Category: Life Changes

Sleeping With ASMR

As life rushes onwards and time disappears, there come little points at which one starts to re-evaluate whether the activities one has been engaged in were ever worthwhile. Occasionally I get enlivening feedback. More usually not. I am not clear how many people I have reached and if any of them had better sleep as a consequence. It is also clear that the amount of time to deliver content is slowly disappearing.

In the present, I continue to try and evaluate sources of restful content and give you my opinion of it. I hope that it may help on the evenings when your mind will just not be quiet. If only as a distraction regarding the hours that are passing, and in which you would have preferred to have been sleeping.

A little while ago, rather foolishly, I did mention that I would look for resources that were outside of YouTube and did not require payment (such as the Calm subscription that I keep banging on about). The time for locating new sources is at a premium so in a bid to satisfy this statement I am falling back on material that I have used in the past (pre-YouTube playlist) most notably during lockdown. One name that I recall was Gil Fronsdal. I have no idea how I first came across him but I do recall that he had a splendid voice.

Of course he appears on YouTube for example:

and

but the point is to find material that is outside of YouTube and subject to less of the godawful advertising that dogs the heels of each and every video.

One amazing resource is this:

https://www.audiodharma.org/teacher/1/

and here we find the audio equivalent of the YouTube series I just outlined. For example:

https://www.audiodharma.org/series/19711

Gil has a beautiful, relaxing voice. As we would expect, the content has a definite Buddhism leaning. You may find that off-putting. In which case this review will probably stand to put you off. I am not particularly worried that it has a religious focus as long as the content is relaxing. I would say almost anything from Gil is likely to fit the bill. Some people may miss the video aspect of YouTube (I can understand that). However, this might be compensated for by the fact that you are not likely to be ripped from your sleep by some objectionable advert.

I may return to Gil. Re-acquainting myself with some of his material today I remembered how much I used to like it.

Those who read this blog reasonably often will know that I have been reviewing material from Calm.com for a little while, with the understanding that some people will not have (nor want) to have a subscription to Calm. This is reasonable, in which case after this brief overview of something from Jay Shetty we’ll get back to some YouTube content.

Today’s Calm content is this one:

https://www.calm.com/app/player/OJtPBsWToz

Daily Jay

Humility & Curiosity

NARRATOR

Jay Shetty

It is from Jay Shetty and I have found that whilst Jay does not have the voice I most like on Calm, he quite often has the most interesting content.

This is quite short (it is less than eight minutes). It considers what happens when you are lost or adrift in the world (and who isn’t). It reflects how temporary everything is and how facing that successfully requires humility and curiosity. (The world is interesting, not threatening).

At this stage, for quite a while in this blog now, I have been reviewing a professional ASMR artist. The results have been a little so-so. Not actually disappointing, but I have had to ratchet my expectations down a little. I am sure that people in YouTube videos are universally attractive but they do not universally have attractive voices. They do not always know how to create a consistently restful video. In this way, my original decision to focus on inadvertent ASMR does not look as crazy as perhaps at one time it might have done.

This week’s is a little left field in that it is only vaguely to do with examinations (medical or otherwise). I saw the title and I was intrigued…

It is from a channel called gumoochie. This channel has 192K subscribers and one hundred and thirty-two videos, so a pretty respectable subscriber per video created ratio. To be honest though, I have not always found that translates towards high quality content. I am not certain why that is, but it does seem to be a valid finding.

This is the first time I have encountered a channel from a professional ASMR artist where there are plenty of videos but no playlists. I’m guessing there is a reason, I do not know what it is.

The video is:

iq test but you’re an idiot (asmr)

a little less than twenty three minutes, the setting appears to be domestic – probably a bedroom from the background, not that I expect you’ll be watching, but listening instead. The video-associated notes are refreshingly brief: “430,120 views 24 Apr 2025

if you want a non-idiot ver, check out the bonus vid on my patreon!!

————————- ♡ ————————-

SOCIALS

email: basicklegwp@gmail.com

insta:   / gumooochie  

letterboxd: https://boxd.it/9z0jz

patreon: / gumoochie 

tiktok:   / gumoochie “

The comments are suitably off the wall, with a low count of dedicated sycophancy. That, in itself, is unusual for a professional ASMR artist.

The voice, as you would expect, is relaxing. There is no introductory music. The participant does engage in that strange clucking behaviour which ASMR artists believe is a trigger for someone. In which case they are probably right. Just not me. I would be happier with just the voice. This voice does not dwell on whispering, which is refreshing, although some ASMR afficionados no doubt will disagree with me. Not to say that there is no whispering because there is some but it does not predominate.

There are no offensively loud noises. People who enjoy pencil on paper noises or mouth-clicking noises are well served here. There is no tail-end music and no content dedicated to sponsors.

I’m not sure I am up to IQ tests any longer (assuming that I ever was) but I do recommend the video as being worthy of review.

At this point I review a video that is inadvertent ASMR. Since I have been looking at non-YouTube content, these blog posts have got rather long. I am conscious that perhaps I soon need to start dropping something.

This time, however, I am going to limit myself to just the one video and that one being a very brief one at that.

Assessment of abdomen & blood vessels

It is a bit over ten and a half minutes in length. There are no notes and relatively few comments. The Channel is Cassidy George which has 1.07k subscribers but only eight videos – that seems a very high performance for so few videos but perhaps there is a reason for that. The video seems to be one of the student assessment videos which is a type of video that has been reviewed on this blog multiple times previously.

The video was posted on 12 Apr 2023 but already has 30, 786 views. Cassidy seems to me a bit loud to be honest, and the background noise similarly. If it is air conditioning it is really working hard. I am not sure that those views were by ASMR fans. I am thinking not. The presentation is as if presenting to a huge room and yet I would think the recording equipment was nearby and this would have been unnecessary. As the examination is performed, the voice does get quieter but, if anything, this just demonstrates how loud the air conditioning is. The setting is domestic, as far as I can tell it is someone’s front room and examination is performed on their sofa.

I tried turning down the air conditioning noise (which also muted the vocal track) and found that the whole thing was a great deal more palatable. As one of the people commented, there is a regular beep which could be a low battery warning for example from a smoke alarm.

This appears to be another situation in which any listener will be reaching for the volume control in a disgruntled fashion. It is a shame about that air conditioning (how many times have I said that on this blog).

So, not startling. However, I notice the channel has eight videos. If I had not used up so much space reviewing Gil at the start of this article I would have reviewed some more. I think I will be returning to this channel in the future.

On that basis, just one, video today.

That’s it on this occasion, more next time.

See you again next week.

The overall playlist of videos covered so far on the Procrastination Pen is here:

The videos weeded out because over time they are just not as good as the others is in this archive list:

I keep this in case subscribers to the Procrastination Pen have personal favourites that they want to hear.

The playlist of videos requiring age verification is here:

I can’t be bothered to stop my listening to log on, this interrupts the experience. You may not mind this in which case this list is for you.

I hope that you find the playlists restful and I hope you get plenty of sleep.

If you liked this blog article, why not follow this blog.

Until next time.

Photo by DeepAI

Sleeping With ASMR

I notice that advice for insomniacs abounds. Quite often the advice does include suggestions to distract oneself with another noise (white noise seems popular). Of course, The Procrastination Pen exists to describe distracting noises. Until recently it has consisted primarily of videos on YouTube. However, I have often bemoaned how intrusive the inter-video adverts are. I therefore keep trying to find alternatives.

So, I thought this week we would start into free resources that might preclude the need for YouTube at all. I am looking for things that could be restful and which are not going to wake you with loud adverts.

I had made a note of a URL during lockdown and never returned to it. Now it turns out that it has gone and can only be located on The Internet Archive:

https://web.archive.org/web/20221005123843/http://me-cl.com/resources/

There are three files that appear in this order:

Talk: Mindful Eating by Jan Chozen Bays (note: begins rather abruptly with a short chant)

Meditation: Mini-Meditation before Eating by Char Wilkins

Meditation: 10-minute Breath Awareness by Char Wilkins

The Jan Chozen Bays talk is close to forty-two minutes in length. It has a long, quiet introduction (silent, in fact). Then it gets really loud very quickly. It seems to consist of rhythmic chanting which I, for one, did not find relaxing. After about a minute the chanting stops, but it is enough, from my perspective, to discount it as a source of relaxation.

After that time a talk starts and that is nicely quiet (another situation where, if I owned the MP3, I would truncate that initial part altogether and the file might be quite usable). The voice is ok, not much in the way of ASMR-y, but given we are looking for sleeping aids, I would say certainly relaxing enough for me.

Not unexpectedly the talk has a religious theme and also (perhaps unexpectedly) a US-centric theme. I apologise if you find either to be not for you. In which case perhaps this review will save you listening to it at all.

The further through the track we go the better it is paced and the calmer the voice becomes. Perhaps it’s one to start playing before you’re ready to sleep and start listening a few minutes in…

The Mini Meditation by Char Wilkins is just less than six and a half minutes long. It starts with a bell, which might be a bit jarring. The voice is, again, not as quiet as I expected, you’d probably want to adjust the volume down a bit. The pace is quite good though. Not an ASMR-y tone but restful enough for sleep, I think. There is another bell about midway through; I’m sure this is a mechanism for punctuating the meditation but it may also be something that causes the slumbering mind to surface again. The final three minutes or so is completely silent.

The ten-minute breath awareness also starts with a bell. It is actually eleven minutes long. Here the voice is a better volume and a better pace than the previous one. There is also a further bell towards the end of the track.

The files seem to be free to download, such that you could download them and manipulate them as you see fit with an editor such as Audacity.

(Perhaps you could even chop out some of the louder bits, for example).

Of course, this mechanism of locating restful material does not build into a playlist. I think you’re stuck with downloading, manipulating to focus on restful moments, and then building a playlist yourself using a media player of choice. Given the files are not mine I dare not do that for you in case a formal person in a serious suit were to find out about it.

The other alternative to YouTube I have explored for a while now is limited only to those who already have a Calm subscription. I am not sure what percentage of a readership this actually is (conceivably it could be a waste of time). However, I have felt that describing alternative methods of getting some peaceful background noise might be more effective than taking a chance with those adverts. Today’s is this one:

https://www.calm.com/app/player/kM_FSkJ6oJ

Daily Jay

You Belong

NARRATOR

Jay Shetty

This concerns the universal desire to belong. It features an enlightening story about belonging and attitude to belonging. Even if you are not using it to relax for sleep it makes for interesting listening.

I like the statement “any form of suffering is a part of life”. Those of us who struggle with sleep probably will take some succour from that.

Frequently having covered the Calm option, I have now been featuring a professional ASMR artist (often on a medical theme). I started reviewing these to see if the offerings were as good, or preferably better, than the inadvertent ASMR which has been the subject of this blog so far.

This week I am looking at the channel Celaine’s ASMR this has 2.01m subscribers, nine hundred and seventy six videos, thirty one playlists some of which have greater than two hundred videos in them. This is an extremely popular channel.

I notice that there are some playlists on a medical theme (which has been our focus for a while now).

and

and

and

and

and

and

and

and

and

As you can tell this is a very prolific ASMR expert.

From all of this huge bounty, I have selected this one:

ASMR Eye Exam Lens 1 or 2 (With or Without) 👓 Light Tests, Realistic Medical Roleplay for Sleep

It is twenty-four minutes in length and in my case started with the loudest advert I’ve encountered yet. Celaine is excellent, she has a great voice. There is no startup music. No attempt to cover every random trigger – for example, no mouth clicking, scratching, or nail tapping on a hard surface. If only there were more videos like this.

