I know at some theaters they have special glasses with subtitles for the hearing impaired, but I’ve personally never used them. Try to call around to cinemas and ask if they have anything you could read subtitles with so you could turn off your headphones whenever that happens. 

Okay not really, but I just realized my blog is 4 years old today and that’s honestly wild to me. I met my beautiful wife through this blog. I’ve had speaking opportunities because of this blog. I’m the Misophonia Research Institute’s vice-chairman of Public Awareness because of this blog. 

This blog has helped shape me into a decent person and I’m just glad I can help people with my horrible drawings and terrible sense of humor. 

Thanks everyone for four years. You are the reason I do what I do. I’ve met so many of you and you’re the very best of people and I’m so thankful for all of your support even though my hands have been useless this year because of ehlers-danlos syndrome and I haven’t been able to draw much xD 

Here’s to another year of whatever this is :) You guys are worth it and you’re all such beautiful, wonderful people.

Hey guys! I just made this for some of my friends in Brazil for their “Red December” misophonia awareness month. 

A groundbreaking study about misophonia was released this year by Dr. Sukhbinder Kumar and his team from the Institute of Neuroscience at Newcastle University and the Wellcome Center for NeuroImaging at the University College London and has changed the game when it comes to discussing this misunderstood neurological condition. 

It’s so interesting, so fascinating to people with backgrounds in psychology and neurology, but to the commonperson? Words like “ventromedial prefrontal cortex”, “amygdala”, and “myelination” might as well be in a completely different language. 

And I know that most people with misophonia would absolutely love to be able to understand what’s wrong with them, so that’s why I’m doing this. Strap yourselves in, we’re taking a crash course in miso-psychology!

Some Words You Should Know Before We Get Started So You’re Not Totally Lost:

- Frontal Lobe:

This is the brain part in the very front. It is important because it controls emotions, problem-solving, memory-language, judgement, and the birds and the bees. The control panel, if you will. 

- Cerebral Hemispheres: 

Think of a hemisphere as half of a globe. Your brain is the globe (the word cerebral come from cerebrum, which is your brain), and the hemispheres are the two halves; left and right. 

- Myelin and Myelination: 

Myelin is an insulating substance that covers special nerves in the brain that send information. (Kind of like those chutes at drive-through banks you send your money through.) The more myelin is covering the chutes, the faster and more vroomwhoosh the information can send. More myelin is like high-speed Internet. 

- Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex (vmPFC): 

Don’t panic, this is just a big word that tells us exactly where on the brain this part is. “Ventro-” on the underside of the brain, “-medial” in the middle, “Pre-” before, “-frontal” in the frontal lobe, “cortex” center. So it’s on the underside of the brain, in the middle, and on the very tip of the frontal lobe. It actually sits right above the eye-socket. VmPFC for short, this part of the brain helps keep emotions like fear and empathy in line and helps you make decisions. 

- Salient: Important, or relevant. 

- Stimuli: Sensory information coming into the brain through your eyes, ears, nose, mouth, or skin.

- Anterior Insular Cortex (AIC): 

“Anterior” in the front, not posterior, “insular cortex” the area of the brain in the middle (imagine a baseball in a mitt - the baseball is the insular cortex and the mitt is the rest of the brain). This part of the brain is on the front of the insular cortex and does a lot of things. The AIC decides what stimuli is salient. This part of the brain helps process emotions. It also arranges all the sensory information you’re taking in so that you have a good picture of what’s going on in the world around you. Believe it or not, but how you experience the world is all related to how your senses are processed!

- The Amygdala: 

The area of the brain where the fight-or-flight response is started. Fight-or-flight is what kept humans alive in the caveman days where the rustling in the bushes could be a bunny, but could also be a tiger. 

The amygdala is located in the insular cortex we talked about above and assigns salience to sensory stimuli so you can be ready to run in case it’s not a bunny, but a tiger. 

Now That That’s Settled, What Causes Misophonia?

