Earworms are those tunes that get stuck in your head. Sometimes you’ll be meditating and have a favorite song stuck on replay. Sometimes it’s a song you hate. Either way, earworms aren’t very helpful to our meditation practice. In fact they can be so persistent that they drive us nuts!
Over the years I’ve tried a whole bunch of techniques to try to get rid of ear-worms. I’ve tried just listening to the song, accepting its presence and using it as an object of meditation, but songs can be intoxicating and I’ve found that I don’t develop much mindfulness and end up rocking out.
Sometimes I’ve listened to the lyrics closely to see if they’re trying to teach me anything, and from time to time I’ve been surprised to find that in some way I hadn’t expected the words of the song are deeply meaningful for me at that moment. That hasn’t necessarily made the song go away, but it’s given me something to reflect on.
I’ve tried imagining that I have a volume control in my head. I visualize turning this slowly from 10 down to 0. As I do so, I hear the song fade out. But then a few moments later I hear it fading back in again.
Finally I came up with an effective approach to earworms. It’s really simple: listen. Really listen.
Listen very attentively to the sounds around you. Include them in your meditation practice. In fact paying mindful attention to them becomes your meditation practice. Sounds make as good an object of meditation as anything else, so doing this isn’t a “distraction” from meditation but going deeper into meditation.
Listen in all directions at once. Listen to sounds in front of you and behind you, to the left and right, above and below. Let your auditory attention feel like it’s being stretched in every direction at once.
Allow all sounds to enter your awareness, rather than focusing on one individual sound, or moving from one sound to another.
Listen 100%.
The thing is that you can’t listen to the external world in this way and also listen to yourself singing internally. When you’re completely listening to the sounds around you, you can’t create an earworm. Listen intensely enough, and your mind becomes silent.
Whenever your attention begins to drift from the sounds outside, you’ll start to notice the earworm again. Now this might seem like a bad thing, but it’s actually wonderful, because now you have a built-in mindfulness meter! When the earworm appears, it’s letting you know that your mindfulness has slipped a little. So now the earworm is actually helping you to meditate, and instead of seeing it as annoying you can now be grateful toward it.
A sense of playfulness around this whole thing is important. Don’t see it as a test: you can’t fail. See it as just a game, so that you enjoy both the times you are able to pay attention to sounds, and the times that the earworm comes along and gently reminds you to come back to mindful awareness.
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This was a great little trick you posted. Thanks a lot for sharing it.
You're welcome.
I've got Brahms' Violin concerto playing in my head right now. I listened to it intensively yesterday, and it's still there. The best parts, the loveliest bits, are the ones that get stuck in worst of all. I will try your method of 'mindful of sounds' but really the solution after all these years, might be to just STOP LISTENING TO MUSIC, which is why the Eight Precepts have this injunction - let's face it, music isn't conducive to breath meditation & jhana cultivation. Getting sick of all the noise and distractions from what's really important (ie, meditation). After this morning, I feel like taking a sword to music and finally being rid of it. Stop listening to alluring music, and in time it will fade from memory, and won't come up in meditation. I'm getting to that stage.
That sounds like a rather drastic solution. I'm not sure it would be effective, either. I can still remember very well music I last heard decades ago!
Hi Bodhipaksa. I also have difficulty with earworms, even though I have recognized rigpa and can stabliize it in my meditations. I have been deeply meditating for about a year and half, after meditating not so deeply off and on for many years.
In my meditations I can maintain focus on presence with distractions that last less than a second or so, yet I can still have an earworm the entire time that is sometimes prevalent and sometimes in the background.
My single-pointedness is admittingly not to the level of access concentration yet, but I wonder if the earworms are hurting this progression.
I have been instructed to listen to mantras or nature sounds for part of my meditation which seems to help. Any thoughts?
Thanks,
Paul
Hi, Paul.
Have you tried the approach I suggested in this article?
It took me a long time to realize this, but trying to cultivate one-pointedness is not helpful if we're aiming to cultivate dhyana, or even access. Dhyana emerges naturally when we open up to all sensations arising from the body, to the connections between those sensations, and to the soft waves of the in-breathing and out-breathing as they sweep through our entire being. And that comes about most easily when we allow the eyes to be soft. It's as simple as that: let the muscles around the eyes be soft; let the focus within the eyes be soft; notice how this calms the mind and allows you to be aware of the whole body; take an interest in how those soft waves of movement and sensation I mentioned affect the whole body.