There are notes of course:

“388,965 views 23 Dec 2024 ASMR Cranial Nerve Exam Roleplay Podcast

ASMR Eye Exam Lens 1 or 2 (With or Without) 👓 Light Tests, Realistic Medical Roleplay for Sleep. Vision Test & Cranial Nerve Orbital Exam. And MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!

In this ASMR medical exam video expect an eye exam roleplay that’s focused on the lens 1 or 2 test, Glasses Fitting, Orbital Light Exam and ASMR Light triggers for sleep FAST.

The perfect ASMR eye examination video to test your orbital vision! This video includes Dr. Eye who will give you a detailed eye exam and eye test for your ASMR relaxation~ ASMR: Lens 1 or 2? With or Without? (role play) inspired by the amazing YouTube creator SRP ASMR !

✿ What is ASMR? ✿

Autonomous sensory meridian response, is a tingling sensation that typically begins on the scalp and moves down the back of the neck and upper spine. Used to help with sleep and relaxation

#asmreyeexam   #asmrroleplay   #asmrvideo”

As usual for a professional ASMR artist the notes are on the long side. I have truncated them a tad or it would be boringly long. The video is divided at intervals and loud adverts, as you would expect, populate those intervals. The video has comments of course. Some of which are a tad on the odd side, the majority, as we would expect, being profuse with praise.

I can hear why that is. I think it is close to ideal for sleep purposes, those intrusive adverts permitting.

At this stage we usually do an inadvertent ASMR video, but this post is already quite lengthy. I think I will cover one video but not attempt to find any linked videos, or this is likely to go on forever.

The channel is

Joel Sattgast with 4.14k subscribers, one hundred and sixty eight videos, twelve playlists. Some of those playlists look worthy of further review (given more time and blog space).

The chosen video is this one:

Foot and Ankle | Palpation Guide

It is a little over seventeen and a half minutes long.

It has notes: “21,676 views 4 Jul 2020

This video takes students through palpation and identification of the major landmarks, bones, and joints of the foot and ankle.

MU DPT Sp2020

Fair Use Act Disclaimer: This material is for rehabilitation educational purposes only (e.g. DPT education)

Fair Use

Copyright Disclaimer under section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976, allowance is made for “fair use” for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, education & research.  Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing.

Copyrighted material used for educational purposes is indicated with citations.”

I think I qualify under the “criticism” heading, at least that is the gamble I am making. If I suddenly stop posting I might be enjoying some leisure time at the behest of His Majesty. There are comments, but precious few of those (let’s hope that is not a bad sign).

Joel’s voice is excellent. It starts calm and nicely paced. There is no startup music and no loud equipment noises. He does get a bit louder as if trying to communicate through projection alone. That said the video is not ideal ASMR material. To be restful I think you’re going to have to reduce the volume a bit. (I’ve commented before that inter-video volume changes are a problem on mixed playlists like that compiled by The Procrastination Pen).

On that basis, just one, video on this occasion.

That’s it on this occasion, more next time.

See you again next week.

The overall playlist of videos covered so far on the Procrastination Pen is here:

The videos weeded out because over time they are just not as good as the others is in this archive list:

I keep this in case subscribers to the Procrastination Pen have personal favourites that they want to hear.

The playlist of videos requiring age verification is here:

I can’t be bothered to stop my listening to log on, this interrupts the experience. You may not mind this in which case this list is for you.

I hope that you find the playlists restful and I hope you get plenty of sleep.

If you liked this blog article, why not follow this blog.

Until next time.

Photo by DeepAI

Sleeping With ASMR

The amount that has to be achieved in a day is increasing. As a result, I have to turn these reviews around more quickly than of late, and certainly more quickly than I did even last year, for example. It is likely that these reviews are going to be a little shorter going forwards but I will do everything to keep the quality high. (Well as high as it has been to date anyway, readers can decide at what level of quality they perceive that to be).

I have been reviewing an offering from Calm for a while now. I have a Calm subscription and, in many ways, I prefer listening to Calm content in order to get off to sleep. It is the lack of advertising in the content. It isn’t as if I have any objections to adverts, as such. It is the insistence that I give them my full attention. This is forcefully applied by making them louder than the video I was just listening to; fast paced, often with bright, fast-moving images and not taking into consideration the time of day. At 3am I want restful adverts, not some catchy tune or person loudly telling me that only they have the answer to this or that life problem.

However, Calm is not free and I do occasionally come across free resources that are not weighed down with adverts. Mostly they have no associated video so they will not embed well in a page. Often the ones I have located concern meditation, rather than ASMR, so a slight change of focus. But if people like the idea I will feature the odd one. Let me know what you think.

Today’s Calm is the following:

https://www.calm.com/app/player/OJtPBsWToz

Daily Jay

Humility & Curiosity

NARRATOR

Jay Shetty

Jay has some of the more interesting and challenging content on Calm. I would not say he had the best voice on there for me that is probably Tamara Levitt. But I find myself listening to him more often than not and trying to adjust my mindset to the message (I am often nowhere near calm enough for a start).

This is a little under eight minutes in length, so will not keep you for long. It concerns the qualities that assist a person in navigating a world as confusing and challenging as ours is. I hope that you enjoy it (if you have a Calm subscription in any case).

Recently I read that Gen Z has the edge on persons of my age in the sleep habits that are recommended. What strikes me is the ability to compare apples with apples. As a young person I could sleep, within seconds, anywhere. Noise did not disturb me. I could go to bed early and sleep right through to the alarm. I could sleep all weekend going to bed on Friday after work and rising to the alarm on Monday morning. I could also go for days without sleep and apparently have few ill effects.

There is nothing like passing fifty to show the weaknesses. I now find that the least noise will wake me, if I go to bed at nine, I will wake at three. If I go to bed at any time I will always wake at my old work wake up time of 4am and then I need to make a special effort to go back to sleep because I no longer wish to wake then.

I have trouble getting to sleep at all some days and lie awake/do some reading/watch television, whatever seems to work. The Gen Z person is also not the only one to feel tired limited by such habits. Old people feel equally as tired I can assure you. The point being I have no doubt that a young person has better sleep habits. It is just that older people often have limited choices because they just sleep a lot worse – age seems to just do that. It was for this reason that the Procrastination Pen blog started looking into restful videos in the first place.

That, of course, brings us to where we are now.

At this stage I always review a professional ASMR artist and so today we have:

ASMR Soft Spoken Medical Exam

This is twenty-two and three-quarter minutes and so a little shorter than we have watched of late. Comments are permitted and are filled with the normal weirdness we have associated with YouTube, interposed with the normal comments we are used to for professional ASMR artists which are always positive, as far as I have found thus far.

There are notes, of course. These ones are a little different to the type of thing we are used to from professional ASMR artists:

“571,112 views 28 Aug 2025

♡ A SPECIAL thank you to my channel members who help make these videos possible ↓

THANK YOU!! :DD

I hope y’all enjoyed this one!! I’ve been listening to a lot of Avril Lavigne lately 😛 specifically the albums: under my skin, let go, the best damn thing, & goodbye lullaby

FAQs:

What is ASMR? 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.

Why soft spoken? I loveee this type of ASMR and many others do too!!

Where are you located? East Coast of the USA!

Instagram: caitASMR

TikTok: caitASMRofficial

All of my links: https://linktr.ee/caitasmr?utm_source…

Transcript

Follow along using the transcript.

cait ASMR

401K subscribers”

However, you will notice no less lengthy for that. (I’ve heavily edited them or they would be pretty huge). It is from the channel cait ASMR. This has 401K subscribers, two hundred and sixteen videos, five playlists. None of the playlists are on a medical subject and so they are not in keeping with the theme we have been following for a while now.

As we would expect the voice is excellent, with a tendency towards the whispery. We have heard that this is a tendency that a number of professional ASMR artists make use of. I can only assume it is exactly the voice level that the majority of ASMR fans are demanding at the moment.

(Perhaps they always have).

There are, as we have heard before, a number of non-voice related noises, clicking noises, liquid noises, tapping noises, container unscrewing noises, tape measure noises, glove -related noises. I have, to date, assumed that these are exactly the noises that some ASMR fans are demanding.

I am only really interested in the voice. The voice here is very good and I may well come back to cait ASMR in the future. Why not review it for yourself.

I noticed this week that WordPress has a little AI button that is there to tell me all the things I did wrong when publishing a new blog article. It would seem that a great deal more work is needed in introducing, summarising, and concluding.

I sometimes wonder if I start to obey other people’s (or in this case a machine’s) recommendations, is the blog still mine? Does it then become a product of the AI which in fact I have simply fluffed a bit to give it a Procrastination Pen piquancy?

There are probably a great many people who do not bother to ask such questions. To guard against the circumstance in which the machine is correct and I am not a little more in the way of introduction. Just in case you have just landed from Oumuamua and wonder what the heck is going on, a few words on the blog.

Way back in the dim and distant it seemed to me I’d rather like to write something and, if I was going to write something, wouldn’t it be marvellous if some people would read it and better still, provide feedback.

It seemed obvious that the way to go was to put it on the Internet because wasn’t everybody doing that? Reviews seemed to suggest WordPress was a great platform for that – because wasn’t everybody using it? A life of posting articles and getting feedback glistened.

If anybody else has tried this, the next stages are probably familiar. Firstly, it is quite difficult to know what you want to call your blog. Secondly how do you go about getting a logo, what should you write about yourself and more to the point, what should you write about in terms of the blog?

Life goes on, pages turn, and people didn’t descend in their millions to praise and criticise and the purpose for the blog was lost. Anyone viewing the archive will probably notice that I quit blogging in 2018.

Then I realised that if the only reason to write was to get something back from other people, then there probably wasn’t any point in writing at all. One of the sagest pieces of advice I ever read is that people just don’t care about you. People care about themselves. For that same reason I wasn’t about to try to determine what people wanted me to write about. Because even if I found out, I wouldn’t be interested, unless (and this is probably quite unlikely) it also spoke to me.

That was 2022, and since then I publish a blog post at pseudo-regular intervals and sometimes people read it.

There was at the time, a huge number of ASMR videos on YouTube (and if anything the number has subsequently grown). I found some of them effective, a great many off-putting and I didn’t have the time to spend my days listening to them. It became obvious I was only ever going to be able to use them to get off to sleep at night.

It seemed to me that I am probably not alone in being bemused in navigating the YouTube wilderness of video recommendations. There might be, say, one other person out there with a similar taste in videos who also needs some material to use in getting to sleep.

I was going to need to navigate the YouTube video recommendations. To store the videos I found, I was going to need a playlist. If I made that playlist public, other people could also use it.

I was going to have to listen to each video to work out if it was worthwhile. Were there jarring noises, was the background drone too oppressive, had someone dropped the lapel mic into their pocket so it sounded like it was recorded through a filter? It might be useful to document the process; some people might agree; some people might vehemently disagree; most people would ignore it altogether.

As I have gone along, the playlist continues to grow. I keep listening to it at night. Occasionally one of the videos wakes me up or grates so much I find it hard to get to sleep in the first place. Such videos are ejected from the playlist and put into an archive list, in case someone, somewhere was listening and finds their favourite video gone. It also acts as a trail of the process; at least those videos made it through the initial critique (many more do not do so).

And so today, another video and another review.

People who have been reading the blog will possibly remember a blog item on Ayesha Mattu in which I was quite glowing about the quality of her voice.

Following that blog item, I have been meaning to make time to go back and seek out any videos featuring Ayesha to determine if there is any content which has an equally relaxing feel to it.