Okay. So the first thing that Kumar’s team notes through their MRI studies is that people with misophonia have a ton of myelin in their vmPFCs. This means that people with misophonia have vmPFCs that function much faster than the average person. Also, the vmPFC is an area that has a ridiculous amount of information bank-chutes to many other areas of the brain.

 Like the areas which process memories, smells, and most importantly, the amygdala. If the vmPFC and the amygdala are talking more than usual? There can be trouble. And that trouble is spelled M-I-S-O-P-H-O-N-I-A. 

This study also found that people with miso also have greater activation in the AIC when they hear trigger sounds. 

Remember how I mentioned that the AIC is responsible for putting together a picture of your reality based on the sensory information you’re picking up? Imagine if for whatever reason, the AIC decides that grandma chewing gum is important. 

Then the amygdala, for whatever reason, thinks that because grandma’s gum-chewing is important, it must be a tiger in the bushes and you gotta be ready to run. 

Then the vmPFC gets confused and thinks it needs to be angry about it because together with the amygdala, they’re not processing emotions the way that they should be.

 Before you know it, the misophonia sufferer, through no fault of their own, is experiencing the anxiety of being chased by a tiger when they know full well grandma’s gum-chewing sounds aren’t a tiger; and in addition, they’re really freaking angry about it.  

To me, this research is fascinating because it confirms everything I have felt as a misophonia sufferer. I have felt like an idiot because I know full well that my classmate eating chips isn’t going to hurt me. But my body is responding like the noise is actually a threat to my bodily safety. This is because my brain doesn’t see reality as reality, and even though I know that, my brain doesn’t. 

And before anyone tries to say, “Well if you know it’s not going to hurt you, can’t you decide to not be bothered by it?” let me say this: the brain is an organ. It’s part of the body. You can’t just decide to not have cancer because you know you don’t need to grow a tumor right there. Your body thinks it does, but you’re not thinking for your body.

I hope that this post helps to clear up questions about what misophonia is, because it is a very complicated and unbelievable-sounding disorder. And though you may not be a scientist, my hope is that after reading this, you may be able to better understand what’s going on in your body and feel more in the loop with the current research. 

(Original artwork by Steven Thomas Vomacka not to be independently posted elsewhere without credit being given.)

Dear Anon, 

My wife just went, “Well f*** they got you!” haha. Funny you should mention this, because there’s a reason I used to never smile when I was a woman. When I was a kid, my birth dad told me,

And like ever since then, I’ve been really self-conscious of my smile. I even went through a period in middle school where I refused to smile for anything and every picture looks like I just heard about Trump becoming the US president. I smile more now as a man - I think it’s just confidence, but whenever I see pictures of myself I still go, “Man…I look like I’m in pain.”

Luckily, I have a wife.  

So things are better now :) 

Thanks for your concern! Hope you’re having a great day.

Dear Bri, 

Thank you so much for your message, it was really encouraging (even though I got it ages ago and I’m just getting to it)! You’re certainly not alone in this, there are literally so many of us and we’re all here for you. I’ve made so many friends in this community and I honestly don’t know what I’d do without it. I even met my wife here! And thank you so much, @living-with-miso are actually sitting on her mom’s couch together this morning answering asks and I can say with complete honesty I’ve never been happier in my life :) 

Dear SquadLeaderChase,

You’re so welcome! Hope you’re able to get that diagnosis. Also, your username reminded me of this drawing of the Paw Patrol I did at my nephew’s direction yesterday and I’m sorry.

Dear MeAndMyHalla,

Thank you for your message! It’s encouraging to see that doing neurofeedback has been so helpful for you. I did something similar with Tom Dozier with progressive muscle relaxation (PMR) for several sessions that helped me for a while that I’ve been meaning to get back into. Hearing from you made me want to maybe try it again and maybe make a post about it! I’ll try and do that soon. That’s incredible to hear that you were only triggered twice during a whole vacation! Wow! If you wouldn’t mind, some more information about neurofeedback would be such a great thing to share about and I’d be interested in doing some research on it to teach the misobabies; I know they’d love that! 

I’m glad my posts have been helpful to you! It’s always so encouraging to hear back from readers and know I’m actually making a difference :)