ASMR MISCONCEPTIONS PUT TO BED
YouTuber says audio phenomenon can help with anxiety and insomnia
Would you like to sleep with Emma Smith tonight? She’s going to kill me for saying that, but I mean it quite literally. If you play the 9hr Sleep Clinic video on her YouTube channel, she’ll tuck you in, check if you’re comfortable, coo softly as you drift off, then wake you up come morning. If that sounds like your idea of a nightmare, it is evidently a dream for others — the video has 1.9 million views so far.
For as much as a third of the population, Smith’s breathy whispers, audible mouth sounds and nurturing smiles to camera elicit something called an autonomous sensory meridian response, or ASMR — a tingle that prickles across the scalp and shivers down the spine, which many find helps them relax.
Smith, 40, stumbled across the phenomenon in 2010, after a serious car accident left her with PTSD-induced insomnia. She found that videos of towel folding and hair brushing helped her rest and recover, a discovery that’s proved both career- and life-changing.
Going by the moniker WhispersRed, the mother of two is now Britain’s best-known ASMRtist, with almost 800,000 YouTube subscribers and 200 million views of her hypnotically whispering into microphones in her Tingle Shed in her London garden. Penguin recently released her series of mini ASMR audiobooks and her actual book, Unwind Your Mind.
Smith shows me around her soundproofed shed, stacked with tingle “triggers” from fabrics to binaural mics, which capture audio in the same way real ears hear sound. Eerily, they are also shaped like them: black, silicone, human ears, which she whispers into or runs over with cotton swaps. Role plays of ear-cleaning are big in the ASMR community. “There are a lot of odd videos,” Smith admits, “and I’ve made a lot of them.”
“If people don’t have ASMR they struggle to believe it’s a genuine thing, so there’s quite a lot of skepticism,” says Dr. Giulia Poerio, psychology researcher at Sheffield University, who has experienced the tingles herself “for as long as I can remember.”
Its closest cousin might be frisson, the goosebumps many get from listening to an emotionally charged piece of music. “Neuroimaging work has shown you’re more likely to experience music-induced chills if you’ve got stronger connections between auditory and emotional sensors in the brain,” explains Poerio, who is working on a study to find out how closely this relates to ASMR sensitivity. “It’s important to point out that before YouTube existed, ASMR was still around. (We) just didn’t have a term for it.”
Most modern “experiencers” probably imagined it was a personal quirk until 2010, when cybersecurity expert Jenn Allen coined the term ASMR, in search of a descriptor “that sounded scientific, so people wouldn’t be embarrassed to talk about it.”
It caught on. YouTube now hosts more than 13 million ASMR videos, ranging from actress Salma Hayek crunching tostadas (1.8 million views) to a three-hour compilation of fabric-scratching that has been watched 75 million times.
Dr. Nick Davis, who co-authored the first study that established ASMR’s existence at Swansea University in 2015, found that whispering is the most common trigger, followed by close personal attention — in real life, that might mean someone gently stroking your hair or face; in the case of “fake facialist” or head-massage videos, it means someone simply pretending to.
“The sort of things that tend to trigger ASMR look a lot like grooming, in the way that great apes pick fleas off each other,” Davis notes. He wouldn’t describe himself as a “consumer” but does get the sensation, “mostly from haircuts; there’s something about somebody being in your personal space, in a non-sexual way, that I think is quite relaxing.”
Of course, the husky voices and lingering looks to camera of many ASMRtists invite the charge that there’s something kinky going on. China banned ASMR videos last year, branding them “vulgar and pornographic.”
Poerio’s research, the first to measure ASMR’s physiological effects, revealed that the heartbeats of “experiencers” dropped by an average of 3.14 beats per minute while watching the videos. This is comparable to the effects of relaxation techniques such as mindfulness.
“People use ASMR to de-stress at the end of the day, to have a good sleep, but also to self-treat chronic pain,” says Davis. “If you’re maxed out on painkillers, a distraction like ASMR might be helpful.”
What began as an internet curio has now spawned an industry of ASMRtists, some making serious money. One, ASMR Darling (a.k.a. Taylor Darling), is estimated to earn about US$1,000 a day in advertising revenue, thanks to her 2.3 million subscribers.
In 2017, Ikea released a video of soothing descriptions of the Skubb storage system and fitted sheets being audibly smoothed. In March, Zoë Kravitz clacked her fingernails down a Michelob beer bottle in ASMR-style during the Super Bowl.
You can read this two ways, says Poerio. “The first is that (brands) think that by somehow making people feel relaxed, they might be more likely to buy their products. Or it could just be that they ’ve recognized that ASMR is quite trendy in pop culture and they’re jumping on the bandwagon.”
London Daily Telegraph