Women of Spirit and Faith: Ayesha Mattu

Just less than six and a half minutes it has a very relaxing tone to it. However, it incorporates an ongoing background music track – which is quite jarring. I’d prefer we just had Ayesha’s voice. The voice is really one of the better ones I have heard so it does not need adulterating with additional music.

It has notes “4,631 views 23 Oct 2013

Ayesha Mattu, writer and co-editor of “Love, InshAllah: The Secret Love Lives of American Muslim Women, explores universal questions of love, intimacy and spiritual co-leadership with her husband, Randy, leading up to the release of the companion anthology, “Salaam, Love: American Muslim Men on Love, Sex & Intimacy” (available Valentine’s Day 2014 from Beacon Press!). In sharing her own story, she hopes to spark interfaith dialogue and confront leading myths about Muslim-American men and women, and their search for Love.

Visit her blog at: http://loveinshallah.com

To hear more voices from Women of Spirit and Faith visit our web site: http://womenofspiritandfaith.org

and

The Divine Feminine Blog at www.patheos.com”

Despite the music, I think I’ll tolerate this and put it into the playlist, Her voice is really that good. (It might get weeded in future, however).

Ayesha Mattu & Nura Maznavi: Salaam, Love: American Muslim Men on Love, Sex, and Intimacy

At over an hour, this is a bit longer than the types of video I usually review. It is also a professional video and as such it has associated notes:

“8,744 views  12 Feb 2014

Harvard Book Store is pleased to welcome Ayesha Mattu and Nura Maznavi, editors of Love, InshAllah: The Secret Love Lives of American Muslim Women, along with four of their contributors: Ahmed Akbar, Dan I. Oversaw, Mohammed Samir Shamma, and Sam Pierstorff for a discussion of Mattu’s and Maznavi’s latest work, Salaam, Love: American Muslim Men on Love, Sex, and Intimacy.

From the editors of the groundbreaking anthology Love, InshAllah comes a provocative new exploration of the most intimate parts of Muslim men’s lives.

By raising their voices to share stories of love and heartbreak, loyalty and betrayal, intimacy and insecurity, these Muslim men are leading the way for all men to recognize that being open and honest about their feelings is not only okay—it’s intimately connected to their lives and critical to their happiness and well-being.”

This is a presentation and as such could not be said to be muted. Ayesha actually does not get a massive amount of air time. This is a shame as when she does contribute, her voice remains really calm, quiet and measured.

This one doesn’t belong in The Procrastination Pen playlist.

Ayesha Mattu and Ali Eteraz on Diffused Congruence Podcast: The American Muslim Experience

This also has notes “

49 views 2 Jul 2019

Ayesha Mattu, Co-editor of “Love, Inshallah” and its new sequel “Salaam, Love” talks about reactions to the books and what she’s learned from her audience. Also, Ali Eteraz, author of “Children of Dust” and the upcoming “Falsipedies and Fibsiennes” talks. about his book. 

This is an unofficial channel created by a fan to create more awareness about the excellent “Diffused Congruence Podcast: The American Muslim Experience.” I do not own the audio interview or images.

The podcast explores and celebrates the many facets of the American Muslim experience with scholars, activists, and thought leaders. It has been hosted by Parvez Ahmed and Zaki Hasan since October 2013. This is episode 11 that was released on September 23, 2014.

You can stream or download other podcast episodes at: https://diffusedcongruence.podbean.com

Please donate to keep this great podcast going at:  https://www.patreon.com/diffusedcongr…

Learn more about this podcast at http://www.facebook.com/diffusedcongruence or http://www.diffusedcongruence.podbean.com”

This has probably the most energetic startup music I have had the chance to review. Straight away I knew it was not going to be suitable for our purposes and at over one and a quarter hours I think I’d have to be really content with it to feature it more fully on the blog.

(Shame I couldn’t set the start and end time of the video, as I could have wiped some of that content out).

American Muslim Women Tell All About Love and Sex

which also has notes “39,694 views 1 Mar 2012

Twenty-four American Muslim Women, in a collection of published essays, open up on the issues of love, sex, religion, cultural norms and family expectations. Frances Alonzo of VOA Middle East Voices speaks to the co-editors of “Love InshAllah: The Secret Love Lives of American Muslim Women,” Ayesha Mattu and Nura Maznavi.”

At less than five and a half minutes it isn’t going to take long. Again, it has startup music, which is thankfully brief. There is a fairly strong set of background noise on it. I’m unclear why, as it seems to have been professionally recorded.

Thankfully Ayesha gets a reasonable amount of air time and that voice is worth tolerating challenges like background noise. The video might, however, get jettisoned after a protracted review.

Salaam, Love: American Muslim Men on Love, Sex, and Intimacy

Notes again “4,263 views 30 Apr 2014

Ayesha Mattu and Nura Maznavi discuss the process of compiling and editing Salaam, Love – a collection of essays written by Muslim men about love, sex and intimacy.”

A bit less than three minutes, so blink and you’ll miss it. Again, with the startup music and this time it is quite loud, but fortunately brief. There is a reasonable amount of air time for Ayesha so it is worth a spin in the Procrastination Pen Playlist.

That seems to be the best of the material available. It also marks an end to any series I might do on Ayesha. It’s a shame for our purposes that she does not have a channel (that I can find), as it would be one worthy of following.

Onwards till next week.

That’s it on this occasion, more next time.

The Ayesha Mattu playlist on the Procrastination Pen is here:

The overall playlist of videos covered so far on the Procrastination Pen is here:

The videos weeded out because over time they are just not as good as the others is in this archive list:

I keep this in case subscribers to the Procrastination Pen have personal favourites that they want to hear.

The playlist of videos requiring age verification is here:

I can’t be bothered to stop my listening to log on, this interrupts the experience. You may not mind this in which case this list is for you.

I hope that you find the playlists restful and I hope you get plenty of sleep.

If you liked this blog article, why not follow this blog.

Until next time.

Photo by DeepAI

Sleeping With ASMR

This week nothing whatsoever is working. As such I have time to stop and have sympathy for people who struggle for sleep. I notice that the links between sleeplessness and dementia are being used as a fuel to stoke our fears.

I’m not sure that a terror about losing your mind is exactly the mindset you need for a long, restful snooze. Just in case you would prefer a restful track designed to be quiet and to distract those kind of thoughts, the Procrastination Pen exists as a site that reviews video tracks in the hope of finding the odd one that may do that. If it turns out that you get ASMR affects from the video, so much the better but you do not need to regard it as a pre-requisite for enjoying the videos.

There is a playlist of tracks that have been reviewed so far and it always occurs at the close of these articles. So if you want to give it a review, scroll right to the end and try it for yourself.

For a while now, I have been swaggering on about having a Calm subscription and how much quieter I am finding it all than the advert-infested YouTube experience. It is true that if you have a subscription to Calm, you probably already make more use of it than you do of YouTube for night-time relaxation. Not because YouTube videos are not restful. Many of the ones already covered by this blog are quite adequate in this respect (some of them are even great).

However, the insistence of ramming loud and distracting adverts into every interval does make the experience in the round a little more testing.

I am on the search for some other free resource with restful tracks of some kind that does not require commitment to receiving a ton of adverts. When I locate such a thing, I will flag it here.

Today’s Calm track is this one:

https://www.calm.com/app/player/XYoEpl-gZW

It’s Like This

NARRATOR

Tamara Levitt

AUTHOR

Tamara Levitt

I like Tamara’s voice. Sometimes I think it might be my favourite voice on Calm, sometimes not. I enjoy the content that she delivers but I often listen to Jay Shetty or Jeff Warren, dependent on what the track seems to have in it.

Mel Mah is much more about activity and I have to say I have not yet bought into the activity aspect. It is probably one of those New Year’s resolution things. To Do but not yet To Done.

The track is a little over ten minutes so it probably will not quite be enough to doze off to unless you are properly tired already. (Perhaps if you’re more bought into activity than I am and, hence, have come in from a long run or similar).

This track is about acceptance which I suppose is not a bad skill to have if your life is heading towards Alzheimer’s.

Recently I have been considering a professional ASMR artist at this stage. So why buck the trend if it seems to have worked for us so far.

This week the video is this one:

【ASMR】Eye Exam for Bloodshot Eyes and Vision Loss🏥 | Ophthalmology Roleplay【Eyelid Injection💉】

It is from the channel Runa ASMR【るな氏】, this channel has 236K subscribers three hundred and nine videos eleven playlists. The longest playlist has nearly one hundred videos in it. This seems to be an ASMR artist that is doing something right.

There are notes of course “299,990 views Sep 10, 2025 #ロールプレイ #mouthsounds #asmr

#roleplayasmr #asmr

#お耳 #talkingasmr #asmrvideo  #makeyousleep     #mouthsounds 

#originalstory #ロールプレイ  #ロールプレイ #医療ASMR #doctor #clinic

💭視力良くなりたいヨォ、コンタクト毎日変えるの大変だヨオ

🎮セカンドチャンネル

   / @るなちの遊び場 

🌙メンバーシップの参加はこちらから

   / @runaasmr575 “

However, I cannot read them.

Google translate at least reassures me that there’s nothing untoward here: “299,990 views Sep 10, 2025 #roleplay #mouthsounds #asmr

#roleplayasmr #asmr

#ears #talkingasmr #asmrvideo #makeyousleep #mouthsounds

#originalstory #roleplay #medicalASMR #doctor #clinic

💭I want to improve my eyesight, but changing my contacts every day is such a pain.

🎮Second Channel

/ @Runa’s Playground

🌙Join Membership Here

/ @runaasmr575″

Comments are permitted but the feedback is predominantly using a character set I do not understand, so they could be instructions for building a space shuttle. More likely they are commenting about how marvellous the video is because that level of adulation commonly accompanies professional ASMR artists.

The video is a little under thirty-nine minutes and so is a little longer than anything we have listened to recently. It has no startup music for which I am very grateful. The voice, as you would expect, is excellent.

Fortunately, when playing, the subtitles were in English so I’m at least clear it didn’t consist of swearing. Sadly, the keyboard features rather loudly, at least initially. But given how good the voice is, I think it is worth persisting with.

At intervals it does not appear to be about the voice. There are tapping noises, liquid sloshing noises, container unscrewing noises, pouring noises, clicking noises, gloves-related noises, equipment noises, liquid noises, plastic crinkling noises, sounds of a pestle and mortar being used to grind stuff.

All of these are a waste of time for me, I’m only here to listen to the voice. But I am betting each one is a trigger for someone. It does mean that we get a lot less of the voice than we would do otherwise, which is a shame.

I still think the voice makes it worthy of a review, why not listen for yourself.

I also think I will be revisiting this channel in the future.

I’ve been spending a lengthy amount of time of late evaluating the sleep offerings through Calm and falling asleep to them. Some excellent voices involved but given Calm is not free it would not be of much service if I start evaluating the content of Calm.

As a result, I have not written much in a while regarding YouTube content and I have been bolstered by the fact that I had written a great deal of content in the past and it was simply a case of editing it sufficiently to bring it up to date before pushing the correct button to put it out there. Calm is certainly interesting and some of the content is worth listening to but whether it is worth the money I can only leave it up to you to decide.

For me it is good to have something else available after YouTube decided to take my channel down one time, and with it all the playlists I had spent time curating. Where anybody has the power to do that to you it is well worthwhile having some other strategy available.

This is probably the message of everything available via the Internet. It is at best transient and so it is not too sensible to base anything permanent around it.

Today’s video draws from previous work indeed it is from an old favourite channel Moran Core from the Moran Eye Center. (UK readers note that is apparently the correct spelling of centre).

