How to get rid of that annoying song stuck in your head

If you’re not here for the entertainment value of my writing, just skip to the third section for the juicy stuff (after the second set of dots).

Have you ever heard about the beautiful concept that is the earworm? No, not an actual worm, just a stupid song that’s stuck on repeat in your head and you hear it over and over and over again, for ever and ever until a new idiotic song comes along and replaces it. Or, even worse, sometimes it’s just a verse from a really bad song that is stuck on repeat. At least with the whole song you have variety, but with a single verse…

Life is fun, right?

I’m pretty sure that 95% of the human population knows what I’m talking about. That’s because the rest of 5% have hearing loss — lucky them, I guess (no, I’m not being sarcastic, they are really wonderful people who are able to have nice, functioning brains and a lot more brain power because they don’t have idiotic songs stuck in their heads all the time and can actually concentrate on things and get. things. done. — unless, of course, they had an earworm stuck before the hearing loss happened and they’ve had that stuck in their brains ever since — this trick should also work for them with some limitations).

Maybe this is not such a big problem for you (or maybe it is, since you’re reading this to find out how to get rid of it), as some people seem to think that having random bits of badly written songs going on and on in their brains is entertaining, but for me it’s such an annoyance. Maybe I’m just more interested in using my brain in creative activities (even if that means coming up with new ways in which I can sew up that skirt that I’ve been planning on making for a year or just building an entire parallel universe in which I’m a graphic designer/politician/documentary filmmaker/summer school teacher instead of a researcher — yeah, that happens a lot) or maybe I just like to hear a whole piece of high quality music when I want to hear music, not the jumble of notes that my brain pieces together from all the pop songs I’ve heard unintentionally while shopping or just being out in the world.

To be honest, I haven’t really had earworms during the past few years, mostly because 1. this trick that I’m about to teach you works and 2. I listen to music most of the time anyway, so I decide what lovely melodies bathe my inner world (yes, that includes old folk music, classical concerts and symphonies, drum and bass, Argentine tango and heavy metal — deal with it). And because I always like to do a bit of research before I start writing anything that I hope will be of help to anybody, now I have scientific support by my side (well, one meager research article that was linked from the Wikipedia article for earworms — you’ll find the links at the end of this article in the “References” section).

As you may imagine (or may have found before stumbling upon this not-so-popular, last-resort, written-on-Medium article), there are many listicles (list-articles) on how to get rid of earworms. They all say the same thing:

• chew some gum — what? no, I hate chewing gum for more than a minute and I will not start chewing gum every time I need to concentrate on something and get a stupid song out of my head; otherwise, I think I’d spend most of my time on a toilet (more on that in another article);
• listen to the annoying song — yeah, so that I learn it even better and get it even more attached to the real estate of my brain; thanks, but no;
• listen to another song, talk to somebody or listen to someone talking at you on the radio — I need to get a song out of my brain and do my thing, not to get distracted by the much more entertaining, yet devoid of value for my current endeavor, lives of other humans; also, if you’re like me, people talking about random stuff on the radio are annoying (because they’re wrong most of the time and you can’t interrupt and correct them) and you’re not that into interrupting someone else’s work/activity just to get a song out of your head;
• do a puzzle — sure, as if moving things around using the visual and abstract part of my brain has anything to do with the listening part; hello, those are different processes, completely able to follow parallel paths; I can definitely solve a Sudoku puzzle while listening to my brain put on repeat the most idiotic song I’ve ever heard.

Oh, oh, and I love the last one “let it go”. Sure, thanks, great advice. It’s like telling a super angry person to calm down and expecting them to actually calm down. Do you know what they will do? They will shout at you “I AM CALM!!!”. That’s exactly how “let it go” works for earworms. They intensify and become huge, mutated beasts.

You know what doesn’t help? That they are made up of fragments of repeating “musical” phrases that have no actual musical value. Nobody really listens to Lady Gaga for her actual melodies (or do they? maybe they do, maybe you do, it’s your right, I won’t judge). They were engineered to get stuck in your head, on repeat, until you become so consumed by them that you actually think you like them and then listen to them more (which is bad, so please don’t do it). Most pop music these days is made up of four tones and it’s all the same tempo, everything is repetitive to the point of nausea (I read some article a few years ago about that, too lazy to look it up now, please search for yourself).

Have you noticed that real music doesn’t give you earworms? I mean any music created for the sake of music itself, not for it being played in malls and supermarkets (and superbowls, although I thought those were supposed to be sporting events). There are no “classical music earworms” or “rock music earworms” or “chillout music earworms” because these genres (let’s call them genres, I have no formal musical education, I don’t know the official name for them) rely on creating valuable experiences through musicality.

You can learn songs/concerts, as a musician you can learn each individual melody for each instrument/element (for electronic music I have no idea how you call the different sounds), but then it’s a complex and conscious learning process that involves actual playing, not just listening. It’s a difficult process, too, it requires lots of concentration and dedication to learn a song, let alone a whole concert. And there are tens of instruments or melodies intertwined into a single piece of real music.

When you get an earworm, you don’t learn a melody from a piece of music, you don’t actively learn anything. You listen passively to some repetitive combination of beats and vocals, while doing something else. This is stuck in your mind through a completely different learning mechanism from that used while learning music. It’s similar to learning how to ride a bike, after the first few minutes/hours/days in which you get used to the contraption. Or similar to learning how to walk, where the contraption are your legs, but you don’t have memories from that time, so I can’t use this comparison. If you want to read more about the two mechanisms out minds use for thinking/learning, there’s a lovely book I would recommend to everyone, Thinking Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman. I’ve been aware of these mechanisms way before reading the book, but the book put into words what I had always known.

