I’m Jane Gregory, a clinical psychologist, misophonia researcher and author of the book Sounds Like Misophonia: How to stop small noises from causing extreme reactions. I once threw my brother’s donut in a bin because he refused to eat it quietly. Not, like, recently. He’s learned his lesson.

I also once stopped a meeting because I couldn’t ignore a faint dripping sound, and across the room I discovered a water cooler leaking onto a very slippery floor on a very public path. I felt like a superhero.

I created this website to help you to learn more about misophonia, as I learn more about misophonia. It’s basically the website I wish I had read when I was a kid, had “misophonia” existed as a term back then. And had “websites” existed back then.

I also love talking about misophonia with anyone who will listen! Have a look at my press and media page to see some of the places I’ve been invited to talk about this little-known, fascinating condition.

Misophonia research

My journey from misophonia sufferer to misophonia researcher to author started with an teeny tiny blog post. I was planning to experiment on myself to see whether cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) techniques could help my misophonia symptoms. I started testing things out on myself and, over time, I felt less inclined to stab anyone daring to breathe near me. I wondered why more clinical psychologists weren’t researching therapy for this, and then I remembered I was a clinical psychologist, so I started researching therapy on this.

We began offering therapy for misophonia at the NHS specialist psychology clinic where I was working at the time, collecting data and asking for lots of feedback to make sure what we were doing was helping. I joined forces with Dr Silia Vitoratou, a psychometrician (fancy word for a mathematician good at measuring unmeasurable ideas) at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience (IoPPN) at King’s College London, who had started designing the S-Five, a new questionnaire to measure misophonia. We started with over 100 statements about misophonia, taken from what we’d read in research, participating in misophonia forums, seeing patients with misophonia and our own experiences with the condition. After surveying thousands of participants with misophonia, we whittled that down to 25 items that best capture the complex experience of misophonia.

After multiple funding rejections, I finally joined forces with my wonderful team at the University of Oxford and I was awarded funding from the Wellcome Trust under the Doctoral Training Fellowship for Clinicians to complete a three-year research project on misophonia. I’m not expecting to find a cure. I’m hoping my research will help to develop strategies to reduce the intensity of misophonia reactions and to help those who struggle with misophonia to live a more fulfilling life.

Check out my Google Scholar profile to see some of my work on misophonia so far!