How to get rid of a song that's stuck in your head
This blog was originally published in July 2018 and updated in September 2026.
Some years back, in the middle of moving house, I got the the song Common People by Pulp stuck in my head for a few weeks. Why? Because my partner and I had rented a flat above a shop.
Sometimes I’ll get a song stuck in my head for a month like that. Other times it will be for a few minutes or an hour. It doesn’t seem to matter if it’s a song I hate or a song I love (or at least a song I loved before it got stuck in my head). Some songs get stuck in my head a lot, but others don’t: Missing by Everything But The Girl is a repeat offender, but Kurt Vile’s One Trick Ponies has never got stuck, even though I’ve listened to it many more times.
There are lots of different ways and reasons that we might get music stuck in our mind’s ear, as it were. There have been rare occasions when I’ve been learning a song and have returned to it again and again voluntarily because I want to remember the words and the tune for when I later sing it.
However, most of the time, the song just arrives without me having to do anything about it, and becomes an earworm: a song stuck in my mind’s ear. Earworms happen to just about everyone at one point or another, and though they don’t have any particular impact on most people’s lives, they can cause a lot of irritation.
If you’re here because you have an earworm, good news: researchers now have a pretty good idea of why earworms happen and some practical tips on how to defeat them.
When and why do earworms happen?
Earworms are particularly likely when we’re experiencing low cognitive load – that is, when we’re doing things we don’t have to think about much – like waking up, travelling, housework and physical movement. To some extent these activities are constrained by the time of day, so there are regular times when an earworm might be particularly likely, like your commute.
But it’s not just low cognitive load that can lead to earworms; they can also happen if your mind is overloaded. Why do both hard and easy tasks open the door to earworms? Well, if you’re not very engaged in a task it’s easy for your attention to slide, which might happen because you’re bored with it or because you’re overwhelmed by it. There is really only a narrow set of tasks that are the exact right amount of ‘challenging’ for you to become absorbed in doing them! When you’re not doing one of those tasks, the mind can wander and you start thinking about something else, like cake or your ex or the impact that Tony Wilson had on Manchester — and suddenly there’s a song in your head.
This can’t be the whole story, though, because there are lots of times when our minds wander and we don’t end up with an earworm. Earworms can be triggered by a wide variety of events, including recent or repeated exposure to a song, an association of a song with a location or emotion, and being under stress.
So, there are many contributing factors in getting an earworm that come from events happening inside or outside ourselves. But why do we get one song in particular stuck in our heads?
In what sounds like a gargantuan effort, Jakubowski and colleagues [vii] asked thousands of people to list their most recent and their most frequent earworms, and then sorted through them to find out what characteristics made a song likely to be an earworm. So that they could measure popularity and recency easily, they used only listed songs that had at some point appeared in the UK music charts.
Three of the top ten most listed songs were by Lady Gaga (Bad Romance, Alejandro and Poker Face), along with Can’t Get You Out of My Head by Kylie, which seems a cruel irony.
What kinds of songs become earworms?
We know the answer to this question thanks to a group of researchers who asked thousands of people to list their most recent and their most frequent earworms, and then sorted through them to find out what characteristics made a song likely to be an earworm.
Three of the top ten most listed songs were by Lady Gaga (Bad Romance, Alejandro and Poker Face), along with Can’t Get You Out of My Head by Kylie, which seems a cruel irony.
What do all these songs have in common? They have a fast tempo, they had been recently released at the time that people were filling out the questionnaire, and they were popular, meaning that you’d have heard them a lot on the radio, in stores, or blasting out of other people’s cars as they sped by.
This fits with another, much smaller study on a group of students in Texas, which showed that Christmas songs were likely candidates for earworms – presumably because they researchers asked people about their earworms as Christmas was approaching, and many stores and radio stations in the area were playing Christmas songs.
How to get rid
of an earworm
We can’t spend our lives avoiding fast-tempo, popular songs, or never letting our minds wander, so earworms are pretty much inevitable.
Luckily, I found a study on how people cope with earworms. Here are some tips based on the findings:
Distract yourself by listening to other music, watching TV or chatting with people – anything that gives you something to listen to that’s not the earworm. Some people have a go-to song that can block the earworm but doesn’t become an earworm itself. Mine is Walk Like an Egyptian by The Bangles, and I have no idea why it works.
Listening to the earworm song in its entirety could also help, though there’s some conflicting evidence about this.
You could try combining the above two by listening to the earworm song and then immediately afterwards listening to other music, though it’s not clear if this is more effective than just listening to other music.
Don’t try distracting yourself with something purely visual or spatial like a sudoku or a Rubik’s cube, because this won’t provide another noise for you to concentrate on.
One final possibility for getting rid of an earworm is my own theory. Please note that this is just a theory — I haven’t tested it and I have no idea if it is something that would work for other people.
For me, earworms are sometimes my subconscious telling me about things I need to deal with, and they go away when the problem is resolved.
About ten years ago, someone I’d been dating for a few months broke up with me. Over the next few days as I trudged like Charlie Brown through the streets of north London, I could not get one specific song out of my head, even though I hadn’t heard it for a long, long time.
Early on in dating this person, they’d told me they didn’t place much value on kindness. I am someone who values kindness very highly. We clearly weren’t a good match, and I think the earworm was my subconscious trying to alert me to that fact, because the song begins, “I don’t think that kindness is a weakness.”
After a few days of having it rattle round my head, I attempted to get rid of the earworm it by listening it the whole way through. I found that I’d been sending myself another message. The song ends with the repeated lyric, “It’s gonna be all right.”
And, funny story, it was. I got over it. The earworm went away and hasn’t come back since.
(Eight years after I originally wrote this blog, there is also, appropriately for a story about music, a coda. To our mutual astonishment and delight, the person who caused the earworm is now a good friend. Last week they told me I had altered the course of their life for the better. Turned out they were wrong about the value of kindness.)
Do you get earworms that are your subconscious telling you about feelings you need to deal with?
I would genuinely love to know.
Drop me an email at clare@thatthinkingfeeling.co.uk