Great, now that we have an idea of how not to try to get rid of earworms, because those techniques don’t actually work, what can we try that really works?

First, I’ll tell you what works for me, how it can be transposed into your life and then we can discover together what other things we can do to maximize the efficiency of this process and stop those pesky earworms from forming in the first place.

I’m a big fan of Nirvana (by big fan I mean I know all of their songs because I listen to them often) and of a few songs in particular. “Come as you are” is a favorite of mine because it’s so different from any other song I know. It has a very repetitive melody, so it’s easy to remember, but it’s complex enough that I can’t play it in my mind without losing bits of it here and there, as I progress through the song. It’s not too loud, not very complex, it ends abruptly with a riff and that’s it. The lyrics are simple too, easy to remember. It’s a very well produced song and after listening to it, my mind is quiet, there are no reverberations.

The effect of this song is so profound that I found out (by listening to it, among others, just because I like it) that it can drown out and override earworms that used to plague me for days. After I realized this, I tested it on different earworms that came my way.

I used to hear the radio while relaxing and reading in common family spaces and they’d sometimes play the most awful, earworm infested songs. I’d play “Come as you are” in my head, the first couple of verses with all of their words and the earworm would disappear. I’d keep reading while doing this, so it wasn’t an active process that involved the “rational” brain that I was using for reading (and imagining all of the wonderful parallel realities necessary in order to follow a storyline). It was something I could do using the same part of my brain that I was(n’t) using while the earworm had a field day in my brain.

Later I discovered that I could just play the first few notes of the song (which are quite unique, as far as song beginnings go) and the earworms would disappear just like that, leaving behind them peace and quiet. This even works for the songs that are stuck in my mind in the morning, as I wake up from a dream that had music in the background (do you get those? I think they’re my favorites, along with colorful dreams that include mushrooms). I like those songs and wouldn’t consider them as intrusive as an earworm, but I also need space to think and organize in the morning, so off they go after I do a few “Ta na na na na”s in my head.

How does this apply to you? You could try this song, of course, but it will probably not work unless you really like Nirvana too (chances are high, but Nirvana is not a universally loved band, despite what I’d like to believe). We all have a different musical backgrounds, we’ve been exposed to different things and I can’t say which song will do the trick for you, but I’m sure you can find one in your favorites.

Revisit the list of songs you listen to most often (yes, I know it’s a daunting task to actively look through hundreds of songs, but hey, they wouldn’t be in the list if you didn’t love them) and test them one by one until one (or several) does the job. If the earworms bother you as much as they did me, I’m pretty sure that listening to your favorite songs all over again will be a welcome distraction.

Maybe all your favorite songs do it for you, maybe just one, but find at least one song that you know so well, that even one note from the beginning will make you able to recall the whole thing (or at least a half of it), a song that you don’t mind singing to yourself in your mind, one that brings you peace and happiness or is neutral (like the Nirvana song is for me — all of the opposing forces in the song, as strong as they are, neutralize each other in the end), one that doesn’t leave you hanging at the end, wishing for more, like a good novel does. In this case, having a sharp ending acts as a marker, a point in time where you can switch your consciousness away from the song and out into the real world, where you are in command.

Once you find the song, use it for every instance of earworm that you get. In time, it will get easier and you won’t even get the stupid songs stuck in your head any more because you’ll be able to block them out using this special song as a shield.

Didn’t expect that, did you?

Yes, you can use your super-song as a shield and protect your mind from intrusive pop radio songs that you have no choice but hear when you go shopping or in other public places with loud music. You can also use headphones, like I do almost all the time when out on my own (I take them off at the counter, obviously; I think it’s a minimum courtesy to take off your headphones when interacting with other humans).

While listening to your choice of music when out and about and surrounded by crappy music is good enough to ward off most instances of Involuntary Musical Imagery (now you understand why I haven’t used the official term until now), having a super-song to wield in special cases where you have no other protection is great. You don’t even have to do it consciously after the first couple of times.

Now I can’t think of anything else that I’d do, these actions I’ve already talked about (finding a super-song, using it to weed out earworms and as a shield against future earworms setting in) are enough to keep me happy with the musical landscape in my mind. I hope they’ll help you too in establishing a flourishing inner peace, undisturbed by instances of low quality “music”.

If you have other tips that work for you, let me and everyone else know. If you try this trick and it works for you, also let me know, I like it when I can actually help people, not just annoy them.

Oh, and I forgot to discuss that article that I’d found on getting rid of earworms. They found the same thing, except they didn’t go into the mechanism of getting rid of the song by using a “cure tune”, they just mentioned that some people mentioned it. That’s not enough, especially as some of the songs their subjects mentioned more than once (meaning as little as twice) are earworm-inducing for me, at least. How would you like to have “***** ******** ** ***” stuck in your head for a few hours?

I really didn’t want you to hate me, so read the list of songs at your own risk, it’s in the second link below.

References

Wikipedia article about earworms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earworm (has a nice list of references for further reading — some are even accessible for free, yay — I’ll leave it to you to find out which)

Journal article about getting rid of earworms (not really helpful): https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0086170