I was in a stationery shop the other day, just browsing the books, when a member of staff started working on
a display stand. It was a tall, rotating stand with compartments for
putting different pencils and pens in. She had a large cardboard box containing
lots of packets and had to open each one and place the contents into the
compartments. As I stood, barely watching, the sounds of her activity began to
have an effect on me: I could hear her busily remove a packet from
the box, open it, get the pencils out of the crinkly bag and… drop-drop-drop
them into the compartment. I could hear her arranging them carefully until they
looked right and then return to the box and repeat the process. Ahhh, joy! The
inside of my head went ‘mushy’, and I became super-relaxed. I wanted the lady
to keep doing it forever and had to pretend I was really interested in the languages
section, so I could keep the feeling going without appearing strange.
It wasn’t my first experience of this phenomenon. I have
been having this trance-like response since I was about ten or eleven. There is
a variety of ways it can be triggered – there’s the passive observance of
someone engaged in a task, particularly if accompanied with certain sounds,
like the pencil-arranging lady, or someone working on their laptop or someone
sorting through their paperwork. Then there are interactive experiences, like someone
asking me questions and typing or writing down my responses. After the initial
irritation of being asked to do a survey for someone, I find myself taken over
by this blissful sensation. And the optician… oh my goodness, the soft voice, the
altruistic attention, the questions with writing and typing… ah, I could stay
there all day. The only way I can describe it is that it’s a bit like when
someone fiddles with your hair or strokes your back, except more than that – I kind
of ‘feel’ it too, inside my head.
At this point, most of you can be forgiven for thinking that
I’m bonkers. But maybe a few of you might be thinking, ‘Oh my God, yes – I get
that too!’
In my early twenties, I talked about this experience with my
friends, to see if they had it as well. But after being faced with an
expression of ‘the girl’s unhinged’ by everyone, I decided to keep my bizarre pleasure
a secret.
It wasn’t until a chance conversation with someone, about 25
years later, that I discovered it’s a real phenomenon, that lots of people
experience it and that it has a name – ASMR, or Auto Sensory Meridian Response.
Rather like that tongue thing where some people can curl up the sides of their tongue,
but others just can’t, ASMR seems to be something you’re either born with or
not – you can’t learn how to get the
response. (It’s even been described as a brain disorder.)
Wikipedia describes ASMR as the ‘experience
of "low-grade euphoria"’, triggered by ‘specific auditory or
visual stimuli’ and goes on to describe the various triggers. It also
explains that ASMR responses can be elicited via simulation: a video of someone
role-playing conducting a questionnaire, showing you their shopping or checking
you into a hotel is enough. And YouTube is teeming with every kind of trigger
imaginable. The people who make these videos call themselves ASMRtists (see
what they did there?) and many of them now make their living sorting out their
make-up bags, enrolling you onto a course or being a softly spoken medical practitioner conducting a routine check-up. ASMRtists and their ever-hungry
followers call themselves a community and have made their home in YouTube. Now, we don’t have to leave it to
chance to get a fix of melty-headed tingles, we can have it whenever and for as
long as we want.
This has totally revolutionised my insomnia issues,
and I think most ASMR followers use the videos to help them to fall asleep. I usually
nod off long before the videos end, only to wake up in the morning with my sleep
headphones (a must!) still on. I haven’t taken a sleeping pill in the five
years since I started watching ASMR videos. The therapeutic value of ASMR is
also acknowledged by sufferers of anxiety and depression.
As you browse through the thousands of videos to
find the one that will give you the best response, it’s easy to see the parallels
with porn. It is true that, like porn addiction, one can become somewhat
dependent upon ASMR roleplay videos. And in the early days of studying ASMR, it
was even dubbed ‘the brain orgasm’. It is now widely accepted that whilst highly
pleasurable, ASMR is not a sexual response – it certainly doesn’t get me in that way. But humans being what
they are do have their favourite genres of ASMR (like porn) and, of course, one
of those genres is erotic. For me, I go with pencil sorting and whispered
questions!
But there is a flipside to ASMR that many people
report. It is called misophonia, meaning ‘hatred of sound’ and, like ASMR, has
a set of triggers, the most typical ones being breathing and eating noises
(which is also a common ASMR trigger). Someone with misophonia will become
enraged or disgusted on exposure to these noises and have extremely negative
feelings towards the person making them. I suffer from this, and it really is
awful. When I hear someone eating, I feel very angry – I actually want to be
violent towards them or scream horrible things at them. The noise they are
making is unbearable to me and I can’t understand how they can’t hear it too
and not want to stop doing it. For some people, it’s such a serious problem
that it becomes life-limiting – going out anywhere or being with anyone carries
the risk of being set upon by these dreadful feelings. Some people need to wear
headphones to block out trigger sounds. I have improved over the years, and
certainly knowing it’s a condition has helped me to deal with it. The person does
not deserve my negative feelings, it’s an extreme and incorrect response in me.
In other words, it’s my problem, not theirs. I also try to see my misophonia as
the price I pay for having the wonderful ASMR feelings.
I feel very lucky that I have this weird condition.
It gives me pleasure, reduces my anxiety and helps me to sleep. It’s free and safe.
I would never want to trade that.
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