My first post was about season one of the The White Lotus. I’d like to return there for a moment to a scene between the two college girls, Paula and Olivia. They’ve just pooled their drugs, and, about to pack a bowl, Olivia murmurs throatily, “Do you wanna do some ASMR?”
The camera zooms in on their faces. A low, reverberating tone replaces the background sounds. Olivia flicks on a lighter and holds it to her friend’s ear; we hear the crackling flames. She gently rotates a pill bottle, and the pills inside roll like the pebbles of a rainstick. It’s intimate, ritualistic, faintly erotic… and a little weird.
This scene is the first time I’ve seen ASMR depicted in narrative media, and as is often the case when a part of life gets represented in media for the first time, its presence suddenly makes its absence up until that point more conspicuous. “Wow,” I think, “is this really the first time anyone has shown this on TV? Why is that?”
ASMR is an acronym for “autonomous sensory meridian response,” but in my opinion, this definition of ASMR isn’t particularly helpful, as the terminology has more or less been invented in order to describe—and maybe legitimatize—ASMR. It doesn’t make understanding what ASMR is any easier. So I’d prefer to define ASMR as “a pleasant and relaxing feeling, as well as the genre of content (particularly YouTube videos) developed expressly to create that feeling in those who consume it.”
What kind of pleasant feeling? It’s hard to describe. I’ve been linked into the ASMR community—yes, there is such a thing—since 2013, when the YouTube recommendation algorithm nudged me from guided meditation videos to a truly weird video of a man who appeared to be whispering in tongues while waving his hands in front of the camera. I didn’t feel ASMR watching that video; instead, I felt disconcerted, as if I had stumbled into a corner of the Internet that was both private and shameful, and as if by simply being there I too was implicated. But I was also curious: where exactly was I? As I clicked around, I saw more and more of this unfamiliar acronym, ASMR. I also found some more innocuous videos, guided meditations that featured a softer voice than my usual fare. And, to my surprise, I felt something. A warm shiver. Goosebumps. And a strange expanding feeling in my head, halfway between a scalp massage and inhaling a garbage bag of nitrous oxide.
What was most surprising was that the feeling was not entirely new to me. I’ve heard people describe ASMR as that feeling you get when a partner breathes on the back of your neck, which, as an image, has a slightly sexual timbre to it. But for me, the feeling evoked sense memories from when I was little: my mom braiding my hair, my dad reading me a story, or that game kids used to play in which you use your hands to simulate cracking an egg over someone’s head (while chanting “Crack an egg on your head and the yolk is running down”— did anyone else ever do this?). A lot of these memories were of times I felt loved and cared for and very in my body, a combination of relaxed and stimulated that maybe overlaps with sex, or the intimacy following sex, but isn’t necessarily sexual.
One possible reason ASMR doesn’t feature in a lot of narrative media is that the awareness of ASMR as a distinct experience is fairly new. According to Wikipedia, this awareness dates back to a post on a health discussion forum in 2007 entitled “weird sensation feels good.”
It is like this tingling in my scalp. The only way I can discribe it is like a silvery sparkle through my head and brain... almost like a sort of head orgasm, but there is nothing sexual about it.
The post became pages long as dozens of other people chimed in to say they had experienced the sensation too. By 2012, ASMR content had a significant presence on YouTube, as Rhodri Marsden writing for The Independent reported:
You'll also see links to hundreds of homemade ASMR videos that might feature the tapping of fingernails; the delicate unwrapping of presents or unboxing of new technology; role-play scenarios with dentists, dermatologists and travel agents; show-and-tell guides to the contents of drawers or cupboards, and hundreds of hours of people whispering about nothing in particular. This might all seem like just another preposterously niche activity begat by the internet, but the preeminent creators of ASMR-related videos rack up millions upon millions of channel views. In an online world characterised by immediacy, ubiquity, multitasking and everything turned up to 11, enormous numbers of people are finding intense pleasure in videos where barely anything happens. "My name is Maria," begins one hugely popular ASMR video with over 300,000 hits, "and I was asked to be your home decor consultant for today." Maria then spends almost 20 minutes demonstrating how to fold towels. I absolutely adore it. I watch it all the time. My friends think I'm mad.
By the time I was exploring ASMR in 2013, ASMRtists—the name people had come up with for ASMR content creators—had honed in on particular cues that seemed to “trigger” large groups of people. These triggers were often advertised in the titles of the videos, such as “Friend Does Your Fall Makeup (Layered Sounds)” or “Old Books Cataloging & Page Turning | Thunderstorm.” Whispering and soft speaking were popular, but while some people preferred words of affirmation or support, other people preferred that the words be unintelligible (this partially explained the speaking in tongues video). There were also many videos without any speaking at all. People liked tapping, scratching, popping bubble wrap, and other soft or satisfying sounds. In their search for “new triggers” ASMRtists would make use of household items and found objects in surprising ways. In one video, ASMRtist Ephemeral Rift elicited a myriad of soft sounds from axes, hammers, and a harpoon, transforming tools of potential violence into instruments of relaxation.
