Misophonia Muscle Relaxation

Tom Dozier, M.S.

About this app

You can choose from 10 voices, 6 background songs, and 6 background sounds. You can customize the muscles in the session, tense and release times, and the amount of talking.

This app is designed to help you 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 sounds. For a quick start to reduce your misophonia, we suggest you complete 3 or 4 session every day for 2 weeks, then decrease to 2 sessions per day for the next 2 weeks. After this, you can reduce to 1 session per day. We suggest you continue to do one session per day as this helps your overall health and wellness.
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.

After you have completed 14-20 relaxation training sessions, you should Sequential Relaxation (SR) and Total Instant Relaxation sessions. Do 3 SR sessions per day and 5 Instant Relaxation 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 relaxation and counterconditioning treatment (RCT) developed by behavior scientist, Thomas Dozier, and has been the method of helping hundreds of 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.

Ratings and reviews

It has potential. I downloaded this to donwith my daughter who struggles with misophonia. She couldn't handle the voice, the music or the babbling brook sounds. It would be a great app if there were a few options for each of those categories so that users can find the voice, music and white noise sound combination that works for them. Sadly, with the app as it is currently is will not work for my daughter because all the sounds in it are triggers for her.

Glad this exist, especially for free but it needs help. The guided audio cadence is strange and with just go silent randomly. For example it tells you to take a deep breathe and hold it then goes silent for about a minute, while others with have you clench for the correct amount of time of 15 second. With that said I am extremely grateful this app is out here, especially for free. Thanks

Disappointed... It was a bad idea to have a high pitch female voice doing the voice over. Plus she is VERY "S"y and crispy. Not a good app in my opinion or not helpful to me anyway. Maybe someone else will benefit from it but beware there are possible trigger sounds.