A New Way to Get to Sleep
We are living in a time where we are constantly getting bombarded with content. For many young people, this keeps us up very late into the wee hours of the night. Many nights I stay up well past midnight checking my social media or watching youtube videos simply just because I can. But now there is this relatively new content that is designed to help the viewers relax and fall asleep. It is known as ASMR, which stands for autonomous sensory meridian response. I know that sounds like a long confusing scientific term but it ultimately just stands for the physical response that your body feels while watching the content. That feeling is described as a sort of chill that people can feel in different parts of their body, the most common places are the back of the head, down the spine and legs. The term is thought up to have been made up by a woman named Jennifer Allen. There is no real science behind the name of it, really there is no science behind it at all, scientist have been unable to figure out why the phenomena even happens in the first place, or why some people experience it an others don’t. All we know right now is that the internet is split down the middle on whether they support it or don’t want anything to do with it.
That sensation is induced by what is known in the community as triggers and there are a plethora of different types of triggers. The two basic categories that triggers fall under are visual and auditory. They can also be induced by physical such as messages or getting your haircut but since creators can’t physically touch their viewers they rely on the other senses. Some example of the visual triggers would be hand movements and the simulation of physical touch by getting really close to the camera lens or even actually touching the camera. Then probably the most common form of triggers are the auditory ones. There are a bunch of different sounds that can induce ASMR but they all stem from voice, mouth sounds, or tapping. The voice is usually at a whisper or a soft-spoken tone, mouth sounds are pretty much any noise that can be made with the mouth other than words and tapping on various items at different speeds. There are even videos that are dedicated roleplays that usually feature more than one trigger and these can range from anything like a doctors visit, to a hair cutting appointment, to even an alien doing “experiments” on the viewer. Below is a video that is meant to introduce the viewer into the world and first let them discover if they experience the sensation without having to dive head first.
The people who create the content, or ASMRtists as they are called in the community, really seem to have a real passion for what they do just like any other content creator. To discredit their work just because its something that “weirds you out” is rude. It is not something just anyone can do as proven by the hundreds of videos of non ASMRtists “trying to do ASMR for the first time” and completely failing. So maybe next time you are laying in bed just scrolling on your phone in the middle of the night, give it a chance, see if you experience this phenomenon and maybe you’ll actually get some sleep.
