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By David Futrelle
Attention all Stacies! Now you and all your, er, foid friends can enjoy all of the thrills and chills of a date with Chad … without the hassle of actually finding yourself a Chad and roping him into a date.
Granted, it’s not a real date, and you won’t be able to have sex with this particular Chad, but if you’re one of those people who gets chills down their spine listening to ASMR videos. and if you have nothing better to do for 22 minutes, this could be the next best thing to the world’s worst date.
H/T — r/IncelTears
Very serious question: am I the only one who gets creeped or grossed out by ASMR videos? I’m not trying to insult people who enjoy them. If they help you relax, great! But I get a visceral reaction of my own, and it’s usually unpleasant. So far I’ve only ever found people who enjoy ASMR videos or who don’t feel any particular way about them.
@Mels
You are definitely not alone. I feel the same way. For me, they just seem unsettling and make me nervous. Honestly I don’t understand why other people like them so much. I don’t want to ruin them for anyone else, but I have anxiety and these videos tend to make me more anxious than usual.
Unsettling! Yes! Thank you for the validation, Naglfar. I also have anxiety and ASMR videos make me feel kind of paranoid. (Except for eating sounds, which induce something like angry panic.)
I’m happy for people who find them soothing, but I can’t relate at all. ?
@Mels – I feel the same way. For some reason ASMR triggers a panic for me.
This is my reaction to ASMR
LOL, ASMR triggers something in me much more akin to rage… like there was a beer commercial some time ago where a woman tapped her nails against the beer bottle and rasped into a microphone and I didn’t care who or what I pushed TF out of my way to turn the channel before seeing/hearing whatever else she was going to do.
I don’t get the whole thing as pleasurable; at the kindest, I’d call it annoying.
I envy people who are into ASMR. He has a nice voice, but it doesn’t do anything for me. Cute tho. Way more attractive than an actual Chad.
I also have an unsettled reaction to ASMR. Like, I do get shivers down my spine, but not nice ones. I’m glad those vids have positive effects for some people, though!
ASMR videos work for me a bit and there’s a few I watch but I can totally see why some people would dislike them.
1) They don’t work for everyone. Like wiggling your ears or curling your tongue there seems to be an ill defined inherent attribute that makes a person ASMR susceptible. I don’t think it can be taught or eased into.
2) They’re somewhat nonsensical. Like a porn video “stimulus delivery” is job one, narrative is second (or absent). If you’re not into that gender, combination or fetish a porn video is, at best, a tedious low-quality movie. If you’re not into the triggers or stimulus an ASMR video is just disjointed dawdling.
3) There’s a sort of casual intimacy with some ASMR stimulus. It simulates getting into your personal space (barber and makeup-artist themed ASMR is plentiful). If you have personal space issues that might mess with you all sorts of ways.
I kind of like ASMR but it’s not the sort of thing I recommend to people. If a person thinks they’ll like it they will. If a person does not think they’ll like it, they’re probably right.
Old white (expat) male here- what is ASMR? I googled, but still don’t quite understand. Is this a thing, and who is it for?”
@ galanx
ASMR is an ‘autonomous sensory meridian response’ which appears to be a ‘static like or tingling sensation on the skin that starts on the scalp and moves down the back of the neck and upper spine.’ Certain kinds of video and/or audio performance can bring on the sensation in susceptible people. The quote marks are because ASMR media don’t do it for me, but I’m not doubting the effect in people who experience it.
ASMR media only serve to annoy me, I’m relieved I’m not alone in that respect. Though in my case, and this should by no means, be extended to anyone else, it could be down to tending to be a grumpy old git.
@galanx
As Kevin outlined, ASMR basically is an acronym for “Autonomous sensory meridian response”, often equated to a sort of “head to toe” or at times even “full body” euphoria response.
For me, their are some ASMR videos that I enjoy, mostly anything relating to the sounds of nature, although there are others that I don’t have any response to or I just don’t get.
It’s a bit of a complicated and nuanced thing since different people find auditory euphoria in differing things.
Although I will admit I once fell asleep to the sound of steady, regular machine gun fire a mountain range away. Admittedly at the time I was in Cadets and it was during a bush exercise on DND property with the Canadian Army doing night training exercises, but the sound of distant automatic gunfire rolling across the mountains in the forest was…. oddly soothing.
Speak up, Chad. I want to hear every word when you brag to me, condescend to me, insult me, and gaslight me — and make a fool of yourself in general.
I get a positive reaction (mostly scalp tingles) to some ASMR videos, but others repulse me.
Whispering? Get out of my personal space!
Mouth noises? Ugh, disgusting!
Brushing/snipping/crinkling sounds? Nice!
Soft rain sounds? I’m getting tingles just thinking about that!
There doesn’t seem to be much logic to it.
I’ve got minor misophonia and off the charts hyperacusis.
Some of the ASMR voices, especially cooking ones, send me into a towering rage in no time flat.
I also have tinnitus from a noise injury 20 years ago, so white (or pink) noise is my friend!
Nature sounds like rain or ocean waves are also very nice.
@CarrieV: I know that ad and despise it as you do, though I usually just mute it. I really am not an ASMR person.
What I really hate is children whispering, like in that bottled water ad and many others, and in horror film trailers. Don’t know why that enrages me so, but if those kids weren’t on the other side of the screen and invisible, I’d be in jail.
There’s also a style of speaking that drives me nuts. Difficult to describe, it’s not whispering, or even quiet, but it feels like there’s no substance to it, as if they don’t have enough air to push the sound out. Blasey Ford was kind of like that, which made her testimony difficult to listen to on top of the subject matter.
@Moggie:
That describes my ASMR response almost to a “T”. Maybe it’s because we’re both cats? ?
