Songs repeating in head constantly

[Muddy]

the past few months I've been having songs I hear repeating in my head every waking moment . It will be the chorus of a song I hear and it just keeps playing all day in my head , it's extremely annoying . I believe it's due to excess glutamate or histamine . Has anyone dealt with this symptom and found relief ?

 

[Wolfcub]

Hey @Muddy ...
I don't know much about the chemicals involved with that. Hopefully someone else will have some good ideas. But I have experienced it, and it's a nuisance.
It happened more when I was well for some strange reason than it does now!
I could always trace it to tiredness and some lack of sleep when it happened.
My only remedy for it was to replace it with some other music and let it be forgotten. I am a great whistler and when it happened, would whistle something completely different like Mozart! That shot it down!
Usually it was advertising "jingles" which were the worst culprits....which I suppose is what they are designed to do -hit us at subconscious level and keep repeating in our brains until we BUY!!
Blow that for a lark....I prefer Mozart.

 

[Diwi9]

@Muddy - Yes! I often wake up to a chorus line in my head. I also get this when I'm in sensory overload and resting with my mask and headphones on...trying to cancel all stimulation out...either a thought or a chorus will just loop over and over in my head. I do not know how to deal with other than some form of distraction once I'm feeling a bit recovered from the sensory overload.

 

[Dmitri]

I've had the "earworm" for a very long time and see it as another aspect of OCD. There's always a melody playing in my head and it's torturous. Oftentimes it's a melody that I enjoy at first, but it becomes an irritation after a whole day of it repeating in my head.

I think low dose naltrexone may have lowered my compulsion to do rituals, but it didn't touch the obsessiveness, earworm, or racing thoughts, so I'm in the same place and can't offer any helpful recommendations. The only thing I'm able to do is listen to a different, preferably catchy song to replace it, but the new melody becomes just as bad quickly.

During my early childhood and the earliest years of being sick, it either wasn't present or it was less severe. I was able to create new music in my mind and "listen" to it, something that would be impossible now with all the mental noise.

 

[learning]

This happens to me all the time. It must be something that us CFS sufferers have in common. I wish I knew what causes it. To much of this or not enough of that... if you find out let me know because I will go crazy if i hear this song one more time... oh wait, there it goes again.

 

[sb4]

Yeah same here. It seems to be part of the wired and tired thing. When I notice it's happening I make a conscious effort to go into a more meditative state and immediately feel more relaxed however doing this is fighting an uphill battle.

Has to be certain neurotransmitters firing off far too much so that the brain is always thinking when it should be relaxing. I hate it.

 

[ChrisD]

I get this too, usually when I am at my worst with the lowest energy. I've always seen it as the brain desperately trying to cling on to something that triggered a happiness or joy response, and replaying it in an attempt to get you up and running again - a bit like a car engine misfiring (Totally unscientific)

 

[percyval577]

Often I must not hear a song twice, I would end up with repeating it again and again in my brain.
Good chance that it is a/the learning mechanism, and repeating things are done by using nitric oxide, causing eg high glutamate.
Eating potatoes or drinking beer has often helped me with this.

 

[MEPatient345]

Me too.. it’s def part of the wired / tired thing, worse when crashed. But also I think that bc we are alone and in bed a lot with nothing to focus on, your brain replaces what would be normal work thinking or conversations w something. I cannot listen to music bc it exhausts me, so in the absense of actual music, I think our brains create a loop. But I’ve got to the stage that if I hear a snippet of a song I hate I have to quickly turn it off bc otherwise it’s in my head for weeks!

 

[Galixie]

Once, as a kid, I had a christmas song stuck in my head for a year. I eventually trained myself to "change the channel". I would consciously thing of a different song, then another, and another. Eventually I could cycle through the songs so fast they became like white noise and finally shut down the problem.

Occasionally, I still have earworms start and I still use the distraction technique to get rid of them. (Also, I highly discourage friends from breaking into song around me, since that seems to be something I'm especially susceptible to turning into an earworm.)

 

[Wolfcub]

In my case it's definitely to do with tiredness and lack of sleep. Whether yours is the same @Muddy or what I don't know.
You'll never guess...? Last night I didn't sleep til dawn and got 5 hours. And lo and behold today I've had a pesky ad jingle going through my head all day; one for equity release on my classic radio station !

So my theory is -whatever happens chemically when we don't sleep or don't sleep anything like enough may have something to do with it.

I got rid of it with Sibelius. Now thankfully I can't even remember that ad jingle. Unfortunately Sibelius is now playing in my head all the time....phew. Roll on tomorrow...

 

[Diwi9]

The other night I watched a documentary about Tupac Shakur. This morning I woke up with the chorus from "California Love" looping over and over...I chuckled this time as I remembered this thread and was like, "Yup, there it goes again."

 

[Wayne]

Usually it was advertising "jingles" which were the worst culprits...

