Drinking lavender herbal tea twice a day might help reduce the intense emotional and physical reactions experienced by people with misophonia. A recent clinical trial found that a two-week routine of consuming the floral tea led to pronounced reductions in anxiety, depression, and anger among individuals who suffer from this sound sensitivity disorder. The findings were published in the Journal of Psychiatric Research.
Misophonia is a psychological condition where ordinary, everyday sounds trigger an intense emotional and physical aversion. The most common triggers are noises produced by other people, such as loud chewing, heavy breathing, lip smacking, or the clicking of a pen. To a person with misophonia, these are not just minor annoyances. Exposure to such stimuli rapidly activates the sympathetic nervous system, the bodily network responsible for the human fight-or-flight response.
When triggered, people with misophonia often experience muscle tension, an accelerated heart rate, and sudden sweating. They can feel acute irritation, helplessness, or even sudden bursts of aggression. The emotional toll can be severe, often leading to strained relationships with family members and coworkers. Sufferers sometimes avoid social gatherings altogether, preferring total isolation over the acute distress of eating a meal in public.
The persistent stress of anticipating and experiencing these auditory triggers frequently gives rise to secondary mental health issues. The condition frequently co-occurs with elevated levels of anxiety and deep depressive episodes. Managing the disorder is notoriously difficult, as standard medical approaches often rely on specialized psychological therapies to help patients reframe their reactions. These therapeutic options can be expensive, time-consuming, and hard to access for the average individual.
Medical professionals sometimes prescribe medication to help manage the secondary mood symptoms associated with misophonia. These prescriptions often include antidepressants or anti-anxiety drugs, which alter the chemical balance in the brain. But these pharmaceutical options often bring unwanted side effects like emotional dullness, drowsiness, impaired concentration, and physical dependence. Seeking a more accessible and tolerable alternative, researchers have begun exploring the potential of botanical remedies.
Nursing researcher Sevgi Koroglu Gokbel at Sakarya University in Turkey led a recent study to investigate whether a natural tea could alleviate the emotional burden of the disorder. Her research team focused on lavender, an herb long associated with anxiolytic, or anti-anxiety, properties. The specific chemical compounds found in the plant, such as linalool and linalyl acetate, are known to interact with the brain’s main emotional regulation centers.
Previous research suggests these botanical components might help boost levels of calming neurochemicals in the brain. For instance, the plant’s scent and ingestion can influence the production of chemical messengers that block excitatory signals, inducing a feeling of relaxation. The researchers postulated that soothing the underlying anxiety and depression in patients could indirectly ease the daily severity of their misophonia symptoms.
To test this hypothesis, the research team recruited sixty adults who had been clinically diagnosed with misophonia. The participants were predominantly women in their early twenties. The researchers randomly assigned thirty individuals to an experimental group, while the remaining thirty were placed into a control group.
Participants in the experimental group were given a strict tea-drinking protocol to follow for fourteen consecutive days. They received twenty-eight individual sachets of dried lavender and were instructed to brew the tea every morning and evening. The protocol required them to steep the herbs in hot water for ten to fifteen minutes and to deliberately inhale the floral scent before taking a sip.
To ensure strict adherence to the routine, Gokbel checked in with the experimental group daily through text messages and phone calls. The control group, on the other hand, went about their normal lives without any intervention. The researchers told the control group members that they would receive the herbal tea after the two-week study period concluded.
At the beginning and end of the trial, all participants completed a battery of standard psychometric questionnaires. These surveys included a specialized misophonia scale, an anxiety rating scale, a depression inventory, and an anger measurement tool. The questionnaires allowed the researchers to quantify any shifts in emotional distress or symptom severity over the two-week span.
The collected data revealed a striking divergence between the two groups by the end of the trial. In the experimental group, overall misophonia symptom scores improved substantially. Under the scoring system used by the researchers, a higher numerical score indicated a lower severity of the disorder. The average misophonia score in the tea-drinking group climbed notably from a baseline of about 78 to over 91.
When breaking down the misophonia scores into specific categories, the researchers found targeted areas of improvement. Participants who drank the tea reported a measurable boost in their general quality of life. They also reported having better personal strategies for coping with irritating sounds when they occurred.
The psychological benefits extended well beyond the specific symptoms of misophonia. The tea-drinking group experienced pronounced drops in their baseline anxiety scores. Their depression scores showed a massive decline, dropping from an average of about 18 out of a possible 63 points down to just over six.
Self-reported anger levels also dropped by a sizable margin in the experimental group. By contrast, the members of the control group showed no statistically significant improvements in any of the measured psychiatric categories. Their anxiety, depression, and anger scores remained practically stagnant over the fourteen days.
Not all aspects of the disorder vanished with the intervention, however. The researchers noted that the tea did not produce statistically significant changes in how participants initially reacted to environmental trigger sounds. Their baseline level of self-control when suddenly exposed to annoying noises also remained unchanged.
While the trial results appear promising, the researchers stressed several limitations in the actual study design. The participating individuals knew exactly which group they were assigned to and knew the supposed benefits of the herbal remedy. This lack of blinding introduces a high risk of the placebo effect heavily influencing the results.
Because the experimental subjects expected the tea to make them feel calmer, their subjective ratings of their own symptoms might have artificially improved. Measuring psychiatric outcomes entirely through self-reported surveys always magnifies this particular risk. The researchers caution against viewing the botanical remedy as a standalone cure based purely on these initial survey results.
The intense monitoring of the experimental group also complicates the interpretation of the final findings. The daily text messages and frequent phone calls from the lead researcher provided a high degree of routine social support. This extra attention from a medical professional could have independently elevated the participants’ moods, regardless of what they were drinking.
The physical and sensory act of brewing the tea introduces yet another uncontrolled variable into the study. Taking fifteen minutes out of a busy day to sit quietly, breathe deeply, and hold a warm beverage is a recognized relaxation technique in its own right. The ritualistic nature of the routine might have granted the observed calmness, rather than any specific chemical property found in the flower.
To verify these preliminary findings, future studies will need to incorporate an active control group into their methodologies. Having control participants drink a completely different type of herbal tea or a placebo beverage would help isolate the actual pharmacological effects of the lavender. The study also only tracked the participants for two weeks, leaving it unknown whether the mood benefits persist with long-term use.
Finally, the specific age and gender makeup of the sample limits the scope of the overall conclusions. The human brain’s sensitivity to calming botanical chemicals can decrease heavily with age. Future clinical trials will need a much more diverse pool of participants, including older adults and men, to see if the therapeutic effects are universal.
The study, “The effect of lavender herbal tea on the mental health of individuals with misophonia: A randomized controlled trial,” was authored by Sevgi Koroglu Gokbel and Gulgun Durat.