The video is this one:

Learning the Ophthalmoscope

It is just five- and three-quarter minutes so don’t sneeze or you’ll miss it. It’s another professional video and as we have established by now, these videos tend to come with notes (not uncommonly because they also serve to promote a service of some kind).

This video has the following notes:

“194,819 views 11 Aug 2018

Title: How to Use the Direct Ophthalmoscope

Author:  Tania Padilla Conde, 4th Year Medical Student, University of South Dakota Sanford School of Medicine; Christopher Bair, MD and Michele Burrow, MD

Date: 08/10/2018”

Tania seems to have a good voice for us, although the volume for me was a little loud, sufficient to sound echoey in the space where it was recorded. The video starts without extraneous startup music which is so rare that sacrifices need to be offered up to the video-recording-god in supplication for the beneficence shown.

If you are listening to this one as part of the larger Procrastination Pen playlist, you might be rolling over to the tablet and giving the volume down button a couple of disgruntled presses. Tis a shame that I do not have control of the videos in the playlist or I would normalise the volume of them a bit. I too am sometimes awakened when the playlist changes from a quiet video to a louder one.

In this case the video is interrupted by a comment by Tania which is even louder. It is all a shame because otherwise she does have a good voice.

Tania does not appear on another video on the Moran Core website so if we are going to stick with her, then a search of YouTube is in order.

Tania Conde returns quite a number of channels and a brief perusal reveals that the majority are just not going to be helpful to us.

Using “Tania Padilla Conde” instead reveals a lot of content in Spanish.

This one:

Nancy Reynoza Entrevista a la doctora Tania Padilla Conde

Which is at the pace of Speedy Gonzalez and so not at all restful.

And a couple of playlists

The first one is:

COVID-19

Consisting of twelve videos. Ranging in length from two and a half minutes to in excess of twenty minutes. Not one of them seems to be a medical examination as such.

I am also hampered in that I have zero comprehension of Spanish, so I am trusting that nothing untoward is being relayed as part of the video.

The first video of the playlist is:

Cómo usar máscara correctamente

This video starts way-way too loud and it continues at a fast pace, this is really not a suitable video for us.

Como tratar los sintomas de COVID-19 en casa.

Double the length of the previous one it starts just as loud with fast paced music. This is just not conducive to sleep.

¿Qué es la hidroxicloroquina? Ensayo clínico aprobado por Kristi Noem en South Dakota.

Continues as for the previous two videos and as such I am convinced there is no purpose in reviewing the rest of this playlist. There is nothing here that we can make use of ASMR-wise.

The second playlist is this one:

Health/Salud

Somewhat more hopeful (given the title) that there might be restful content. It contains fifteen videos ranging between two and three quarter minutes and in excess of twenty minutes.

The first video is this:

Como tratar los sintomas de COVID-19 en casa.

And oh no just as before loud start up music. It strikes me that this is eerily similar to those that we’ve just looked at. So, unfortunately, I think that this playlist isn’t going to offer anything useful either.

On that basis just one, short, video on this visit.

Onwards till next week.

That’s it on this occasion, more next time.

The Moran Core playlist on the Procrastination Pen is here:

The overall playlist of videos covered so far on the Procrastination Pen is here:

The videos weeded out because over time they are just not as good as the others is in this archive list:

I keep this in case subscribers to the Procrastination Pen have personal favourites that they want to hear.

The playlist of videos requiring age verification is here:

I can’t be bothered to stop my listening to log on, this interrupts the experience. You may not mind this in which case this list is for you.

I hope that you find the playlists restful and I hope you get plenty of sleep.

If you liked this blog article, why not follow this blog.

Until next time.

Photo by DeepAI

Sleeping With ASMR

I’ve been struggling a little with time of late, and so my attention to reviewing has not been what it was. However, this week I have come across a reasonable Calm track. Although I have to caution people that it contains music, and as you know I do not find music as actually being that effective in pushing me off to sleep.

The track is this:

https://www.calm.com/app/player/7JQNaQVDM

Afternoon Nap

Refresh your mind & recharge your body with a special nap story. After a brief intro and soothing music, you’ll wake up to gentle birdsong.

NARRATOR

Erik Braa

AUTHOR

Calm

As I say, it is not for me. However, given it is dedicated to sleep I thought I should at least give you the chance to try it. However, be aware that most advice is that when you are sleep deprived, try to stick to your normal sleep routine rather than topping up with additional naps as this track would seem to suggest.

Personally, if I get an opportunity for sleep (and I can make use of it) I fill my boots. Who knows when the next such opportunity will present itself.

This week I came across a post which shows that I am certainly not alone in having problems getting off to sleep. I certainly hope that some of the people who are responding to the person posting got the opportunity to read the Procrastination Pen.

This week the professional ASMR artist is PollyTingle ASMR the channel has sixty two videos, seven playlists, 86.2K subscribers so not quite as popular as some we’ve heard of late. The video is this one:

ASMR Cranial Nerve Examination by a Neurologist 🌙 Quiet Voice / ASMR Cranial Nerve Examination

It is a little over twenty-four and a half minutes in length. Of course, it has notes (I’ve truncated them a bit) “1,773,407 views 7 Feb 2022 #asmr #asmrneurologist

This video features pleasant, relaxing music, a quiet voice, and a variety of neurological manipulations.

Unfortunately, I was ill while filming this video, so my voice is a bit sore and I have a slight fever (because of this, I cut out almost half the video 😰). But everything is fine now, and I plan to gradually return to the channel. The next video will be a continuation of the Hobbit book reading, and then I’d like to film some light but interesting trigger video (if you have any ideas, please write in the comments, I’d be very happy!)

Have a good rest, see you soon ❤”

The video is in Russian, and you need to turn off the English US option or you will have a lot of very loud interjections (presumably made by some automated process). The first “so” on the track made me jump off my chair, for example. These will really mess up any restful feelings that you might otherwise have had. Once I discovered that, I realised that the voice is actually very good.

I am not sure why the voice on the English US option is so loud but it really ruins the video in terms of ASMR. I notice that (rather uniquely for a professional ASMR artist), the comments are turned off. It is potentially possible there were any number of negative comments from English-speaking listeners that encountered this problem.

With the Russian speaking version, I have zero idea what is being said (I speak no Russian). However, it sounds very restful. There are, as expected, other noises; paper turning, brushing noises, clicking noises, rustling noises, liquid noises, writing noises. There is also a quiet musical back track (if this was an inadvertent ASMR video this would discount it from the Procrastination Pen playlist).

As you know I would prefer it was just the voice, which, assuming you only listen to the Russian version, is calming without straying into whispery. Quite a feat, given that most professional ASMR videos seem to very much focus on the whispery end of the spectrum.

The drive for the perfect playlist for ASMR sensations (or alternatively just to cause you to drift off to sleep) means that I am concerned that sometimes I have not been sufficiently critical of videos and that some “dead wood” still hangs around in the Procrastination Pen playlist.

I think that as the list continues to grow in size some of the older videos might get a severe pruning. I am thinking particularly of those with perky music at some point during the video, those with air conditioning noises or those which incorporate the odd clang or thud from the movement of medical equipment. Regular readers might be a bit surprised at the videos that get removed in this purge.

If you are not a regular reader, well hey, welcome. This is the Procrastination Pen which for over a year now has been reviewing medical videos (and occasionally videos on other subjects too) with a view to finding any that might produce ASMR effects. Sometimes we have a great day and sometimes it is more “challenging”.

Today I have a URL, and on that URL a whole gamut of videos on medical subjects. It’s odd for me to stray far from YouTube but given someone else has gone to all the effort of collating these videos into one place let’s give it a try at least.

The URL is this one:

Medical Training Videos

It has thirty-two videos (discounting the introductory one) so this might be a very long day in review terms. I suspect if the history of reviewing videos is accurate, we will be fortunate to find one in all of those thirty-two that is of much value but I’m game if anyone else is.

The first video is this one:

Advanced Life Support / Code Blue – How to lead a cardiac arrest (ALS/ACLS simulation)

On the face of it, not the most inspiring ASMR title. Comments are permitted but there are not obviously any ASMR-related ones.

It is a professionally produced video and therefore as we have come to expect there are notes, which are these:

“368,741 views 3 Feb 2017 Most Popular

How to lead a cardiac arrest /code blue using the advanced cardiac life support (ALS/ACLS) algorithms. This 360-degree medical simulation video shows a well-led ALS scenario, unscripted and in real time.

Produced with Rewind VR studio and filmed in the Education Centre at University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.

For further information visit ww.oxfordmedicaleducation.com or comment below.”

The video is just shy of eight minutes and it begins in a bit of a hurry, and it is quite loud. Thankfully no startup music but sadly for us that is really all there is going for it ASMR-wise. It has shouting, loud equipment noises and the kind of frenetic activity almost designed to maximise sleeplessness.

Further videos are as follows:

Cardiac Arrest and ALS (Code Blue) Simulation – Training Video with Questions

It is slightly less than seven minutes the notes are:

“168,813 views 8 Mar 2017

This interactive 360-degree training video demonstrates a cardiac arrest (code blue) as if the doctor is leading an arrest for the first time. The doctor will ask questions in the arrest. PAUSE THE VIDEO WHEN YOU SEE THE INFORMATION BAR APPEARING and try to answer them – there are a number of options each time.

Produced with Rewind VR studio and filmed in the Education Centre at University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. 

For further information visit ww.oxfordmedicaleducation.com or comment below.”

It starts without startup music again, which is great for us. However, it is frenetic and loud (just like the last one). This is not going to be suitable for us.

Cardiac Arrest Experience – Patient point of view in advanced life support / code blue

The notes are:

“182,696 views 8 Mar 2017

This 360-degree video is filmed from a patient’s point of view and demonstrates what happens if you have a cardiac arrest in hospital. You (the patient) would be unconscious throughout.

If you have been a patient or relative involved in cardiac arrest please comment below – we’d love to hear from you.

This is a well-led cardiac arrest and results in a successful outcome (return of spontaneous circulation). In practice most arrests are unfortunately not successful.

Produced with Rewind VR studio and filmed in the Education Centre at University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. 

For further information visit ww.oxfordmedicaleducation.com or comment below.”

Just less than seven and a quarter minutes, no startup music, however it is far too loud for us.

Cardiac Arrest (Code Blue) Advanced Life Support – Mental Health Training

The notes are: “51,203 views 8 Mar 2017

This 360-degree training video demonstrates how to manage a cardiac arrest (code blue) using an automated defibrillator. It was filmed as part of a series to train mental health staff how to manage medical emergencies in mental health facilities.

Produced with Rewind VR studio and filmed in the Education Centre at University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. 

For further information visit ww.oxfordmedicaleducation.com or comment below.”

Just over seven and a quarter minutes, there is no startup music but as before it is loud and frenetic and so not much use to us either.

Cardiac Arrest and Advanced Life Support (ALS) in 360 Degrees – TRAILER

For which the notes are: “35,322 views 12 Dec 2016 Most Popular

Trailer for our Cardiac Arrest and Advanced Life Support (ALS)/ Code Blue simulation videos. These are clips of three 360-degree medical simulation videos we’re producing at Oxford Medical Education to train doctors in running cardiac arrest situations.

Produced with Rewind VR studio and filmed in the Education Centre at University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.

For further information visit ww.oxfordmedicaleducation.com or comment below.”

Only a little over one and a half minutes but it is excessively loud in any case.