I too experience feedback loops with certain songs, and espcially jingles. I also experience feedback loops with various smells, fragrances, tastes, etc. I sometimes wake up in the middle of the night experiencing a feedback loop of something I smelled many hours earlier. I finally got an electronic nasal irrigator to help keep my sinuses clear of extremely low-level compounds that might be continuing to stimulate my sense of smell.

 

[Wolfcub]

I too experience feedback loops with certain songs, and espcially jingles. I also experience feedback loops with various smells, fragrances, tastes, etc. I sometimes wake up in the middle of the night experiencing a feedback loop of something I smelled many hours earlier. I finally got an electronic nasal irrigator to help keep my sinuses clear of extremely low-level compounds that might be continuing to stimulate my sense of smell.

Yes it might be minute traces which have got into your nose. That happens to me with laundry detergent and only for brief periods, and so far isn't unpleasant. (I am not sensitive to it or overwhelmed by it like some people might be.)

But I've also found there's a mind/visualisation aspect to the sense of smell -and taste also to some degree.
I can clearly visualise any scent of anything as a "thought" and reproduce it at will. These are obviously based on acute memory faculties
So I wonder if memory plays a part in the "scent loops"? Perhaps....

 

[Howard]

When I'm being mindful, practicing presence throughout the day, I can usually avoid this pitfall.

Like many others, when I'm particularly exhausted and feeling unwell it's more difficult to escape the lyrical loops once they begin.. seemingly symptomatic of being in a bad place.

Then again, I avoid most forms of music where I can understand the lyrics. What this entails is listening to music sung in a foreign tongue, or choosing music where the lyrics are nearly indecipherable (technical death metal / black metal etc.).

Otherwise, my favored listening choices are instrumental jazz and ambient music (I only listen to music as I go to sleep, helps relax my mind / provides a pleasant distraction worth disappearing into).

Where I get into serious trouble is listening to or recalling my own music, resulting in a spiraling sort of repetition I cannot easily elude.

Fortunately it's only an occasional intrusion, due to creative limitations / no longer being musically active.

 

[Mary]

@Muddy - Some years ago I would periodically find a song running through my head, it would have been "playing" for awhile before I'd really become aware of it, and most often the lyrics of the song were spot on with regard to something that was going on in my life! The songs would vary, depending on what was going on in my life. Sort of like my internal soundtrack for my life. It made me laugh several times.

But that was different than annoying lyrics or music you hate playing over and over. Recently I had a very annoying song playing for about a week - no relevance to my life and a song I never liked and didn't remember hearing it recently, just something annoying. But it finally stopped.

About glutamate - I did a thread last January about my extreme sensitivity to msg and all its derivatives - see here. You might get some useful information out of it - e.g., I discovered that taurine is needed to help with msg neurotoxicity, and B6 is needed for the body to make taurine . . . and Nutreval testing had shown I was very low in B6, so I've increased that and some other things. You might want to check it out.

 

[IThinkImTurningJapanese]

the past few months I've been having songs I hear repeating in my head every waking moment .

Ohrwurm

These are fun if it's a song that helps. For example, "Take a ride on a rocket, take your mind, unlock it. You all know we can do it, if you put your mind to it." Journey - People and Places

Mindfulness practice can help with controlling ruminating thoughts, try showering without thinking of anything other than what you are doing. When your mind wanders, practice coming back to what you are doing in the moment. Like exercising a muscle, quickly you can develop some control over what you think about.

And that is so valuable, because there is some seriously disturbing shit going on in the world. But that's not all that's happening.

 

[Wolfcub]

@IThinkImTurningJapanese
I like that song.

 

[xcell]

The cause of the bizarre symptoms is a disturbed filtering function of the brain stem and a reduced threshold for neurons to fire. This enables external stimuli such as movement, light, sounds, touch and sometimes even unpleasant thoughts to generate extensive neuronal activation leading to excitotoxic damage to these cells. Such mechanisms are also known from autoimmune diseases and viral infections of the nervous system. (10)

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator
http://meversuscfs.blogspot.com/2016_07_31_archive.html
(10) http://www.investinme.org/IIME-Newslet-1306-04 Severe ME.shtml

 

[Muddy]

Yes , I had chronic fatigue for years due to EBV (very high IGG levels ) and than caught herpes simplex and felt a burning and tingling in the back of my brain. By the next day I had started developing many new symptoms and now I'm afraid it's progressing to ALS. ALS is similar to CFS in many ways except ALS kills you and CFS doesn't . I'm very scared and desperately trying to figure out a way to combat this . The seasonal change is causing symptoms to flare major for me , I'm in Connecticut.

I've become very bloated , have extreme sensitivity to any sensory stimuli , and have gotten a severe worsening to my already bad histamine intolerance . My arms are getting weak and I have tightness and repeat fasiculations in my deltoid muscles . My hormones have gone all out of wack too and my stools are loose , floating and light colored (cellular stress causing liver /gallbladder issues ?)

Has anyone tried histamine reducing strains of probiotics ?