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
The Procrastination Pen 