Have you ever found yourself with a piece of music stuck in your head for what feels like hours, or maybe even days? Perhaps a chorus, a catchy line, maybe a whole verse? If so, you probably didn’t find it too bothersome. These “earworms” are a natural byproduct of listening to music.

I experience a significantly amplified version of this strange beast. They can only be described as severe earworms bordering on musical hallucinations. I have a song looping in my head from the moment I wake until the moment I drift off to sleep – with absolutely no let-up in between. The earworm usually takes the form of one or two bars from a familiar song repeating incessantly, until another one finally pops into my head to replace it. It’s a neverending cycle. The source is often the last thing I heard on TV or simply the last piece of music I happened to think of. It’s easily triggered: something as innocuous as overhearing the word “groove” can set off the chorus to Earth, Wind & Fire’s Let’s Groove. It can often take me a minute or two just to realise its origin.

Yesterday, I had Slayer’s Piece By Piece looping in my head. Right now, it’s the Carly Rae Jepsen song I Really Like You. Unfortunately, there’s no clear medical explanation for my chronic condition – beyond murmurings of OCD and “auditory imagery loops”. I’ve realised that “earworm” is too meagre a term to describe this hellish affliction. Ear kraken or cochlea wolf would be more apt.

I believe the condition grew from an anxiety disorder that cropped up last summer. I’d had minor health anxieties as a teenager, but the fear this new bout caused me was so all-consuming that I spent the rest of 2014 feeling on the edge of psychosis. Jumping to such wild conclusions seems ignorant in hindsight, but rationality and anxiety do not go hand in hand.

My concerns have since died down considerably. Now, on the rare days when I feel like a well-adjusted and useful member of society, the compulsion to focus on the looping dissipates, and I’m able to go about my business uninterrupted. But when I’m at my worst, the music can still swell to an uncomfortable volume and send me into the most unpleasant spiral of obsession imaginable. There was a point towards the end of last year when I had The Who’s My Generation stuck in my head. Roger Daltrey’s “My generation!” refrain got louder and louder until it reached an impossible point of distortion that absolutely terrified me.

During conversations I will often zone out, the music looping in my head taking all my concentration. I’m basically a write-off when it comes to anything like instructions or directions. This has put a considerable dent in the love I once had for my hobbies. I used to adore cinema as much as I do music, but my ability to fully immerse myself within it has been seriously hindered. The next time you watch a film like the austere samurai revenger’s tragedy Hara-Kiri, try to imagine the chorus to Blue’s All Rise repeating on a low volume throughout – then you will understand my problem. It completely punctures any tension or atmosphere, and makes absorbing dialogue an absolute nightmare. Matthew McConaughey’s musings on the intricacies of space travel were practically white noise by the time I’d made it to the end of Interstellar. My mind feels perpetually clogged, as if at a permanent standstill. Cohesive, fully realised thoughts rarely manage to stumble their way through the fog.

There are a few minor advantages to all of this, especially when it comes to composing (I’m able to pluck melodies out of nowhere). But there’s still something painful about suffering from a symptom that seems so abstract and minor from the outside. I started a course of anxiety inhibitors, SSRIs, towards the end of last year in an attempt to curb the problem and, although they’ve managed to quell the surrounding anxiety, the song remains the same and shows no sign of stopping. It’s a horrid nuisance but I’ve gradually taught myself to accept the condition as permanent. Now all I have to do is learn how to live with it.

• John Laughton is a pseudonym.

