Millions of People Do This Relaxing Activity to Help With Sleep
ASMR, is thought to reduce stress and anxiety and promote deep relaxation
Every month, millions of people are oddly glued to videos in which women whisper, comb hair, crackle paper, and tap their manicured nails to induce a tingling sensation that begins in the viewer’s scalp, travels down the spine and ends in a blissful state of relaxation known as ASMR.
The ASMR-inducing masters (usually women) will speak to you with soft, whispery voices while toying with their hair, fluttering their fingers, and gazing into your eyes as if they deeply care, while positioning their faces so close to the camera, they fill the screen like a full moon. When they move close, they often appear to smooth your hair or adjust your clothing, all to induce that shivery sensation of deep calm, which for some, also helps with sleep, at least anecdotally.
ASMR is an acronym for Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, a phenomenon coined in 2010, in which some people experience a physical sensation in response to specific auditory and visual stimuli.
Heather Feather, a popular “ASMRtist” with nearly 400,000 YouTube subscribers, describes the sensation as a “pleasurable feeling that many experience when hearing certain sounds, or when someone…