Choking and Cardiac Arrest (Code Blue) Advanced Life Support

A little less than two- and three-quarter minutes the notes are: “38,966 views 12 Feb 2017

This 360-degree training video demonstrates how to manage a cardiac arrest (code blue) due to choking. It was filmed as part of a series to train mental health staff how to manage medical emergencies in mental health facilities.

Produced with Rewind VR studio and filmed in the Education Centre at University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. 

For further information visit ww.oxfordmedicaleducation.com or comment below.”

Again, it starts loud, it continues loud and so it is not useful for us.

Respiratory Examination – Clinical Skills

A little less than eleven minutes. The notes are: “376,646 views 27 Feb 2015 Clinical Examinations

This video – produced by students at Oxford University Medical School – demonstrates how to perform an examination of the respiratory system. It also indicates common pathologies encountered. It is part of a series of videos covering basic clinical examinations and is linked to Oxford Medical Education (www.oxfordmedicaleducation.com).”

The start is with an introduction, the person has a good voice for us and it is not excessively loud. The actual examination though is a little on the echoey side as if filmed in a large corridor. The examination is also dogged by background noise (likely air conditioning). However, the medical professional has a good voice for our purposes.

This is a good video for the procrastination pen playlist.

I think that I will conclude the blog post at this one and continue in a second post, failing that this blog post would become really large indeed. To the point of boredom, I imagine.

That’s it on this occasion, more next time.

The University College London Hospitals playlist on the Procrastination Pen is here:

The overall playlist of videos covered so far on the Procrastination Pen is here:

The videos weeded out because over time they are just not as good as the others is in this archive list:

I keep this in case subscribers to the Procrastination Pen have personal favourites that they want to hear.

The playlist of videos requiring age verification is here:

I can’t be bothered to stop my listening to log on, this interrupts the experience. You may not mind this in which case this list is for you.

I hope that you find the playlists restful and I hope you get plenty of sleep.

If you liked this blog article, why not follow this blog.

Until next time.

Photo by DeepAI

Sleeping With ASMR

I’m spending some time recently exploring psychology books and trying to work out if I am actually learning anything about myself, or if I have an ego sufficiently huge that nothing is ever going to penetrate it. I have found that no matter how many books I read, it does not seem to translate into more of a restful life. Which probably says a great deal about my inability to learn effectively.

So, given life is carrying on at the hubbub it had last year (or more likely an ever-increasing pace with each passing year), I have found it helpful to have something restful to listen to. It was for this reason that I started to explore ASMR. I’m not sure if I am a typical ASMR listener, (I have a sinking sensation that many such people are a great deal younger for instance).I did pretty swiftly find that the quality of “ASMR” was highly variable. I wondered how I would settle down with an ASMR track in the hope of getting to sleep, knowing that the ASMR video was actually going to be restful (and not crammed with all kinds of weird effects designed to hammer on every “trigger”, as if it needed a 4lb hammer).

After a while I realised that I couldn’t depend on the commentary associated with the videos. It ranges from sycophantic through aggressive, onto asinine. The review sites I found seemed to belong to people whose ears were obviously assembled in a different factory to mine. Therefore, I was going to have to review the material in advance before I wanted to use it and make use of some method of storing the ones that were worth listening to.

YouTube played material without paying up front. At the time, the adverts really did not seem too overpowering, but the clincher was that you could assemble the items that you liked into a playlist for subsequent playing. There was no need to own the videos to do so.

I also discovered that you could make the playlist public, so that other people could benefit from the work that you had done.

I reasoned that I would have to be pretty formal in my approach and hence, this process of reviewing videos started. I hope that you have ears not too dissimilar to mine and that therefore you will like the videos that I like.

If so, the Procrastination Pen playlist always appears at the end of every one of these articles and you can hop over to YouTube and see if you like what you hear.

A little while ago I started listening to Calm, mostly because it does not have the advertising load of a YouTube track. The downside is that you are going to need a subscription.

For many people this will be a show-stopper and if so, the YouTube reviews are coming very soon in this article (scroll down a bit). I used to be the same. I find too often now I’ve drifted off to a charming little ASMR video only to have some loud and distracting advert kick off and rouse me back to wakefulness again. In fact, of late this has become so frequent that I think it is by design. Advertising pays the bills, after all.

Today’s Calm track is taken from the Calm Dailies. I find these rather more approachable than Calm “sleep” tracks. The artists involved, frankly, have better voices. The Calm Dailies do not have music (I find music is just not as restful as people would have you believe). Some of the Calm “sleep” tracks involve an actual story and so rather than drifting off to la la land, you find yourself engaging with the story.

The Calm track this week is this one:

https://www.calm.com/app/player/kgezKhbBSs

Daily Calm

Thinking

NARRATOR

Tamara Levitt

AUTHOR

Tamara Levitt

Tamara has a great voice. She maybe my favourite but I rather like Jeff Warren, so I dither in the mornings when I am looking at the next track. That said, Jay Shetty has much of the more interesting material, especially if I need a mental kick up the backside – which is most of the time, frankly.

This is quite a long one for a Calm Daily, in that it is nigh on 11 minutes in length. It is about obsessive thinking. If you find yourself struggling with intrusive thoughts at bedtime, this may well be the track for you.

I’ve settled into a semi-rigid structure for several weeks now: Calm review, professional ASMR review, inadvertent ASMR review. The blog originally only considered inadvertent ASMR videos. It has evolved this way. So, in deference to custom, this is this week’s video from a professional ASMR artist:

ASMR – Extremely Satisfying Allergy Test!

It’s a professional ASMR video so of course it has notes and of course the notes are going to promote the ASMR artist: “410,294 views 24 Sept 2025

Hi guys, welcome back! In today’s video I’m doing your allergy test. Hope you enjoy!

My Spotify Nanou ASMR: https://open.spotify.com/artist/2trBl…

My TikTok ASMR: nanouasmrofficial

My Dutch vlog channel (with subtitles):    / @nanouphilipsvlogs  

My new English vlog channel:    / @nanouphilips  

🖥 My other channel:    / @nanouphilips 

🖥 My channel with shorts:    / @nanouasmrshorts 

📱My Instagram:   / nanouphilips 

🎥 Production: Arc Agency – contact: info@arcagency.be

TikTok: nanou.philips

TikTok ASMR: nanouasmrofficial

Twitch:   / nanouasmr  

🅿️Paypal: https://paypal.me/NanouASMR

📧 E-mail: nanou.asmr@outlook.be”

The notes were so extensive I’ve given you the edited highlights, which, to my mind, are still way too long.

There are comments, of course, and, of course, because it is a professional ASMR artist they vie towards the sycophantic side. So far, so usual.

The video comes from the channel Nanou ASMR, this has 1.75M subscribers, seven hundred and fifty-two videos nineteen playlists, more than one of those playlists has in excess of one hundred videos. So, a hard-working ASMR artist – full kudos given. I am a little concerned because the last video I listened to that had in excess of 1.5 million people raving about it, I really couldn’t get on with at all. Let’s see how this one fares.

It is surprising how often a video starts from a professional ASMR artist that raves about their latest sponsor and so it is a rare experience to be free of that. I disregard completely the many I find that do that. Making money is reasonable but I do find this disrupts the ASMR experience, whether you introduce sponsor du jour in a whispering voice or you do not.

In this case we are music free, sponsor free, and the video starts instead with what I assume to be recognised “trigger” sounds.

Clucking noises, keyboard noises, paper-related noises, donning-gloves noises, crinkling noises, tapping noises, liquid noises, a potpourri of sound, presumably designed as a catch-all of “triggers” for any attending ASMR devotee.

I am not really interested in that. I’m here for the voice and so how is it? The voice as you would expect, with such a popular artist, is excellent. Presentation is on the whispery side of whispery and so is about as believable as Boffo for Prime Minister, but this does not detract from its effectiveness as an ASMR voice or as the audio for a restful video. It does that job very well, in fact.

Sadly, the keyboard is selected for its ability to be heard which is sad, because I would prefer that it wasn’t heard at all. I think the keyboard is distracting and excessively loud. No doubt there are some ASMR fans who just love that kind of thing (I guess a number of subscribers to this YouTube channel, in fact).

There are quite a few rustling noises, gloves, clothing, the ASMR artist moving around. This is not obtrusive and so if it isn’t your thing either, it should not cause any concerns.

I’m not sure why ASMR artists do that clicking/clucking noise at intervals with their tongue, it seems out of place to me, but I just bet there is a die-hard devotee that turns up for new videos just to hear that sort of thing.

The plastic arm that intrudes into view and is then drawn on with a felt tipped pen is a tad on the surreal side, as if Metal Mickey had turned up for an examination. Given that you’ll be listening rather than watching, I’d say this should not have any impact. I’d say the video goes on about two to three minutes longer than I would have liked but a heck of a lot of subscribers disagree with me. On that basis you may want to give it a review.

The routine in these articles for the last few months has been that now I deal with the material on which I originally based the blog i.e. inadvertent ASMR videos. Of late, this has been videos on a medical theme, just because I have found a lot of success finding calm and restful videos where those videos were designed to illustrate some medical concept or other.

This week we are back to a channel that has featured multiple times on this blog here, here, here, here and also here.  It is Geeky Medics. The videos so far have featured Dr James Lower and Dr Andrew Pugh, and so in this week’s article.

The dedication to this channel has been because the videos here seem to be of a reasonably consistent quality (given that they are inadvertent ASMR videos in any case). They have a tendency to be quiet. There is though the regrettable tendency for the odd distracting noise to crop up in them.

Of course, some readers will not have read the previous articles, so I should mention that Dr Lewis Potter is the founder of Geeky Medics. The videos will all have notes that are similar (this has been established in those past blog articles). In order to cover the notes for new readers, I will give a precis version with the first video.

I think this will be the concluding such article, as I believe I have calculated that we have covered very nearly every video available. I make it that there are six left to cover and so we’ll mop those up in this article. I suspect we are getting a bit towards the tail-end in terms of quality as well but I live to be surprised.

Straight Leg Raise & Femoral Nerve Stretch Test – OSCE Guide | Clip

In case there are people who have not read any of those previous articles, I will include the notes associated with this video so you see how they work. The notes are lengthy and I’ll only include them once (or this will grow to become a very long article composed principally of notes).

The notes are: “48,856 views 14 Sept 2022  Musculoskeletal Examination OSCE Guides | CPSA | UKMLA | PLAB | MRCS

This video demonstrates how to perform a straight leg raise (a.k.a. sciatic stretch test) and a femoral nerve stretch test in an OSCE station.

You can read our step-by-step guide to the examination of the spine here: https://geekymedics.com/spine-examina…

Check out our other awesome clinical skills resources, including:

• 🔥 Geeky Medics Bundles (discounted products): https://app.geekymedics.com/purchase/…

• ✨ 1000+ OSCE Stations: https://app.geekymedics.com/purchase/…

• 🏥 Geeky Medics OSCE Revision Book: https://app.geekymedics.com/purchase/…

• 📝 150+ PDF OSCE Checklists: https://geekymedics.com/pdf-osce-chec…

• 🗂️ 3000+ OSCE Flashcards: https://app.geekymedics.com/purchase/…

• 📱 Geeky Medics OSCE App: https://geekymedics.com/geeky-medics-…

• 🩺 Medical Finals SBA Question Pack: https://app.geekymedics.com/purchase/…

• 💊 PSA Question Pack: https://app.geekymedics.com/purchase/…

Chapters:

00:00 Straight leg raise

00:36 Femoral nerve stretch test

Subscribe to our newsletter to be the first to know about our latest content: https://geekymedics.com/newsletter/ ✉️

Join the Geeky Medics community: 👩👩👧👧

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Always adhere to medical school/local hospital guidelines when performing examinations or clinical procedures. DO NOT perform any examination or procedure on patients based purely on the content of these videos. Geeky Medics accepts no liability for loss of any kind incurred as a result of reliance upon the information provided in this video.

