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Paulina Ortiz

Instructor- Judith McCann

English 1302-213

31 January 2023

“You’re Getting Very Sleepy”…Right?: The Phenomenon of ASMR

Introduction

Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) has become a worldwide phenomenon

in a short amount of time. There are many social media platforms that provide ASMR to listeners

worldwide. There are also online videos if people would prefer to watch and listen. Viewers and

listeners describe the feeling that they experience when listening to it as calming and tingly. A

warm feeling is felt running down the spinal column that most closely resembles tingles. One of

the most common uses of AMSR is to assist people when falling asleep. The calming sensations

experienced when listening to it relax people and help them sleep faster at night. Even though it

is nice to know that there is a video people can play to fall asleep faster, there are many questions

that are being asked about the science behind it. What causes those reactions? Why do so many

people describe similar reactions to whispers, tapping, and brushing? And most importantly,

what is happening in the brain when listening to ASMR? In this experiment, the researcher did

find that it took less time for the participants to fall asleep when listening to ASMR compared to

when they do not.

Methodology

In this experiment, the researcher had three participants to see how long it took them to

fall asleep when listening to ASMR. Two out of three participants were female, and their ages

ranged from three to thirty-seven years old.

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During the first part of the experiment, the participants did not know that they were being

observed. The researcher first recorded how long it took them to fall asleep without the aid of

ASMR. They started recording at ten p.m. and counted the hours from there. For the male,

three-year-old, it took him roughly three hours to fall asleep. For the female, thirteen-year-old, it

took her around two hours to fall asleep. Finally, for the thirty-seven-year-old female, it took her

around four hours to fall asleep. All of these times are not accurate but estimates due to the fact

that it was difficult for the researcher to get the time down to the exact minute that the participant

fell asleep.

For the second part of the experiment, the researcher explained to the participants what

the experimental process would entail; however, neglected to elaborate on what data exactly

would be collected to prevent any biased or skewered results. Because the participants were not

expressly told that the amount of time they take to fall asleep would be recorded, the results

remained as independent as they could for the study. For participant 1, the male, it took him

fifteen minutes after starting the video to fall asleep. For participant 2, the thirteen-year-old, it

took her ten minutes to fall asleep. And for participant 3, the thirty-seven-year-old, it took her

thirty minutes to fall asleep. Participants 1 and 3 were fighting the urge to go to sleep but

eventually, they succumbed to it.

The morning after, the researcher asked participants two and three to reminisce about the

night before and try to recall what sounds triggered the most tingles. Participant two answered

with the following: hair brushing, tapping, and mouth sounds. Participant three said they listened

to water spraying, whispering, and writing.

Results
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From all the data gathered, the researcher was able to conclude that ASMR does, in fact,

help people sleep faster. The researcher also asked the participants, after they woke up, how they

felt when listening to the video, and participants one and two said that a tingly, warm feeling was

felt and a heavy, sleepy sensation ran through them. Participant number two even went as far as

saying that she felt as if her “body was melting into the mattress and did not want to move.”

Participant number one was not able to give an explanation due to his inability to communicate

properly.

The researcher compared this study's participants' responses to the participants in Poerio

et al.'s study. Hair brushing and tapping caused tingles in over five hundred out of the study's

eight hundred and thirteen participants. Tapping was also up there with them, with just a little

over four hundred participants claiming it to be triggering. Not only do these sounds cause a said

reaction, but they were reported in both this and Poerio et al. study that they create feelings of

calmness and excitement (Giulia et al. 6). Table three in Giulia et al.’s study presents an overall

average of participants who experienced certain reactions to the videos. In this case, the group

that will be paid attention to is the control group because it most closely resembles the study

conducted in this paper. The average tingle frequency that the participants reported is 1.40. There

is also an average number of participants that reported feeling excited is 2.90. Finally, the

average frequency that was gathered from what the participants reported feeling calm is 4.72

(Giulia et al. 7).

In article two by Guilia et al., the authors provide graphs for how long the average

occurrence lasted, the number of times the occurred, the total time that the feeling was

experienced, and the percentage of participants who felt tingles, relaxed, baseline, and no press.

The focus of this study will be on the results of tingles and relaxation. The duration for the
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average occurrence of “relax” is seventy-five seconds with the number of occurrences being

twelve. The time allotted for all of the occurrences is two thousand seconds. For “tingle,” the

time per occurrence is fifteen seconds with the number of occurrences totaling up to fifteen per

video. The total time reported for this feeling is less than two-hundred fifty seconds (Guilia et al.

299). This proves that not only was it the researcher’s group of participants that went through

these emotions, but other participants as well.

Conclusion

In this study, the researcher was looking for whether or not ASMR would help people

sleep faster and what psychological effect it would leave on them. During the experimental

process, the researcher gathered that ASMR did, in fact, aid people in sleep. Not only did it

shorten the amount of time that it took to fall asleep, but it also caused positive emotions that had

a lasting effect until the next day. Overall, it seems safe to conclude that more people should

sleep while listening to ASMR. Who knows, maybe it is the secret cure to insomnia.
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Works Cited

Giulia, Lara P., et al. "More than a Feeling: Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response

(ASMR) is Characterized by Reliable Changes in Affect and Physiology." PLoS One,

vol. 13, no. 6, 2018. ProQuest,

https://go.openathens.net/redirector/tamiu.edu?url=https://www.proquest.com/scholarly

-journals/more-than-feeling-autonomous-sensory-meridian/docview/2062795969/se-2,

doi:https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0196645.

Lochte, Bryson C., et al. "An fMRI Investigation of the Neural Correlates Underlying the

Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR)." BioImpacts, vol. 8, no. 4, 2018,

pp. 295-304. ProQuest,

https://go.openathens.net/redirector/tamiu.edu?url=https://www.proquest.com/scholarly

-journals/fmri-investigation-neural-correlates-underlying/docview/2136863839/se-2,

doi:https://doi.org/10.15171/bi.2018.32.