I’ve had ASMR since I was a kid. I didn’t know what it was or whether anyone else had it– no-one else ever seemed to talk about it and so I guess I was afraid to bring it up in case people thought I was weird… or more weird. Since the 90s when I got on the internet, I’d type “does anyone know what that tingling on the back of your neck is called” into search engines ever couple of years and get nothing back (except for the usual “OMG U HAVE TEH DOUBLE PLAGUECANCERS U GONNA DIE” results you get when you type anything medical-related into a search engine, of course ?)… and then a couple of years ago– boom. I think it was the fact that someone gave it a name was all it took; suddenly, people all over were like, “hey, I have that!”
Because I’ve had from childhood, I’m kind of weird about anyone describing it in sexual terms, or sexualising it in any way– I mean, there’s ASMR channels on YouTube that are out-and-out soft porn AFAICT. Hell, I wouldn’t even watch ASMR videos made by women for the longest time in case anyone caught me and thought I was being a creep. I get why people do because when I get a very strong (dose? bout? outbreak?) of ASMR there is that same feeling of pleasure with a simultaneous desire for release that you get on the edge of orgasm. But it’s qualitatively different too, in the way that orgasm tends to feel like this frantic rush towards and over the top, whereas ASMR is much more mellow, like riding a roller-coaster versus riding a train.
No, not at all. When you see the list of triggers that different people have, it’s just a collection of the most random things imaginable.
One of the things I’ve noticed is that there is often a personal connection, like how a lot of people get it when they’re having their hair washed at the hairdressers’ and why a lot of the ASMR videos on YouTube are role-play of things like beauty treatments¹. That seems to be the case for me too; like, one of my real-world triggers is seeing someone do something intricate with their hands like drawing, or even writing. But if they’re drawing or writing with what I know is my pen? 10x tingles. Weird, huh? Or another time, I got a very strong response to someone whispering– something that, normally, does nothing for me or is outright annoying like you find yourself– in an office because I knew they were whispering so as not to distract me (well, not me, specifically, but the other people in the office in general). It was that personal connection, that consideration, on the whisperer’s part that seemed to do it.
¹ To the point where some people have theorised that ASMR might be all that’s left of some innate primate grooming response. Dunno about that– some triggers seem to fit that but not all of them do.
ASMR content ranges from boring to unpleasant for me as well. I’m glad that it makes other people happy, but it’s not for me.
I do sometimes get the body tingles when listening to specific pieces of music, but I think that frisson is a different response than ASMR.
I get brain tingles when watching kinetic sand videos. Something about layers of crunchy, brightly colored sand being sliced into perfect slabs really scratches me where I itch. I also love those “oddly satisfying” videos where you can’t quite figure out what they’re making, but it’s mesmerizing to watch.
Tapping, clicking, and whispering don’t do anything for me, though.
@Mels
The only kind of ASMR I like are ones with dry sounds, like hands rubbing together or something rubbing against paper and just whispering. It helps me to sleep a lot and I use them as like white noise. I get the being creeped out thing though, my favorite ASMR video right now is with some girl roll playing that she’s a catholic nun nurse who’s nursing someone that’s dying from the black death.
I have horrible anxiety most nights when it’s time for bed so just having some noise is good and I like things where someone is like telling me a calming quite story.
When my fiancé is home and sleeping next to me. If I have a nightmare or anything like that, he’ll softly read one or my books to me until I fall back asleep.
Idk, maybe it’s just something really comforting to me since my mother read me books while I was inside the womb, inside the crib, bed time stories and then of course actually sitting there with me to teach me how to read.
@Catalpa
I have the same thing. It usually doesn’t really bother me when it happens while I’m listening to music, but it’s not really pleasant either. One album that really does this to me is the last Woods of Ypres album:
(Still can’t embed properly)
*For those who don’t know, the album has a number of songs on it about dying, a few of them referencing a car accident, and shortly after finishing the recording the lead singer died in a car accident. Probably a coincidence (though possibly a suicide), but still interesting.
@Catalpa
Never tried the videos, but definitely get this from some music. Mainly Romatic-era stuff by slavic composers (Scheherazade is my go-to piece), but also some prog-rock.
Oof, ASMR is definitely not my thing. Give me some Tallis any day.
“What I really hate is children whispering, like in that bottled water ad and many others, and in horror film trailers. Don’t know why that enrages me so, but if those kids weren’t on the other side of the screen and invisible, I’d be in jail.”
I find it very concerning that I’m the first one here to find this statement very concerning.
Gonna go out on a limb and say that urges to do bodily harm to children are probably NOT just a sensory issue. We live in a culture that is routinely violent to children and a lot of adults haven’t examined or worked on the ways they’ve internalized that. It’s not okay to talk like this.
The video is pretty much one of my recurring nightmares. I have hearing loss and intelligibility problems and cannot make out much of anything the guy is possibly saying. It could be nonsense syllables for all I can tell and it makes me angry the way my bad dreams do.
Carrie V – I’ve always felt that particular ad was trying to do ASMR and failing somehow.
The ads I will wreck the living room to get to the mute button for are the ones with people (almost always women) whose “s” sounds are high-pitched*-whistle-y. It seems like there are more of them all the time. Sigh. I also think this might be either deliberate to catch attention. Or the possibly unintended result of sound mixing in editing because in some really egregious commercials, it will actually back off the whistling “s” sounds after they’ve been running a while; kind of like when an ad has a long version and later a short version.
This has never been an issue with radio ads IME.
*I have always had very acute hearing in the higher frequencies. Still do. Bleh.
Nice one. I watched the whole video at work. It was so funny when he said “I didn’t know you could eat, well I mean, I know by looking at you,”. Well done Ryan on playing this character so well. By the way I found this website today. Good materials. I should check you up more regularly.