Achieve success in your medical school OSCEs, UKMLA CPSA, and PLAB 2 exams with our free clinical skills videos. Subscribe to our channel to be informed of our latest releases. 🙂

CPSA OSCE Guides https://geekymedics.com/the-clinical-…

UKMLA AKT Notes https://geekymedics.com/ukmla/

PLAB 2 OSCE Stations https://geekymedics.com/plab-2-osce-s…

Revise for the Simulated Consultation Assessment (SCA) with our collection of high-quality SCA cases written by GPs and Training Program Directors. Check out our SCA revision cases and prepare for the MRCGP https://geekymedics.com/sca-cases-ban…”

As we have heard in the previous articles, these videos commence with an unwelcome piece of startup music. So far, I have found no mechanism for removing startup music on someone else’s video. If I had, you would see more of the videos that have been rejected on the road to getting the odd “acceptable” one out to you.

I have tolerated the startup music in previous Geeky Medics videos and I will do so this time. It does not preclude bumping them to the archive list at some point in the future.

This video is a little over one and a half minutes so it is rapidly over with. It is the voice here that is excellent. There is background noise but it is not excessive. There are periods of silence which might be distracting whilst listening. Personally, I found this quite restful.

There is tail end music which is even louder than the startup music and it would be great if it just wasn’t there at all. Of course, given the video is a short one, there is much more opportunity for distracting adverts which was certainly maximised at the time I was reviewing this one.

Lachman’s Test – OSCE Guide | Clip

One and a quarter minutes long and so none of the ones we’re looking at this week seem to be very long at all. It finds time for the distracting start up music though. It is nicely calm in the few moments it is actually playing. However, it also finds time for the even louder tail end music – I’d have to ask why this is necessary.

Anterior & Posterior Drawer Test & Collateral Ligaments Assessment – OSCE Guide | Clip

Just over one and a half minutes and now we’re in the swing of these, we know how it will go, distracting start up music, nice calm presentation, even worse tail end music, YouTube advert…

Patella Tap & Sweep Test – OSCE Guide | Clip

All of these seem of a similar length; this is the same length as the last one. The format is the same as the previous ones including unwelcome musical parts. This video seems to have been substantially slowed down and is mostly silent. This makes for very calming watching but does not contribute much when you’re listening and not watching.

Thomas Test – OSCE Guide | Clip

This one is shorter at just over one and a quarter minutes. Same format as the previous ones. In common with previous OSCE videos there are on screen medical notes for medical students. Of course, these are of no interest to us. The presentation is beautifully calming, but oh so brief and it’s back to funky music again.

Trendelenburg’s Test – OSCE Guide | Clip

The last ever such video and the last item in blog posts featuring Geeky Medics. It has been a while now. This is the shortest so far at only slightly over a minute. Same music top and tail. Same on-screen notes, useful to medical students but not to us. Same calming voice but this time we barely have time to hear it before it is back to the music again.

That’s it on this occasion, more next time.

The Geeky Medics playlist on the Procrastination Pen is here:

The overall playlist of videos covered so far on the Procrastination Pen is here:

The videos weeded out because over time they are just not as good as the others is in this archive list:

I keep this in case subscribers to the Procrastination Pen have personal favourites that they want to hear.

The playlist of videos requiring age verification is here:

I can’t be bothered to stop my listening to log on, this interrupts the experience. You may not mind this in which case this list is for you.

I hope that you find the playlists restful and I hope you get plenty of sleep.

If you liked this blog article, why not follow this blog.

Until next time.

Photo by DeepAI

Sleeping With ASMR

A narrowing amount of time to deal with blog posts as I am about to be out of the country for a while. I was reflecting this week on the stresses of being able to travel. All the documentation, insurance, tickets, booking forms and online details. Then there are the things to remember, the money, the property information, the boarding passes, the passports, the details of the rental car. There’s the need to be up-and-Adam at stupid-o-clock. A lengthy journey to an immense building designed to beat the resistance out of the most chipper individual. The interminable queues. The seating crammed with strangers’ backsides. The security akin to an abattoir holding pen.

After all that the wedging into a tiny space for hours entertained by a constant background droning, coughing, sneezing, snoring and children crying. Pitching out somewhere strange. The need to find the car rental, the place you are staying, the negotiations over check in. Then and only then the rest that this entire process was supposed to promote.

And I reflect that every one of these is a first-world problem that many in the world would fight to have the possibility of.

I begin to see that it is all kind of mad and perhaps we are all a little mad for continuing to indulge in it.

Perhaps when such events are normal it is unsurprising that life is not that beneficial for sleep and many of us have to adjust in any way we find feasible to get what shut-eye we can. If we just can’t get enough sleep to afterwards compensate with any legal chemical (such as caffeine) to keep going when getting enough sleep is looking unlikely.

In such circumstances if you have managed to find even a few minutes to look at the Procrastination Pen I reflect upon the miracle that must have relied upon. I welcome you, however briefly.

If you have not been here before, this little blog really tries to find anything that is restful. To review it for its restfulness and to present it as a possibility to listen to when your mind is racing and will not be assuaged by visions of jumping sheep.

As is usual this week I have a track from Calm. Calm is a paid-for service and I appreciate that you probably pay for way too much already. The advantage, for me, is that it does not have advertising. You will not be interrupted whilst you are trying to get some sleep. The disadvantage is that it does not provide a mechanism for assembling playlists that I have been able to ascertain (In the web-based version at any rate) and of course the need to pay before listening.

This week’s Calm track is this one:

https://www.calm.com/app/player/PTAKI4ZSz_

Daily Jay

Self-Stories

NARRATOR

Jay Shetty

It is about the stories that we tell ourselves. How these stories influence our self-image and self-worth. It isn’t obviously sleep material. To date though I have found the Calm dailies to be better in terms of restfulness than the Calm material that is supposed to be about sleep. Jay isn’t the most restful voice on Calm; I think that is Tamara Levitt. However, Jay does great inspirational material. I find myself listening to him more often than not.

Recently I have been reviewing YouTube videos for professional ASMR artists and being hyper critical. Often finding much to be critical about. As I review professional ASMR artists I find that the inadvertent ASMR videos, I have been looking at, have actually been maintaining a higher standard than I had previously given credence to. With this history in mind, I approach this week’s video. I had noticed that since I reviewed an ASMR video with a steampunk theme the purely medical nature of the YouTube videos that appear in my recommendations has filtered down somewhat. Perhaps the variety will appeal to my audience. Then again perhaps it will not. Feel free to let me know if you are not really appreciating the direction of travel.

This week’s is

[ASMR] Vintage Reverie | Traditional Scalp Healing Ritual

straight away I realise that the video is not going to be merely based upon speaking. There are occasional taps, hisses and noises of items being moved.

It is twenty two minutes long and so positively whistling past in comparison with some we’ve heard. There are notes and refreshingly these are kept very short: “21,293 views 10 Sept 2025

Back to 1920s again~

==============================

Hello Guys!!! I’m Miranda, if u like my videos, u could click “LIKE”. More videos of mine, “SUBSCRIBE” and watch more~!!! LOVING U~

我是MT，喜欢我的影片的话，希望大家按下【喜欢】，想收看更多我的影片请【订阅】哦~~感谢大家的支持~

微       博：MTkoala

bilibili：https://space.bilibili.com/6881318

网易云音乐：http://music.163.com/#/djradio?id=662…

荔枝fm：http://www.lizhi.fm/1256826/”

The clue is right there; the video is not in English. However, I do rather like the voice and, although the presenter could be swearing for all I know, I’ll blithely assume it is all relevant material. Just not in a language I can understand.

The site is Mandarin Whispers 官方频道 with 69.6K subscribers there are three hundred and forty eight videos and three playlists so this site also seems to be punching above its weight in terms of subscribers. There are comments but a number of these have responded in Chinese characters so I have no idea if they are positive. Given the halo around ASMR professionals I will make a guess that they are.

The voice tends towards the whispery but is a good voice nonetheless. There are ceramic noises, hair brushing noises and a noise of a stone being applied to skin. There are liquid noises and cloth rustling noises. These additional noises seem to me distracting. Others may find them the bread and butter of what they are looking for in an ASMR video. Personally, the video wasn’t the greatest. I would have preferred the same thing but just with the voice. At least some of the more irritating aspects of other videos are missing (such as startup music or air conditioning noises). It’s a bit of faint praise though I fear.

Based on that, let’s move onto the normal Procrastination Pen material, which is all about inadvertent ASMR videos. (Videos designed with a different purpose in mind but which nonetheless turn out to be restful). Habitually, I select these based upon the voice of the participant.

Another week, another video, another chance for rest and relaxation. Perhaps a good alternative to the Friday evening glass of wine for relaxation. Given the usual posting date more likely a Monday evening, but I’ll gloss over that; who knows when you might be reading this.

This time a video that comes from a technique to which I have not given much time on this blog (that might be about to change).

The Alexander Technique

This one is incredibly brief at slightly over three minutes. One would hope it does not have time to do anything too loud or off-putting. It is a professional video and hence it has notes: “54,429 views 30 May 2014

http://www.concordmedia.org.uk/produc…

A demonstration of the Alexander Technique.

A clear demonstration of the Alexander Technique. Dr Barlow uses a young woman previously unfamiliar with this therapy to show how posture has to be learned, and the great benefits it can bring.

Distributed by Concord Media

Website: http://concordmedia.org.uk

Twitter: http://twitter.com/ConcordMedia

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/ConcordMedia59”

The comments reveal that this is a snippet of a much longer video available for purchase from here http://www.concordmedia.org.uk/products/the-alexander-technique-by-dr-wilfred-barlow-210/

But I would not be able to share the purchased version with you, so for our purposes, there is not much point in going down that route.

It is (as commentators have noted) a shame that more is not available on YouTube as Dr Barlow has a great voice. It was apparently filmed in 1990 so it has been around for quite a while.

There are no extraneous noises – material like this is the reason that I keep looking each week on YouTube. Sadly, it is all over so quickly.

The channel is Concord Media. It has 1.4K videos and 13.8K subscribers – wow.

There are a number of playlists but none at all seem to be concerned with The Alexander Technique. Therefore, sadly this one is it. More next time.

The overall playlist of videos covered so far on the Procrastination Pen is here:

The videos weeded out because over time they are just not as good as the others is in this archive list:

I keep this in case subscribers to the Procrastination Pen have personal favourites that they want to hear.

The playlist of videos requiring age verification is here:

I can’t be bothered to stop my listening to log on, this interrupts the experience. You may not mind this in which case this list is for you.

I hope that you find the playlists restful and I hope you get plenty of sleep.

If you liked this blog article why not follow this blog.

Until next time.

Photo by DeepAI

Sleeping With ASMR

If you have had an interaction in which you do not feel you came off well, or even that you did not behave like an adult, it can be hard to let that go when it comes time for sleep. The pillow may feel like it has been welded together from jagged metal. The mattress, as if it has been ebonised. The temperature in the room will be just that level of uncomfortable that means tossing and turning seems a much better choice than real shut-eye.

In such circumstances it can be best to distract the mind from any self-perceived lack of emotional control and, instead, to listen to a soothing voice. Especially if it is there to convince you that nobody died and tomorrow you get a fresh start. Perfect doesn’t exist, after all.

