If you’ve ever seen those videos of people whispering, tapping on objects, role-playing as doctors, and making hand gestures into the camera lens and questioned what the heck you’ve stumbled across, don’t worry, you’re not alone.
When Dr. Craig Richard, a biopharmaceutical sciences professor at Shenandoah University, first heard about the autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR), the feeling those videos are trying to elicit, he was puzzled too.
It was 2013 when Richard listened to a podcast that mentioned ASMR videos and how people were reported “magically healed” of their anxiety and insomnia just from watching them. He wasn’t convinced.
But then they mentioned TV painter Bob Ross.
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“That’s when they got my attention because I used to come home and I’d turn on Bob Ross, and it would turn my brain to fuzz,” Richard told MobiHealthNews. “It was something I’d kind of forgotten about, but as they started listing more and more examples of these ASMR triggers and these ASMR scenarios that led to this deep relaxation, I kind of just kept checking them off. Like, ‘Oh my goodness, I have to check out these videos!'”
From there, he was hooked.
“Because I’d experienced it, I immediately went 180 [degrees] from skeptic to very intrigued,” he said. “And I jumped on YouTube and yeah, these videos were super relaxing to me and I started reading through all these comments and seeing how popular all these videos were, and that’s when it stood out to me that, wow, these aren’t just entertainment and interesting and curious – these are beneficial to people.”
As a researcher himself, Richard’s first instinct was to take a deep dive into all the published papers on ASMR to better understand this phenomenon.
“In 2013, there wasn’t a single peer-reviewed research study that was published. So my search led to zero,” he said.
“I thought, ‘That’s OK, I’m sure there’s plenty of sites that are just talking about the science, the potential mechanism, the biology, the evolutionary theories and really getting into the nitty-gritty.’ I wanted to understand more of how these weird videos were doing this. And once again, I basically came across nothing.”
Richard remembers seeing the occasional mention of ASMR in Reddit threads, but by and large, no one was really talking about it back then. Even now, as ASMR users report reductions in anxiety, insomnia, and depression, there is still little in the way of mental health research.
SO, WHAT IS ASMR?
The ASMR experience is described as a warm, pleasant, and tingly sensation that typically begins at the crown of the head and moves down the neck, spine, and throughout the rest of the body. Often called “tingles,” these sensations are associated with feelings of calmness and relaxation.
ASMR is stimulated primarily through audio and/or visual triggers such as whispering, tapping, hand movements, and more.
Up until 2010, this experience didn’t have an official name. That year, Jennifer Allen, a cybersecurity worker and early ASMR organizer, coined the term.
She chose to use a clinical-sounding name to encourage people to share their experiences without fear of judgment and to prompt deeper exploration into it, according to a past interview with Richard.
Since then, ASMR has exploded online, primarily through YouTube videos. The ASMR community on YouTube includes hundreds of creators – called ASMRtists – some of which have garnered millions of subscribers for their content.
The community has gone more mainstream in recent years, with W Magazine beginning a celebrity ASMR series and Michelob ULTRA airing an ASMR Super Bowl commercial with Zoë Kravitz.
Source: Mobihealthnews