One-pointedness is not a factor in first dhyana. The early Buddhist scriptures include no mention of one-pointedness at that stage. The most that's mentioned is "unification of mind," which is a different thing. It was only later that scholar monks, trying to make sense of meditation experiences they hadn't had (because they were scholars, not meditators) added in one-pointedness as a dhyana factor in first dhyana. It's one of the most misleading alterations to the Buddhist teachings that I'm aware of.
I have been plagued by earworms my whole life, and taking up meditation a year a go has made me aware of it. I have tried interrogating the part of myself that generates them: why are you doing this? What do you (I) get out of it? My earworms seem random: the 8-bar theme of a radio program, a TV advertisement jingle, my favorite Darius Rucker song. They are compelling, but at the same time they are ever so slightly unpleasant. They seem like some form of irritation that my unconscious self employs to distract me from something, or provide a balm for some hurt that lies below my consciousness. I never get a reply. I have speculated that this noise is the feedback of the complex mammalian brain, an inevitable side effect of higher cognition. I am wondering if others have asked the same questions, and received any answers. Thank you!
Mine happen more frequently when I'm anxious or trying to think about things that might cause anxiety. I've even had them kick in at moments like those, loud and sped up, as if it was frantic trying to pull my attention away! The way you described it as a subconscious balm is how I've been thinking of them lately.
I haven't been able to get any answers while the worms are blocking it all out. The few answers I have gotten have been in near silence, sometimes voices, sometimes sounds, sometimes imagery, almost always nonsense. Any conversation always ends earlier than I want.
Though they can be frustrating and the lack of control can cause anxiety, I believe it's there to mask deeper anxieties. Lack of control, the unknown, death... grand things that are hard or impossible to process fully, so you aren't given the chance to try. Only for this kind of persistent background earworm, not so much for temporary annoyingly tunes... though, some of the temporary ones may only be seen that way because it doesn't count as an "earworm" when it's pleasant. It's "catchy" then. The pleasant ones do an even better job as a balm, especially if the listener doesn't know it could be one!
The pleasant and unpleasant ones both exploded in frequency once I scratched hard enough at whatever they're now covering. Now the pleasant ones are unpleasant too since they're an obstacle now. The timing of its sudden appearance is why I think it serves this purpose, if not for everyone then at least for me.
I have been plagued my whole life as well. I have panic disorder, and at times of higher anxiety, they seem to be a lot worse. I, too, had them 24/7. Woke up with them, went to sleep with them, and the only time I "escaped" from them is when I was dreaming. Mine made no sense either most of the time. A snippet from a son my dad listened to fifty years ago, the Dick Van Dyke theme song, and of course the last thing I listened to. Sometimes I just had to put on a different song to get rid of the last one, and then no matter how long one stayed with me, once it was gone I couldn't remember what it was. I currently have other random thoughts and phrases that pop into my head throughout the day, like a random word that will repeat several times. And when I'm really tired, the earworms are back and I also hear random conversations in my head just before falling asleep. When water is running, or my blow dryer is going, washing machine is on etc...I hear music that isn't there. I know some of these things are common, because I ask a lot of people in my life, and they experience some of it too. I have tinnitus due to an inner ear disorder (Meniere's Disease), so I always thought maybe that made things worse. Between the high pitched tones and other sounds, the earworms and all of it, sometimes I want to scream or try to escape it somehow. I've learned to live with it, and guided meditations definitely help. When I'm calm and things are going better in my life, all of it seems to fade a bit. AND I have been in therapy for the past year, and working through a lot of childhood and adult trauma has helped a lot as well. Kind of like pipes getting clogged, no place for the water to go. Now that the pipes are unclogged, everything flows more freely and the earworms don't plague me as much.
I give thanks to Jesus Christ and you Bodhipaksa. After all suffering with songs and thoughts playing and looping all the time, now I can control them. thanks.
That's lovely to hear, Chrystian.
This is a very interesting concept, and I can't wait to try it during a meditation.
When this happens, frankly, I just go with it and I accept that the song is playing and I have little control over it. I don't fight it. I focus on it like it's my mantra for the moment. And I play with it, such as repeating a certain verse when I breath in and another when I breath out (or humming a particular part of the song if it doesn't have any lyrics). Sometimes it can be uncomfortable, sure, because you feel powerless to this soundtrack in your mind, but I think fighting it is worse. But focusing on other sounds seems like a great idea, will definitely try it. Thank you!
Thanks for sharing. Those are wise approaches.
The practice of being mindful of other sounds (I'd prefer to avoid the expression "focus on") has the advantage that you're neither fighting the song in your head, nor having it dominate your experience. It simply ceases to be produced. As I explain in the article, if it does come back, that's just a reminder that you've slipped out of being mindful to sounds. So the song becomes an ally, reminding you to relax your attention.