It is for such restless night-times that this blog has recently (and for some time) been exploring resources that may help to settle the runaway wagon that can be the thought processes when the bedroom is not as welcoming as perhaps it could be.

A little while ago I started listening to Calm, mostly because it does not have the advertising load of a YouTube track. The downside is that you are going to need a subscription. I realise for some people that buying the groceries is something of a struggle, and so an extra few pounds on such a luxury item is just not realistic. If you are one of those people, scroll past the next section and onto the stuff that is supported by advertising and therefore “free” (for a given value of free).

Today’s Calm track is taken from the Calm dailies rather than from tracks dedicated to sleep. This is because I cannot currently get on with the tracks on Calm dedicated to sleep. I am not finding them restful enough to make a difference on the days when I have acquainted myself with every patch of the ceiling that I should have repainted years ago and, somehow, have never got around to doing so.

The other benefit is that the Calm dailies are brief, typically hovering around ten minutes. The advantage being if the one selected is not for you, well, it is a matter of very little time before you can move onto another one.

So far, I have not found the functionality to create a playlist of such tracks (it may well not exist). So, I’m afraid that is a limitation of the interface. (At least via the web in any case).

The Calm track this week is this one:

https://www.calm.com/app/player/PTAKI4ZSz_

Daily Jay

Self-Stories

NARRATOR

Jay Shetty

This is about the stories that you tell yourself and how to weed out the less helpful ones. (Say, that message you’ve been feeding yourself about how childish you have been recently).

It is less than eight minutes and I do think worthy of review, assuming that you have a Calm subscription anyway.

If you have been reading this blog at all in 2025 you now realise that after the Calm suggestion, I move on to examine a single video on YouTube from a professional ASMR artist.

I am not as kind to the professional ASMR artists as I am to those participants in an inadvertent ASMR video. The latter are probably unaware their video is going to be used for ASMR purposes. I can hardly be damning about the incidence of unwelcoming noises therefore (although I often use such noises to exclude them from consideration).

Professional ASMR artists, meantime, are creating the video specifically to appeal to those who enjoy a calming experience. I wouldn’t expect, therefore, for such videos to contain unwelcome noises. You can be certain if the video does contain unwelcome noises that I am going to raise the fact in a very pointed fashion.

Today’s video is this one:

ASMR｜Blending herbal medicines at an old pharmacy🫚Teaching true healing｜roleplay｜sleep｜relax｜Japan

This commences with a very brief tune. Although I dislike startup music in such videos, I think this is forgivable and it is hardly intrusive. The comments are largely in Japanese which is a new experience, in that I cannot tell you if the participants are really rating the video or giving it a right going over for being terrible.

There are notes, which are somewhat extensive, for which reason I have hacked them to pieces (if you would like to see the (much) longer version they are available on YouTube: “270,858 views  Premiered on 11 Aug 2025  #TwitterとInstagramのフォローもぜひよろしくお願いしますっ

This work was inspired by Uirō-uri, one of the “Kabuki Jūhachiban” (The Eighteen Great Kabuki Plays).＿🖋️

In the story, the protagonist Sukeroku disguises himself as a merchant selling a medicine called Uirō and comically delivers a rapid-fire speech about its effects.

…

ASMR is all about delicate sounds.

But since my ears haven’t been in great shape, I edited the video by watching the sound waves (dB meter) instead of relying only on listening—so the production was quite a struggle.

Also, maybe because of that, the pitch of my comfortable speaking voice keeps getting lower.

I never liked my voice to begin with, and now I like it even less, which makes me sad…

But I’d be happy if you keep watching as always!

(Even if my voice turns all raspy, you’ll still be here for me, right? 🙂←)”

The notes do not seem to bode well but we’ll bravely soldier on. The channel is dot okome._ch / maika ASMR which has 109K subscribers – wowee. This achieved with only ninety-three videos and eight playlists. My goodness, what kind of a wonder is this channel.

The video itself is somewhat more than forty-three minutes in length. Professional ASMR artists seemingly either go in for epic videos of the type requiring commitment to get all the way through, or ASMR “shorts” which whistle by and barely make an impression.

There are various additional noises, ceramic noises, items being moved around, rustling noises, crinkling noises, water pouring noises. None of these are particularly distracting.

I am here, of course, to review the voice, which, for me, is the main appeal. As expected, it is well-nigh perfect here.

The presentation (should you be watching rather than just listening) is rather beautiful. The interior and the objects within it obviously selected for their visual appeal.

The voice is quiet but rarely strays into true whispering.

Despite the concerns echoed in the notes I would say the tone of the voice is reasonably consistent (certainly to my elderly ears). Of course, the presentation is in Japanese which may put off some listeners. There is music at the tail end of the video but it is hardly alarming or nippy. I would say that this video is definitely worthy of a review.

Of course, a loud and obtrusive advert banged straight in afterwards and destroyed the atmosphere completely.

For the more usual material (for this blog), I have been looking at medical videos habitually. The aim is to find videos designed for medical tuition that are also relaxing.

This week we are back to a channel that has featured multiple times on this blog here, here, here, here and also here.  It is Geeky Medics. The videos so far have featured Dr James Lower and Dr Andrew Pugh, and so in this week’s article.

The dedication to this channel has been because the videos here seem to be of a reasonably consistent quality (given that they are inadvertent ASMR videos in any case). They have a tendency to be quiet. However, there is the regrettable tendency for the odd distracting noise to crop up in them.

Of course, some readers will not have read the previous articles so I should mention that Dr Lewis Potter is the founder of Geeky Medics. The videos will all have notes that are similar (this has been established in those past blog articles). However, in order to cover the notes for new readers, I will give a precis version with the first video.

As for previous incidences of blog article featuring this channel, I am only going to feature a subset of the videos on offer. There are just too many to make a blog article of anything like a readable length. Plus, the review will have a tendency to be repetitive, and hence dull, I would think.

Abdominal Palpation – OSCE Guide | Clip

The notes associated with this video are very long, the edited highlights are as follows:

“178,182 views 31 Aug 2022 Gastroenterology OSCE Guides | CPSA | UKMLA | PLAB | MRCS

This video demonstrates how to palpate the abdomen including assessing the bowel, liver, spleen, kidneys and aorta. Abdominal palpation is commonly performed as part of a full abdominal examination in an OSCE station.

You can read our guide to abdominal examination here: https://geekymedics.com/abdominal-exa…

…

Always adhere to medical school/local hospital guidelines when performing examinations or clinical procedures. DO NOT perform any examination or procedure on patients based purely on the content of these videos. Geeky Medics accepts no liability for loss of any kind incurred as a result of reliance upon the information provided in this video.

 Achieve success in your medical school OSCEs, UKMLA CPSA, and PLAB 2 exams with our free clinical skills videos. Subscribe to our channel to be informed of our latest releases. 🙂

….

CPSA OSCE Guides https://geekymedics.com/the-clinical-…

 UKMLA AKT Notes https://geekymedics.com/ukmla/

 PLAB 2 OSCE Stations https://geekymedics.com/plab-2-osce-s…

Revise for the Simulated Consultation Assessment (SCA) with our collection of high-quality SCA cases written by GPs and Training Program Directors. Check out our SCA revision cases and prepare for the MRCGP https://geekymedics.com/sca-cases-ban…”

All the notes associated with the videos are similar so I won’t repeat them for the other videos in this article. (Regular readers will be familiar with the style from previous blog articles about this channel).

This video is a little over three minutes long so barely enough to whet the appetite. It begins with startup music (which frankly it does not need). As usual, it is the voice here that is excellent. This one does feature equipment noises, but fortunately the background noise is muted to the extent that it is not noticeable.

In the examination phase there are, in fact, extended periods of silence which I actually found quite restful.

In common with previous OSCE videos there are on-screen medical notes for medical students. Of course, these are of no interest to us. There is funky tail end music which is loud, distracting, and unwelcome to ASMR listeners. Sadly, in my case, the end of the video heralded a loud pumping advert as well.

Axillary Lymph Node Palpation – OSCE Guide | Clip

This one is one- and three-quarter minutes so there isn’t going to be much time to note a great deal. I think in this case they have actually slowed the video right down. But they still found time for the startup music, sadly. This time there is excessive background hiss in the moments of interaction interspersed by absolute silence. Again, there are on screen medical notes, and, again, the tail-end music is unwelcome and loud.

Head & Neck Lymph Node Palpation – OSCE Guide | Clip

This one is less than one and a half minutes. It has startup music, limited interaction, during which time there is an extensive background hiss that sounds like something from a 1980s cassette recorder.

The music remains at each end and, of course, the shorter the video, the more of the time given to that video is proportionately taken up with that music.

Monofilament Assessment of the Foot – OSCE Guide | Clip

This is a little over one minute and twenty seconds. Music as before, background noise seems a little more muted but is most definitely there. I would say that these shorter videos are extracted from much longer videos that I have reviewed before. I suspect that you get more ASMR bang for your listening buck by sticking with the much longer ones. (It would not be such a problem if the top and tail music interludes did not exist.)

Schober’s Test – OSCE Guide | Clip

This is the same length as the previous one. The participants are the same, the music is the same. The background noise is the same. Again, there is silence between the periods of verbal interaction but I found these moments to be quite welcome. It’s a shame that the videos this week have been so short. I think it is a sign that we are running out of new Geeky Medics videos and very soon we will not be returning to this channel any longer.

That’s it on this occasion, more next time.

The Geeky Medics playlist on the Procrastination Pen is here:

The overall playlist of videos covered so far on the Procrastination Pen is here:

The videos weeded out because over time they are just not as good as the others is in this archive list:

I keep this in case subscribers to the Procrastination Pen have personal favourites that they want to hear.

The playlist of videos requiring age verification is here:

I can’t be bothered to stop my listening to log on, this interrupts the experience. You may not mind this in which case this list is for you.

I hope that you find the playlists restful and I hope you get plenty of sleep.

If you liked this blog article, why not follow this blog.

Until next time.

Photo by DeepAI

Sleeping With ASMR

Someone recently bemoaned the decline in evening classes. That back in the 1970s, people would come home from work, head off to a local college and learn to throw pots or paint by watercolours and this now seemed to be a declining art. I am not certain about the statistics, but the account at least seems believable.

There now seems to be this perception that any personal time needs to be snatched from sleep, from lunchtime, or from that ever so useful time originally given over to thinking.

Perhaps, when the engine is running at 6000 revs, then it is hard to let it slow down again to idle, and maybe there we find the current fascination for sleep.

In any case, the Procrastination Pen exists to try to look at sleep. Mainly from the approach that you distract that busy mind through restful background noise.

For a while now, I have been giving the odd recommendation from Calm. I’m not paid by them and I realise that you have to pay a subscription in order to listen. The advantage for me is that you then do not have to put up with the loud and obtrusive advertising that populates the intervals between YouTube videos.

I have seen that it is now possible to pay for an advertising-free experience on YouTube and I have been considering it. However, this would mean that my recommendations would be in ignorance of the reality for most, which is that just after a nice peaceful video something loud and distracting will kick in. There seems to be no allowance for the fact that it is 3am and no consideration that if the video you just listened to is peaceful, why would you want an advert based upon Monsters of Rock circa 1985 to follow it.

Anyway, here is today’s Calm recommendation:

Daily Calm

Interruptions

NARRATOR

Tamara Levitt

AUTHOR

Tamara Levitt

https://www.calm.com/app/player/8szz-qSorG

I like Tamara’s voice and this one is about interruptions and how to deal with them, which I think is likely to be relevant for everyone. If you have access to a Calm subscription why not take a listen. It is a little over ten minutes in length.

