The Rise of the ASMR Video: From Non-Existent to the Top of YouTube in 10 Years

The first time I remember feeling the tingles, I was sitting criss-cross-applesauce on the floor in first grade. My teacher Mrs. Rounds was talking at the front of the class, and all the kids were listening quietly. Her dry erase marker squeaked lightly across the board as she drew numbers and mathematical symbols. The only other noises were the rustling of clothes and tinkling of necklaces and zippers as my classmates shifted on the rug. At some point, the girl sitting behind me got bored and started playing with my hair. Waves of soft tingles flowed up from the nape of my neck to the top of my skull and a feeling of contentment came over me. It reminded me of the times my mom would absentmindedly tickle my head when we laid in bed together reading or watching a movie. 

Since that first memory of the tingles, the feeling has been triggered often while living my daily life: a friend quietly practicing ukulele in the dorm room across the hall, whispers while sitting in a church, a custodian walking by my desk at work and wiping down surfaces with his dust rag. It wasn’t until I first heard the term ASMR in college that I learned it wasn’t a universal experience.

What is ASMR?

ASMR is an acronym, coined in 2010, that stands for Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response. The definition from Oxford Dictionary is “a feeling of well-being combined with a tingling sensation in the scalp and down the back of the neck, as experienced by some people in response to a specific gentle stimulus, often a particular sound.” It’s sometimes described as the opposite of misophonia, a strong negative reaction to many of the same sounds that trigger the tingles, like mouth noises or repetitive tapping. ASMR and misophonia are each estimated to affect one in five people, but there is some overlap. About a third of those who experience ASMR in response to some type of stimulus report having a misophonic response to others. 

There are three types of triggers that can provoke physical responses. Tactile stimuli involve or mimic physical touch. Tickling, massaging, hair touching, grooming, and physical examination are examples of this. Visual stimuli may include hand movements, eye contact, or movements of light. Lastly, auditory stimuli may include whispering, speaking in a caring tone, mouth sounds, tapping, scratching, and caressing noises. Of all these types of stimuli, the most commonly triggering to tingleheads is whispering, followed by personal attention and crisp sounds. In comparison, the most common misophonic triggers are mouth sounds and repetitive noises. In the chart below, common triggers for both ASMR and misophonia are listed with the percentage of study participants that were triggered by each stimuli. The pink bars are auditory stimuli, the green bars are tactile, and the blue bars are visual.

As you can see, a major difference between ASMR and misophonia is that misophonia is always triggered by sounds, whereas ASMR can be triggered by any of the three types of stimuli. They aren’t exact opposites, but rather both experienced by people who are sensitive to their surroundings.

Why don’t you try out some of these triggers yourself? The sound snippets below were taken from ASMR videos on YouTube uploaded by the popular creators Jane ASMR and Gibi ASMR. Take a listen with your eyes closed to see if you might be triggered by any of these sounds. To experience ASMR, one usually needs to be in a quiet area, and headphones are highly suggested. On the other hand, misophonia can be experienced in any type of setting.

Research on ASMR is in the early stages, but the first peer-reviewed study on ASMR by Barrett et. al. in 2015 showed that while experiencing the tingles, the “reward center” of the brain lights up and releases oxytocin, also known as “the love hormone.” This is the same part of the brain that becomes addicted to drugs like cocaine and heroin, though ASMR has not been shown to be addictive in that way. This feel-good hormone may be the origin of the relaxation that ASMR experiencers (also known as “tingleheads”) feel when the sensation is triggered.  

On the less scientific side, a widespread survey put out by ASMR University, a website that collects information about ASMR, concluded that tingleheads skew female and are often curious and open to new experiences. However, they can also be neurotic, introverted, disagreeable, and careless. In addition to these self-reported personality traits, a joint study by the University of Essex, the University of Manchester, and Manchester Metropolitan University has shown that the brains of tingleheads are highly sensitive and significantly more receptive to external physical, auditory, and visual experiences. For example, experiencing chills when listening to music.

There are a number of theories about why some people have this trait. One widely believed theory is that the ASMR feeling stems evolutionarily from the euphoria experienced by primates grooming each other in bonding rituals. Because so many triggers involve personal attention, soft sounds, and light touch, it’s not hard to see how the two relate. In a study done by Dartmouth College and Shenandoah University, the brains of tingleheads experiencing ASMR in an fMRI machine lit up two areas of the brain associated with social behaviors and the sensation of touch, lending some credence to the grooming theory. 

Another theory is that people who experience ASMR are just neurodivergent, meaning “differing in mental or neurological function from what is considered typical or normal.” As mentioned earlier, people who experience ASMR are likely to be highly sensitive, bodily aware, and have a high emotional response to external stimuli. A study from the University of Winnipeg found that tingleheads may have different wiring of the brain, with more blending of the networks that relate to sensory inputs and emotion. 

This leads us to the third theory: that ASMR may be a form of synesthesia. Synesthesia is a “perceptual phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway.” This means that one person with synesthesia may see colors in their mind when listening to music, while another might taste the words that they read. In the case of ASMR, one might be feeling things that they see or hear. A study at Swansea University found that there may be a higher rate of diagnosed synesthesia among tingleheads than the general population (5.9% compared to 4.4%) though the study was small and more research needs to be done in this area.

