Posts tagged relaxation

Last night I couldn’t fall asleep. I have become reliant over the past couple of years on a sensation called ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response) in order to relax. This form of relaxation, for lack of a better phrase, knocks me the fuck out. Now for those unfamiliar with ASMR, it is essentially a tingling sensation in the top of your head which generally reaches your fingertips and kind of gives you that “butterflies in the stomach” feeling, and it may as well be goddamn percocets, because it feels damn good. It is usually triggered by an external stimulus such as music or a soothing voice, or oddly enough when you get a haircut and your hairdresser is gentle and speaks softly. Unless I’ve been up for 24+ hours, I need it to sleep. ASMR is not officially recognized by science at this point, as more study is needed to prove its existence (but to the few of us that experience it, like World of Warcraft, it’s real to us).

How do I achieve this on a nightly basis then, you ask? Well my friends, YouTube has become quite the source for virtually fucking anything in recent years. And with this diversity of videos there are quite a few people that upload ASMR related videos: soothing music, clips of sounds that tend to lull you, such as office background noise, the sound of haircutting scissors, typing on a laptop keyboard, etc. Some of my choice videos have been people that make videos of themselves speaking in a low volume, generally doing some form of guided visualization or hypnosis, and most of them have VERY soothing voices. Like the kind of voice that gives you goosebumps, but not in a bad way. I’m sure you all remember The Joy of Painting on PBS? Yeah you do. We all watched it when we were younger, and unfortunately Bob Ross passed away in 1995 before anyone my age can appreciate what his program really was: 28 minutes of the best relaxation you’ve ever had. That show ran for 11 years, and that guy had one of the most soothing voices you’ve ever heard. That form of relaxation is ASMR.

Well you surely must be thinking at this point, how were you betrayed by the Internet as your post title suggests? Well my friends, I was hooked on one particular YouTube account for like six months, the moderator of which was a young Danish woman who posted hundreds of soothing vocal videos and hypnosis videos, and they were as good as fucking ambien. Well sometime yesterday she deleted her damn account, taking those hundreds of videos with a combined hundreds of millions of total views with her.

Come back to YouTube, liliumcandidum27, I need my sleep back.