6 Ways To Treat Hearing Voices in Your Head

Voices can cut into a quiet moment, a conversation, or an ordinary task. When you’re hearing voices from inside your head with schizophrenia, treatment may help make them happen less often, feel less intense, or cause less distress. Doctors call this symptom an auditory verbal hallucination, which happens in about 75 percent of people with schizophrenia.

One MySchizophreniaTeam member described their experience with auditory hallucinations: “I am 46 and have schizophrenia. I became aware of my illness about seven years ago when I went into psychosis. Looking back, I can see where it was always lurking in the shadows, waiting to reveal itself. What are some coping strategies to deal with auditory hallucinations?”

There isn’t one approach that works equally well for everyone. Medication, talk therapy, and day-to-day coping skills can be combined as part of a care plan. This article will explain six evidence-based ways to treat and manage auditory verbal hallucinations, including options for people who continue to hear voices despite medication.

What Can Help With Hearing Voices in Your Head?

Treatment for auditory hallucinations in schizophrenia often combines multiple approaches.

Antipsychotics are the main medication treatment for schizophrenia.

Common antipsychotic medications for schizophrenia include:

• Aripiprazole (Abilify)
• Brexpiprazole (Rexulti)
• Cariprazine (Vraylar)
• Clozapine (Clozaril)
• Haloperidol (Haldol)
• Lumateperone (Caplyta)
• Lurasidone (Latuda)
• Olanzapine (Zyprexa)
• Quetiapine (Seroquel)
• Risperidone (Risperdal)
• Xanomeline and trospium chloride (Cobenfy)

Most of these medications act on the dopamine pathway in the brain. Dopamine is a chemical messenger that helps brain cells communicate. In schizophrenia, higher dopamine activity in certain parts of the brain is linked to hallucinations and other psychotic symptoms.

Research has found clozapine can help when other antipsychotics haven’t given enough symptom relief. It may be recommended when schizophrenia hasn’t responded adequately to at least two other antipsychotics. This is known as treatment-resistant schizophrenia.

Because it can cause serious side effects, people who take clozapine need regular blood tests and other health monitoring.

The goal with these medications is fewer voices, quieter voices, or voices that are easier to manage. Taking medication as prescribed helps your care team see how well it’s helping. If side effects make that difficult, tell your prescriber rather than changing your dose on your own.

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is commonly recommended for people with schizophrenia. It involves working one-on-one with a therapist to understand how thoughts, feelings, actions, and symptoms are connected. A therapist can help you examine beliefs about a voice, notice what makes the experience more distressing, and develop other ways to respond.

Research suggests CBT can help reduce hallucinations. A 2024 umbrella review, which combines findings from multiple reviews, found small to medium improvements in hallucinations across 28 clinical trials by the end of treatment. A 2025 meta-analysis of 45 studies found a medium improvement with CBT.

CBT doesn’t have to make every voice disappear to be helpful. Treatment can focus on lowering distress, building coping skills, and helping you feel more able to choose how you respond.

Avatar therapy is designed for distressing voices that continue despite treatment. With a therapist, you create a digital face and voice that resembles the voice you hear. You then practice talking with that digital representation while the therapist guides the conversation.

A 2026 review of 23 studies found that avatar therapy was the most effective among the psychological approaches studied for reducing the severity of voices. The review also found that psychological treatments overall reduced the frequency and distress of voices.

Avatar therapy is still a newer option, and access may be limited. For people with voices that continue, though, it may be worth asking a schizophrenia specialist whether a program is available.

Self-management strategies don’t replace medication or therapy, but they may help make voices easier to cope with in daily life. Research suggests that people respond differently to these approaches, so it may take some trial and error to find what feels helpful.

A review of self-coping strategies for hallucinated voices found some evidence for coping methods that involve doing an activity, changing what you hear, or making sounds with your own voice.

Vocalization means making sounds with your own voice. Singing, humming, or reading aloud may give you another sound to focus on. Other forms of distraction may include listening to music or audiobooks, meditation, journaling, exercising, cooking, or participating in other hobbies.

Some people find it helpful to decide when they will and won’t give a voice their attention. One study found that selective listening, asking voices to go away, and setting limits on when they would respond were more successful coping mechanisms.

Support from family members and peers can complement medication and therapy for schizophrenia. Family intervention programs can provide education about schizophrenia, strengthen communication, and help families work through problems together.

Peer support groups offer a different kind of connection. Support from someone who has experience managing their condition may help improve quality of life and the experience of care. A support group or trained peer specialist may provide a place to exchange coping ideas with people who understand what it can be like to hear voices.

Family and peer support don’t replace other schizophrenia treatments, but they can be valuable parts of an overall care plan.

Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) is another treatment being studied for auditory hallucinations in schizophrenia. It is not approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for this use. It sends magnetic pulses to selected brain areas without surgery.

A 2025 study found improvement in auditory hallucinations during regular care, but the authors also noted that other recent research had mixed results. For now, rTMS is best discussed with a specialist as one possible add-on approach.

When To Talk With Your Doctor About Changing Treatment

Consider contacting your psychiatrist or care team when voices stay just as frequent or intense after enough time for a treatment to work, distress is increasing, or side effects are hard to manage.

Before deciding that medication isn’t working, your care team will likely want to review the diagnosis, dose, treatment length, consistency of taking medication, therapy, and other health factors.

What if You’re Just Starting Treatment?

A first episode of psychosis is often a time to find out which treatments help and how your body responds to them. Early-intervention care may include a combination of an oral antipsychotic, CBT, and family intervention.

When starting an antipsychotic, your psychiatrist or care team may begin at the lower end of the recommended dose range and increase the dose slowly. They’ll watch for changes in symptoms, including any improvement in the voices, and ask about side effects. It’s recommended to take the medicine at an appropriate dose for four to six weeks to see how well it works.

This early period is also a good time to ask what improvement might look like and when to contact your care team. Keep track of changes in your voices, sleep, mood, daily activities, and side effects. That information can help guide the next step.

How To Talk With Your Doctor About Changing Treatment

If your current treatment isn’t helping as much as you need, make an appointment with your psychiatrist or care team. In preparation for your appointment, it may help to write down what you’ve noticed and what you want to ask. Consider bringing:

• Details about the voices — Note how often they happen, how intense they feel, how much distress they cause, and whether any of those patterns have changed.
• A medication list — Include the names, doses, and how long you’ve taken each medicine.
• Notes about missed doses — Let your care team know if side effects, cost, forgetfulness, or another issue has made it harder to take medication as prescribed.
• A side effect log — Write down any side effects and how much they interfere with sleep, work, relationships, or daily routines.
• A record of what has helped — Include medication, talk therapy, coping strategies, and other approaches that have made voices easier to manage.
• Questions about next steps — Ask whether the dose or treatment length has been adequate, whether another antipsychotic might be appropriate, or whether options such as clozapine, CBT, or avatar therapy should be considered.
• Support person — A family member or caregiver may help you remember questions, share observations, or take notes during the visit.

Don’t stop or change an antipsychotic on your own. When you make a medication change with your prescriber, they can explain how to do it safely.

If voices tell you to hurt yourself or someone else, seek immediate help by calling 911 or 988 or going to the nearest emergency room.