There are days when someone would has an enormous amount of work to do; whether that would be stuff from school or work; at the end of the day you might feel stressed and anxious. 

At that point in time, the best option for a stressed individual is just to sleep it off, and hope for a better tomorrow, but what if those thoughts still plague your mind? What can you do to relax?

What if you can get a nice spa day for yourself, however, that would require you to get out of bed and spend money, but you don’t want that. How about counting until you fall asleep? Well, that’s boring and useless, because your body doesn’t feel any sensations.

Sensations! That’s the word! To be able to sleep properly, you will need to feel something like tingles that flow from your head all the way to your spine. This is known as Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response also known as ASMR for short. 

ASMR is a genre that has been gaining popularity in current trends, According to verywell mind It is the term “used to describe a tingling, calming sensation some people report experiencing in response to close personal attention or certain audio or visual stimuli.” This can occur due to various sounds and triggers such as whispering, nail tapping, brushing hair or on the microphone, roleplays, and my personal favorite, visual triggers like hand movements. 

If this certain genre is meant for the purpose of relaxation and calming the mind, why are there so many negative reactions towards it? This can go in both directions, one being that some people are very sensitive to certain sounds. I asked a classmate who is currently a staff writer for the gator’s eye about what their opinions are about ASMR, 

“I think ASMR can sometimes be annoying in my opinion, especially mouth sounds I don’t know it’s just kinda weird” 

Another student in Green Level says, “I find cooking ASMR to be alright, but any form of talking ASMR makes me want to throw my phone away and burn it.” 

Concluding that statement, some specific sounds may not sit right with a lot of people, and it is all right to feel as such because we all have different preferences.

However, the problem with the perspective of ASMR is not because of sounds, but rather how the media has portrayed it. Unfortunately, ASMR as a genre has been overly sexualized due to the misinterpretation of sensory tingles that people experience as “brain orgasms.”

“Some spoke of the need for a research group to better understand the sensation. Still others expressed fear over social repercussions: Were they perverts? Were they sick?” According to The New York Times Magazine, Jennifer Allen states, “People had been told they were on drugs or that they had lice — things like that,” Allen says. “And then there was the factor of people calling it a ‘brain orgasm’ and it sounding like some sort of erotic fetish kind of thing.”

Because of this idea, you will find that the algorithm will mostly show people the weird perverted side of the ASMR community which is sadly more popular than the actual pleasant ASMR videos.

With that being said, lets’s not generalize the community, there are amazing ASMRists out there that make beautiful aesthetically pleasing videos, ASMR is nothing but just another form of art that is truly intended for sleep and relaxation.  

Here are some of my favorite ASMR videos that I enjoy listening to!