I was listening to a video this week as part of the stuff I have to keep up with. It is not medical and so I won’t be listing it in any playlist, but I contend that the voice is just excellent.

Three Decades in Kernelland – Jonathan Corbet, LWN.net

If this is of any interest you might want to give it a review. It is also squarely an “inadvertent” video as it is plainly not designed to be relaxing…

I have been, recently, evaluating a professional ASMR artist in these articles, rather as a counterfoil to the inadvertent ASMR material that I prefer.

YouTube have now decided that as I took a moment to review a steampunk-related ASMR video, now I am the world’s greatest steampunk fan and my usual set of suggestions based upon medical themes have now all got a definite sci-fi tinge to them.

Hey I can live with that. Hence although this week’s professional ASMR review is definitely medical, it is “not as we know it – captain”.

It comes to us from Dreamscape ASMR who most definitely does not need any promotion. The channel has 406K subscribers with one hundred videos and five playlists. This number of subscribers for that output shows a surprising level of efficiency. I am guessing something must be going very right.

The video is this one:

Taking Care of You When You’re Sick 🤒 SCI-FI SOLARPUNK ASMR ☀️ [Unusual Remedies, Deep Resonance]

It is a shorter than I have reviewed of late given that it is a little over twenty-six and a quarter minutes. There are a mountain of comments in the usual ASMR professional adulation mode. I wish I had whatever ASMR artists have…

the notes have the habitual level of self-promotion, so I’ve chopped them a little, the edited highlights are:

“1,286,378 views 4 May 2024 #cinematicasmr #ASMR #asmrroleplay

NO MUSIC VERSION:    • Taking Care of You When You’re Sick 🤒 SCI-… 

You find yourself battling a mysterious illness, one that manifests in an array of strange symptoms—like chromatic sweats, haptic hallucinations, and polarized vision. The city hospital dismissed your case as spring allergies…But I know it’s something more serious than that. After exhaustive research and numerous tests, I’ve begun to suspect that your condition might be a rare sensitivity to the recent solar flares. Here, in the quietness of my eco-friendly sanctuary, I will care for you. Using my scientific expertise, I am committed to unravelling the mystery of your illness and developing effective remedies. You are the most important person in my life, and I will keep you close—watching over you with unwavering vigilance—until we uncover the truth behind these unusual symptoms.

…

I hope you enjoy the ambience section at the end! I love when there’s at least 10 minutes of nothing important happening in ASMR videos so I can actually fall asleep. Scratchy pencil sounds are one of my favourites 🙂

–DREAM”

Even edited that is a healthy set of notes I’m sure you agree.

It starts with music – which is not great – and the music continues during the speech – even less great. I wasn’t taken by the voice to start with (obviously the only person, given the in excess of one million views). I did like the setting but I was less keen on some of the attendant noises, beeps, strange sci-fi related echoes. I did like the running water noises but, for me, it is always about the voice and I wasn’t as enthralled as all of those one million listeners.

I am not as bothered by paper-folding noises, and definitely not keen on the buzzes and hums that were designed to make the sci-fi atmosphere authentic. Of course there are the noises from objects being moved, objects being opened and closed, but there were also artificial voice sounds (which I wasn’t keen on).

I got the feeling that this was a more visual-orientated experience than the title would indicate. For me ASMR is about the sound. By about half way I was looking to do something else which is not a great sign in itself.

So this one is not for me, but over one and a quarter million viewers disagree so why not give it a try.

Moving on to the part of the blog that started the review process all those months ago, the locating of and the review of inadvertent ASMR videos and, to date, this has mainly consisted of videos on a medical theme.

As the weeding process of videos that do not stand the test of time in the Procrastination Pen playlist of ASMR videos, I am finding that I do not share the taste of some sites that exist to curate ASMR videos.

There seem to be videos which are considered good ASMR but which contain loud noises from equipment, distracting background noises, or strange interruptions from people, equipment or even animals.

I don’t think that such videos really belong in a playlist which is designed to provide the background to a person’s sleep time and so, I have been dispatching such videos to the archive list whether they receive a recommendation or not. At the moment I seem to be weeding the average of one video per week in this fashion.

The implication of which is that I had better keep generating more blog posts or that playlist will become so short it will be barely worthy of the name.

For today’s video we are back to an old favourite. She does not have the world’s best ASMR voice, that could easily be someone like Hollie Berry, it is a little too loud for a start. However, I do like her style of delivery and some of her videos have stood the test of time in the Procrastination Pen playlist.

The video is this one:

Eye Examination 2

It has notes which are thankfully brief: “151,236 views  17 Oct 2015

Jessica Nishikawa demonstrates common components of the eye examination. Subscribe at    / jessicanishikawa 

Follow Twitter @JessNishi”

It has comments and some of those comments are from ASMR fans, so with any luck we should be on solid ground here.

The video is a little under four minutes so hardly there at all really. (Lot’s more space for loud and off-putting YouTube adverts (grrr)).

It starts quietly and completely without any startup music. (Heaven be praised).

There is no concluding music, which is no less miraculous. In fact, this little video is more or less ideal.

For regular readers you will have spotted that this is Jessica Nishikawa and of course that is also the name of the channel.

Whenever I review a video from a channel which has multiple videos (this has twenty-six of them at today’s date). I look to see if there are other videos on that channel that could also be useful in terms of ASMR/sleep promotion.

In this case we have a video which is Eye Examination 2 which pre-supposes the existence of a Eye Examination 1 video to match it (and if we are luck 3, 4,5 and so on).

In this case we are not lucky. There is just one other video in the Eye examination series and it is this one:

Eye Examination

This too has notes: “22,511 views  11 Oct 2015

Jessica Nishikawa demonstrates common components of the eye examination. Subscribe at    / jessicanishikawa. Follow on Twitter @JessNishi”

Again, some comments from ASMR fans, so this could be a good thing.

The video is a little over four and a half minutes and there is no introductory music. There is, however, the air conditioning from hell. it is as if the microphone is under the air conditioning outlet. We have encountered this before and it makes for very distracting listening. As if in compensation Jessica is raising her voice here quite a bit more than in the previous video.

Thankfully, there are no equipment noises, and after a brief delay the person recording must have cottoned onto the fact that the background noise is oppressive because the recording volume suddenly decreases. Would that there was an air conditioning sound filter and that it had been applied.

In deference to the fact that this is the only extraneous noise, I am going to trail this one in the procrastination Pen playlist. However, I do not have high hopes that it will persist there for very long.

The Jessica Nishikawa playlist on the Procrastination Pen is here:

The overall playlist of videos covered so far on the Procrastination Pen is here:

The videos weeded out because over time they are just not as good as the others is in this archive list:

I keep this in case subscribers to the Procrastination Pen have personal favourites that they want to hear.

The playlist of videos requiring age verification is here:

I can’t be bothered to stop my listening to log on, this interrupts the experience. You may not mind this in which case this list is for you.

I hope that you find the playlists restful and I hope you get plenty of sleep.

If you liked this blog post why not subscribe to this blog.

Until next time.

Photo by DeepAI

Sleeping With ASMR

I notice that media outlets are now declaring that six hours of sleep is just not going to be enough. Which is all very well, but if you are above the age of fifty and have a reasonably busy life, I can more or less bet that many of your nights will have less sleep in them than that. The reflection that as you get older, waking up in the middle of sleeping gets a more pronounced experience does not help if it is three AM and the one thing you don’t want to do is to wake the person who you’re sharing a bed/bedroom with.

At such times, perhaps the Procrastination Pen playlist and a decent set of headphones might be the saviour of the night. (YouTube adverts excepting).

Of late, I have told you when I come across a meditation on Calm that I liked and regular readers will note that I have developed a taste for the daily meditations featuring Jeff Warren. This includes this one https://www.calm.com/app/player/5iglULfMFq “Patiently In A Rush”. I am finding the dailies on Calm to be much more useable than the tracks dedicated to sleep and so again here too. Sadly, Calm is not free and I am not trying to persuade you to pay for it.

A habit I have established is the review of a professional ASMR artist in each of these blog articles. If only in contrast to the inadvertent ASMR that I have been reviewing for greater than a year now.

Today’s video is this one:

ASMR Appointment with Your Doctor

It starts with the medical professional typing into a computer and ignoring anyone else. This has the benefit of being accurate to real-world experience but is not a noise I would want to start an ASMR video with. Perhaps we should be thankful there is no peppy music or thanks given to some sponsor or other.

This video is a little over twenty-one minutes and so is not a huge length for one of these videos. The notes are largely dedicated to advertising, so I won’t bother with them. A quick scan of the comments indicates that they are largely positive. The channel is VisualSounds1 ASMR with 326K subscribers and 1.1K videos. Wow that is a lot of videos. There are twenty-six playlists, none of which obviously focus on medical themes.

Unsurprisingly VisualSounds1 ASMR is also on the ASMR Index.

There is a quite loud background noise, either air conditioning or a sound mimicking air conditioning and I do wonder (again) why ASMR artists include this. I am constantly looking for inadvertent ASMR videos that do not have this type of background noise.

The style is of a person responding to an individual (unheard/unseen) which I believe is probably to make the whole video feel more personal. It can also be a tad on the confusing side until you latch on to what is going on.

The tone, is of course, excellent but tends to delve into the whispery. This seems to be the volume that most professional ASMR artists use. It has the benefit of being ASMR-y but the disadvantage of being much less believable as a rendition of a real medical exam. I cannot remember one occasion in which a GP has ever whispered at me. Perhaps I am missing out…

Hopefully, that was a bit of fun and now back to the day job. Today’s inadvertent ASMR video is this one:

Macleod’s examination of speech

It is, of course, from a channel that we must by now have done to death. Farsight Channel has 102K subscribers and fifty-nine videos which seems a very high subscriber to video ratio to me.

The notes will be familiar to regular Procrastination Pen readers: “84,162 views 6 Jul 2013

This video demonstrates clinical examination techniques as described in Macleod’s Clinical Examination. The textbook with access to the full set of videos is available at www.elsevierhealth.co.uk/macleod”

We are now used to the slightly stilted and artificial sounding sound track from this channel and this particular video is no different. There is no startup music, no background noise and no strange narrator with a less desirable voice. In fact, in terms of the videos I commonly review this is pretty good. However, it is less than three minutes in length which gives YouTube plenty of opportunity to slide in loud and distracting adverts prior to the next video in the playlist.

The problem with reviewing this site a great deal before, of course is the likelihood that I repeat previously-covered videos. To obviate this possibility, I decided to narrow my search to speech and speech related videos on this channel. This only produced one further video which is this one:

Macleod’s examination of the facial (VII) nerve

The notes don’t really need to be repeated… There are only four comments, but even in that small number they are somewhat variable. It is less than a minute in length and this time there is a narrator. As usual, with the use of narrators, the voice of the narrator is louder and less inclined towards ASMRishness. In other respects, it is similar. The voices of the participants sound odd as if they do not belong to the people participating in the video, just as before.

The Farsight Playlist on the Procrastination Pen is here:

The overall playlist of videos covered so far on the Procrastination Pen is here:

The videos weeded out because over time they are just not as good as the others is in this archive list:

I keep this in case subscribers to the Procrastination Pen have personal favourites that they want to hear.

The playlist of videos requiring age verification is here:

I can’t be bothered to stop my listening to log on, this interrupts the experience. You may not mind this in which case this list is for you.

I hope that you find the playlists restful and I hope you get plenty of sleep.

If you liked this blog article why not follow this blog.

Until next time.

Picture DeepAI.org