Can’t Get You Out of My Head
Hums aren’t things which you get; they get you.
-Winnie the Pooh
The feeling of a song stuck in our head is familiar. Some call them earworms.
You find yourself singing the song or humming along to it without noticing. One rarely wants or enjoys an earworm. You want to get it out of your head, but you can’t. Earworms aren’t the only things that play on repeat in our heads.
When our mind is occupied, there are thoughts we can’t get out of our head. Sometimes it’s about gossip or social anxiety. Other times we replay arguments of what we should have said in the moment. Or we worry about some imagined future. Or play out repetitive imagined conversations. These mental loops are a mind virus. We should do everything we can to fight them and move on.
When I first started practicing metacognition (thinking about what I think about), I realized my thoughts often went in circles. I was hitting the replay button instead of thinking about novel ideas. People admit this all the time. “I spent all weekend thinking about it!” There are diminishing returns to consciously thinking about most problems for more than a short time.
Think of the opportunity cost of that mental bandwidth. We could instead spend our time thinking about unique solutions to problems, ingesting new information, or refining our worldview.
Even when our mind is resting, we may have recurring dreams. There’s something about thoughts playing on repeat that’s addictively satisfying. Repetition helps us absorb information. It’s a feature of being human, not a bug.
Maybe we’re naturally inclined to repeat things, and mind viruses are maladaptations that stem from the positive habit of repetition. All species need to be addicted to things to survive and proliferate. We’re addicted to food, sex, sleep. We crave these things. Humans have abstracted out of the constant want/need of our evolutionary purposes. But we still use the same basic mechanisms to process and operate in the world. It’s the same assembly code running, i.e. we use the same core brain as when we were less evolved.
It’s positive when we’re deliberate with our thoughts. Hard problems require contemplation. The greatest thinkers (philosophers, physicists, inventors) have all had thousands of hours of undisturbed deep thought.
Meditation is an amazing tool to mitigate repetitive thoughts. The ability to turn one’s mind off is powerful. Restart your internal computer. You won’t regret it.
On the flipside, mind viruses can be used for offense. When doing sales, if you have a catchy enough pitch, people will keep thinking about it. They’ll keep replaying it in their heads. Free credit report dot com is a great example. Being memorably positive is key.