ASMR Takes Over the Internet

If you’ve spent time on YouTube or TikTok, you’ve probably come across an ASMR video. A person, often an attractive woman, creates the circumstances needed for a viewer to get the tingles by, for example, whispering, tapping on something, or eating close to a microphone. These videos may seem ubiquitous and highly saturated, but videos of this type are relatively new. 

In 2007, a user dubbed @okaywhatever posted about the feeling of ASMR on a health discussion forum called SteadyHealth. The thread was titled “Weird sensation feels good” and in the post, @okaywhatever described feeling the ASMR sensation throughout their life and asked other users if they knew what it was. The thread garnered over 300 responses, which broke off into new websites, blogs and facebook groups. These groups cataloged triggers and started lists of YouTube videos that were good for setting off the tingles. 

At this point, there were no YouTube videos intentionally triggering tingles, but users on tingle discussion forums would link to videos that they had found which triggered the sensation. For example, Bob Ross painting videos were a big favorite, featuring the quiet-talking man painting landscape scenes.  

In 2008, the first intentional ASMR YouTube channel was created, called @WhisperingLife. Of course at this time, the sensation was not yet called ASMR. The online discussion groups were debating about what to call the pleasurable feeling that would give it an air of legitimacy. A popular option was “Attention Induced Head Orgasm,” but users didn’t want the feeling associated with sexual pleasure. Studies show that only 5% of tingleheads feel any sort of sexual stimulation from the sensation.

Finally, in 2010, discussion blog frequenter Jennifer Allen came up with the name “Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response.” It doesn’t actually mean anything scientific, but users thought it sounded official, and the term has stuck until today.  

Once there was an official name for it, the idea of ASMR slowly became known to people who frequented sites like Reddit and YouTube. ASMR creators, also known as ASMRtists, started posting intentional trigger videos that gained a lot of attention. In the five years from 2012 to 2017, YouTube searches for ASMR increased 25x. In ten years, searches had increased 100x and it was the most searched youtube keyword in 2021, followed by “music” and “fortnite” (excluding searches for specific channels). Right now, there are an estimated 500,000 ASMR channels and 25,000,000 ASMR videos on YouTube.

Fourteen out of the fifteen most popular ASMR channels worldwide have to do with food. Eleven are mukbang channels, a Korean term which combines the words for “eating” and “broadcast.”  These videos, which started growing in popularity around 2017, involve a person or multiple people eating copious amounts of food on camera and recording the sounds of them eating. The other three are cooking channels, which follow the cook through a full recipe, with only their hands featured. 

However, of the top 100 most popular ASMR channels, only three never show their face. About two-thirds of the most popular creators are female, while about one-fourth are male. The rest have both male and female creators featured on the channel. This is probably because ASMR watchers prefer the ASMRtist in trigger videos to have a specific disposition: caring, soft spoken, and empathetic. Many of these character traits are associated with women, and therefore more of their channels become popular.

It’s clear people really like ASMR videos, and there may be a scientific reason why. Tingleheads don’t just watch the videos because it feels good: 98% use it to help them relax, 82% to help them sleep, and 70% to reduce stress. Scientists from Swansea University say that watching ASMR videos has similarities to mindfulness and meditation, which are proven relaxation and anxiety relief methods. They discovered that experiencing ASMR releases a large amount of alpha waves from the brain, which are usually associated with meditative experiences. 

In the same study, they found that watching ASMR videos can give temporary relief to tingleheads for their depression or chronic pain. Over half of study participants with chronic pain had significantly improved symptoms for three hours after watching an ASMR video. Additionally, over three quarters of tingleheads reported an improved mood from watching an ASMR video. Interestingly, those with depression reported a significantly larger mood improvement over those without depression.

There is still a lot of research to be done about the sensation of ASMR, but despite the unknowns it’s clear that millions of people benefit from watching ASMR videos, including me. I don’t often seek them out, but if it’s late at night and I scroll upon an ASMR video, I might stop and watch for ten or twenty minutes and drift off to sleep. However, I like the ASMR triggers that I happen upon in my everyday life the best, like my experience in first grade. It’s nice to get a little hit of “the love hormone” in the middle of the workday when I hear my coworkers quietly talking about something boring. Instead of feeling dull, it gives me a boost and makes me feel a little more happy throughout the day. Hopefully with a deeper understanding of what’s happening in the brains of tingleheads, even more people can be exposed to the beneficial effects.

Sources:

• ASMR University

• Barratt EL, Davis NJ. Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR): a flow-like mental state.

• Lochte BC, Guillory SA, Richard CAH, Kelley WM. An fMRI investigation of the neural correlates underlying the autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR).

• Giulia L. Poerio, Safiyya Mank, Thomas J. Hostler. The awesome as well as the awful: Heightened sensory sensitivity predicts the presence and intensity of Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR).

• Enzler F, Loriot C, Fournier P, Noreña AJ. A psychoacoustic test for misophonia assessment.