Earworms and Mental Health
Ian Delaney
Legal Recruiter | Advocating for Your Legal Career: Tailored Placements, Seamless Transitions. Placing Associates and Partners into top law firms and prestigious boutiques. Message for a confidential consultation.
Recruiters have been talking a lot about attorneys’ mental health and what we can do to help associates and partners with the stresses and struggles that elite professionals encounter.
Negative thoughts have no greater right to live in our brains than the positive ones.
I am a chronic sufferer of earworms.? Once they bore into my brain, it can take days to shake them loose.? Growing up we would torture my mom by humming just the first two notes of the “Colonel Bogey March” because just that would be enough to get the song stuck in her head.? She taught me an important lesson that can be equally applied to mental health and negative self talk.
We all deal with the devil on our shoulder whispering that we’re not good enough, not qualified enough, not smart enough, not enough.? Like an earworm these thoughts can stick with us far longer than they’re welcome and those falsehoods can become ingrained in us.? My mom’s secret was “Jingle Bells.”
As soon as she felt in danger of an earworm she would sing “Jingle Bells,” sometimes at the top of her lungs.? She fought the earworm with something she knew couldn’t get stuck in her head.? She drowned out the negative.? And even for me, singing “Jingle Bells” works like a charm to this day.
This is exactly what we need to do with negative self talk.? Drown the false negative with a truthful positive.? If you hear yourself thinking, “I screwed up on that deposition/pitch/client meeting/whatever-it-may-be and am a terrible attorney,” train yourself to follow it up with “Today didn’t go as I wanted, but remember when I did really well on that other deposition/pitch/client meeting/whatever-it-may-be?”
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Negative thoughts have no greater right to live in our brains than the positive ones.
We are all enough, and I wish you a fantastic and successful 2025!
-Ian
If you or someone you know is struggling, here are two exceptional resources for the specific challenges attorneys deal with: