Breathe, she said. Just breathe.

It's called a cognitive itch or sticky tune, but I like the more evocative earworm: music that gets stuck in your head and keeps repeating as if on a loop.

Webster's online makes it sound like an annoyance (intercom tunes at the supermarket), but I found my earworm comforting, prescriptive even, in the early days of my layoff.

And breathe... just breathe,
Oh breathe, just breathe
it told me as I walked my neighborhood.

Rather than jogging, I walk to stay in shape and clear my head. But while I had been doing the 2-mile circuit on weekends for years, I now could ply the route daily because I had no job to report to. Over the summer, I became a statistic in the Great Recession and a Paper Cut in the newspaper industry.

At that point, I was having regular panic attacks (WHAT AM I GOING TO DO?!) that made my heart race, that clutched at my throat and filled my eyes with tears. Then the refrain would do a loop: breathe, it said, just breathe. And I would.

I'm no music aficionado or CD collector; I don't know why the lyrics came to mind. In fact, I had to do a Web search to find out what my earworm was.