I Have An Earworm, Which Is Neither A Worm Nor In My Ear

Yes, that constant song in your head is a thing.

I blame it on too much bad poetry recited to an annoying cadence. Somehow that singsonging rhythm has gotten stuck in my head and ruined my reading pleasure. But it’s been years since I’ve been to a poetry reading, so that’s not really the cause. I’m just looking for a scapegoat because I don’t want to admit I might be losing it. Because, at my age, any mental or neuro phenomena have a dangerous and scary connotation. Yes, I mean the big D.

My affliction started several months ago.

I don’t recall the book or blog post I was reading at the time. Maybe it was even a haiku on Medium or a poem, and I tried to imagine the writer reciting it. Who knows? It’s not enough I have this chirpy melody going on, but my memory is shot to boot.

At least 98% of us according to statistics have had the annoyance of a song repeat itself in our heads for a few minutes or even hours at a time. I don’t have a song or lyrics, I have a cadence. And it only starts up when I read.

The voice in my head takes the words on the page, even the ones I write and turns them into a poetry reading.

This has been going on for so long, I can’t recall what it’s like to just read a paragraph normally, without trying to turn it into musical comedy or an aria in an opera or a recitative in Bach’s B Minor Mass.

This bizarre phenomenon has taken hold of my reading life for a good two to three months now. It has turned into my secret horror.

After a while, I feared impending dementia.

Then I decided to make a brilliant move for someone of my advanced age. Use the technology at your fingertips, I told myself. Go on the internet machine and see if there’s an explanation or even a cure.

I skipped over several relevant articles before I discovered medical science had come up with a name for this condition. Earworm.

I skipped over several relevant articles before I discovered medical science had come up with a name for this condition. Earworm. When I realized these articles about earworms did not refer to parasites suffered by residents of tropical countries, I began to educate myself.

An earworm is the annoying condition of a song repeating itself over and over in your head.

Also, according to Captain Obvious, Stuck Song Syndrome or SSS. The more I read about SSS, the more I realized that’s what had captured the sensory apparatus in my brain.

I read of one desperate fellow who’d suffered for three years from a song repeating in his head.

Finally, he fled to the nearest psychotherapist. Said therapist cured him with cognitive behavioral therapy.

That case study, along with lists of several possible remedies, began to reassure me that I wasn’t losing my marbles or suffering from dementia. Encouraged, I began to try the remedies, though none of the articles mentioned my peculiar variation, the singsong cadence that accompanied my reading experience.

First, understand that medical science can only offer coping mechanisms for this condition, workarounds rather than cures. No one has come up with a medical remedy for persistent earworms.

Most earworms are just snippets of songs or lyrics.

The standard approach is to let it run to the end instead of trying to cut it short. Sing the whole damn thing, or find a recording on your phone.

If that fails, next up is a stick of gum.

Three minutes of active chewing seems to be the optimal time to rid your brain of the tune. If you don’t have gum handy, try listening to a different song, or distract yourself with an absorbing enterprise like Sudoku.

Before I’d read these articles, I tried to tackle this auditory invader on my own by playing music while I read. No luck, perhaps because I don’t really have a song bugging me. And it seemed the more I worried about the problem, the more persistent and pronounced it became.

I was singsonging my grocery list and the ads in my local Walgreens.

Anything I had to read had a more or less musical accompaniment, like a stubborn toddler out to defy me.

But armed with some remedies, I went on the offensive. First, I took comfort in the number of people who reported suffering from these neural disturbances in their thirties and forties. I constantly resist the temptation to blame every affliction on age, reminding myself that young flesh is heir various afflictions as well as old bodies.

Just that revelation seemed to loosen the grip of this gremlin in my head. The peculiar rhythm was still there but more like background music, not a marching band.

Next up, I broke out a pack of gum.

I’m not sure if the noise of chewing is always as loud as it was as I read my test pages, but I had an experience I hadn’t enjoyed for some time. I read several paragraphs before I noticed I wasn’t humming along with the words. I’d been reading normally. I just hadn’t noticed I’d returned to reading as I had pre-earworm.

I’m not completely cured.

It’s early days. I read a word at a time, and that may make this problem harder to banish, but I think I’m on my way.

If such a large percentage of the population suffers from this annoyance, I hope my little discovery about earworms helps you. At least, if you can’t get rid of your song, I hope it’s a tune you enjoy. Some people faced with the chance to eradicate the sound found they missed it when it was gone.

Not me. I had started to dread the activity that gives me the most pleasure in life. Now I’m like a cat after a mouse. I’m going to root that thing out of my brain so I can read at my leisure without a background of bad poets keeping me company.

I’m an editor and writer on Medium with Top Writer status in Writing, Psychology, This Happened to Me, Food and Cooking. I’m also an editor for the publication, Rogues Gallery. I’ve published 55 titles on Amazon and edit fiction and nonfiction for private clients. If you’d like to hire me as your editor, please contact me here. If you’d like to read more of my stories and tips for success on Medium, click here to sign up for my newsletter. I’ll make sure you don’t miss a word. Thank you for reading.