Even as there was no scientific consensus as to the cause of ASMR or whether it was even a “real” phenomenon, ASMRtists and their viewers, in constant dialogue about which triggers worked, were engaged in a massive experiment, echolocating through a vast unexplored cavern.
Was it all simply the power of suggestion? The thought has crossed my mind. People claim that ASMR helps them with a host of mental and emotional problems—stress, insomnia, anxiety, depression, loneliness—presumably by promoting relaxation and feelings of well-being, but we don’t fully understand whether these benefits are simply the placebo effect.
Here’s the thing some people don’t understand about the placebo effect: it’s a real effect. Patients who ‘get better from a placebo’ really do get better. As Dr. Robert Shmerling writes in his post for the Harvard Health Blog,
Measureable physiological changes can be observed in those taking a placebo, similar to those observed among people taking effective medications. In particular, blood pressure, heart rate, and various blood test results have been shown to change among subsets of research subjects who responded to a placebo…We used to think the placebo effect was limited to suggestible people without "real" disease; we now know better.
Not everyone experiences the placebo effect, and not everyone experiences ASMR. What if the two populations are the same? What if ASMR is precisely the placebo effect?
When you’re in the placebo group of a clinical trial, you don’t receive the pharmacological or surgical treatment, but you do receive care. In the placebo arm of a well-run clinical trial, you meet with someone who talks to you in a calm, kind way, who asks you questions about yourself and seems to listen, who validates your suffering and your worth, and who makes you feel as if you are in good hands. That’s care. Human beings need care, and that need is often neglected in our society. Receiving care can be transformative, even if that’s all you get.
ASMR videos are designed to simulate care. “Personal attention” is a major trigger and a feature of the vast majority of ASMR content. Some ASMR videos even simulate the exact experience of being in the placebo group of a well-run clinical trial, down to meeting with someone dressed as a doctor or nurse.
There’s something deeply poignant about this. Despite its lack of representation in mainstream media—the scene in The White Lotus being the exception that proves the rule—ASMR is important. The top ASMRtists have millions of subscribers on YouTube, and individual videos get hundreds of thousands or even millions of views. Of course, visit one of these popular videos and you’ll find comments like “I watch this every night so I can fall asleep,” so some of these views might be the same people watching over and over again—but I would argue that if that’s the case, ASMR is no less important, it’s simply more important for a smaller number of people. For some, ASMR has become a big part of their palliative care, supplementing or possibly even replacing traditional care dispensed by doctors, therapists, and social workers. Why? Are these people struggling to get care through the usual channels? Is the care they are receiving inadequate? Has our medical system become too focused on pharmacological and surgical interventions at the expense of other kinds of care? Why do millions of people, myself among them, need to tune into these videos, sometimes every night, to simply hear messages like “You are enough”?
Now that I’ve been linked into the ASMR community for a decade, I’ve come to think of ASMR differently than just a cheap, unaccredited version of therapy. Something has happened in those ten years that’s been fascinating to watch: ASMR has matured as a medium. Tropes have emerged and been subverted. Now, alongside “traditional ASMR” with themes of care and safety, you’ll find ASMR simulating alien abductions, being eaten by a vampire, and Lovecraftian horror. It’s as if the genre is now fertile enough that it’s given birth to subgenres. It has become its own species.
We are living in the age of digital media like video games and fan fiction being reappraised as legitimate art forms. I believe that ASMR now deserves a place among them. Some people—admittedly, mostly the ones with enough financial backing to do YouTube full-time—are putting a great deal of effort into their videos, spending hundreds or thousands of dollars per video on makeup, costumes, set design, and production. There are ASMR series with different characters, often played by the same ASMRtist. There are crossovers and collaborations and “extended cinematic universes” of ASMR.
As ASMR mutates, it retains its fundamental goal: to relax. The experiment of finding powerful triggers continues. And as I’ve gotten sucked into ASMR content with increasingly complex storylines, I’ve reconnected with the pleasure and the healing power of a good story.
My brilliant friend Meredith Nnoka recently published their award-winning second poetry chapbook. I highly recommend it.
This was a great read, even (maybe especially?) as a person who finds the textures and timbres associated with ASMR to be the exact opposite of soothing. What I appreciate is your focus on how receiving the care and attention of another human being is clearly a fundamental pillar of human health, yet we treat it like some kind of social or medical anomaly. What came to mind for me are the stories of folks recovering, or at least plateauing, upon entering hospice – i.e. once they start receiving the kind of non-intervening attention that allows them to relax and maybe actually heal.
Utterly fascinating. And I felt ASMR in some moments of reading this. Perhaps you experienced it in moments of writing about it? And I love the ASMR video with musician Devendra Banheart receiving ASMR, which I'm sure you know. Thanks for this. Perfect for a Sunday morning while the house is still soft and quiet.