Sleeping With ASMR

This week I get age verification in my operating system. As if to reinforce it, age verification on YouTube became even more strident, indeed, positively insistent. I wouldn’t mind but I do not wish to be reviewing material that is unsuitable for a three-year-old. I would think, therefore, that no age verification should be necessary.

I suspect there is more involved to this age verification business than is being stated and so I am not in a hurry to comply. My mission to find resources for ASMR outside of YouTube just got a boost and that can only be to the good.

To which end: Elisha Goldstein has to be about as famous a meditator as it is feasible to get. Are there any resources for Elisha that do not involve my straying into YouTube territory (we can be assured there are many, many videos on YouTube featuring Elisha). Fortunately, a number of meditations are available here: https://www.mindfullivingla.org/elisha-goldstein/. These stretch from five minutes to thirty minutes and as such should act as a reasonable distraction in your snoozing moments. Not a single age verification challenge did I receive (which I hope means that not one item of age-inappropriate content is therein contained).

This week’s ASMR from an ASMR professional. It is a true blast from the past. I used to listen to this one some years ago now. Before I really started listening to inadvertent ASMR material in any quantity.

It is this one:

🌿 Relaxing Naturopath Visit 🌿 ASMR 🌿 Doctor RP

And it comes from one of the titans of professional ASMR artists. Often justifiably so I have found as she has a great voice.

The URL of the video is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmhmKEhnIpA

The channel is Gentle Whispering ASMR and anyone who listens to ASMR must surely have come across this artist. To give you an idea, the channel has 2.42m subscribers, eight hundred and forty-three videos. With statistics like that it makes me wish I’d paid more attention in school and grown up to be a successful ASMR artist.

Surprisingly, there are only fourteen playlists with only the one playlist on theme for the medical ASMR material which I have been featuring on this blog of late:

Today’s video has notes – of course it does. However, surprisingly, these are moderately on the succinct side for a professional ASMR artist: “8,082,246 views 16 Jan 2018

Hello sweetheart! πŸ™‚ Today I welcome you to my naturopathic medicine practice 🌿 I will shortly give you an overview of your visit then at 03:00 I will perform a check-up of your hair, your ears 06:30 , I’ll put on my gloves and examine your skin 08:50 , your sinuses 11:25 , your lymph nodes 13:03 , neck muscles check 14:10 , I’ll gently test your eyes reflexes with a flashlight 16:56 , I’ll tell you about Eyeology 19:29 and check your eyes 22:26 , then I will perform a check of your tongue 29:55 after I explain how you can read your health by your tongue 27:47 ,  I’ll tell you a bit about tension headache that you’ve been experiencing and how to deal with it 32:32 ,  I’ll recommend you some essential oils 34:34 , and herbal supplements 36:16 that even sound good and at the end I will relax you deeper with gentle hand movements to help you doze off 38:29 . Enjoy β™₯ Thank you for watching! πŸ™‚ “

Still, the notes are on the long side though you notice (ASMR professionals do so love their notes). I have edited them a little or you’d never have time to read it all.

There are comments and, sheesh, people do so love to comment. Lots and lots of appreciative comments and a fair few off-the-wall ones as well. No surprises there then.

The video is forty one and a half minutes long and so it is lengthy compared to those we have listened to of late. It starts without music and straight away we realise that the focus is going to be at the whispering level of delivery. Not a bad thing, but also a fairly common approach to ASMR. I do like it when I find a non-whispery one.

Some of the words I could not make out, but I think the overall delivery may not be intended to deliver meaning so much as a relaxing effect on the audience. In which case I would say that the video is a good one. The voice really is that good.

It is calm, quiet, and the intonation is well-nigh perfect. Presumably over two million people would agree. There is that strange clucking come mouth-clicking sound beloved of ASMR artists. This is not something I am trying to find in a video (a lot of people must disagree).

Of course, there are some non-vocal related noises but not too many I notice, mainly clicks and rustles. There is also the tendency for the delivery to vie towards the breathy side. I am not really into breathy personally, but it would appear that a great many ASMR fans are. There is also some clicking from a plastic valerian tablet bottle which did not appeal to me (but must appeal to someone). There is also the grinding sound of a pestle on mortar which is not unpleasant or distracting in my opinion. All told an excellent video and I can remember why I used to listen to it.

Today’s Calm offering came via a recommendation (from Calm). It is this one:

Daily Calm

Tiny Choices

https://www.calm.com/player/-82hIZWhE5

NARRATOR

Tamara Levitt

AUTHOR

Tamara Levitt

A person with possibly my favourite voice on Calm but who I only encounter on the Calm dailies. These daily offerings are around ten minutes in length (as here) and so probably not long enough for you to drop off to in themselves. The other disadvantage to the majority of readers of this blog is that Calm access is not free; you will have to pay a subscription if you want access.

This is about the big effects that small choices can make. Regular repetition of habitual choices can have a big effect. It is important to have awareness of the choices that we unconsciously have made in the past, giving the facility to change such choices in the future.

This week’s inadvertent ASMR is this one:

02.01 General Assessment Physical assessment

and comes from the channel Nursing made easy with 2.68k subscribers and one hundred and seventy-two videos. There are six playlists all of which are in some way related to the medical theme I’ve been pursuing for a while (and given the title of the channel, unsurprisingly).

and

and

and

and

and

The video is just a little over two minutes, blink and it’s gone, it has no notes and no comments and sadly starts with quite loud startup music.

The narration is from a voice which is nicely calm. There is a medical examination which is featured visually but we cannot hear the participants. Thankfully there is no tail-end music. So, it is a reasonable one but also a rather brief one this week.

On that basis, just one, video this time.

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

Urged on by my recent account about attempting to using magnesium supplements to assist with sleep, a friend recommended that I took ashwagandha. Not two minutes after that recommendation, I got a recommendation for the same supplement from an alternate person. It sounds like it is a supplement which I should give some attention to.

I do not know of ashwagandha, and I still don’t really know how to pronounce it, but it was available at Holland and Barrett and so I have been taking it. I’m about fifteen capsules into a thirty-capsule container and it purports to be five hundred milligrams (by the label).

There are several claims for the benefits of ashwagandha however, I notice that slipping off into nod-nod land is not one of them. So it has proven. I had variable results with the magnesium and I have had variable results with the ashwagandha.

It seems to have a small effect on wake-time calmness. Either that, or some recent training I am attending is having the desired effects.

However, it does not seem to have affected my annoyance at different aspects of life, nor the fact that I occasionally need the television to still my mind enough for sleep.

I continue with it and I welcome other recommendations for sleep, preferably those I can share on the blog. Any substances which are “controlled”, presumably, I am not going to be able to find and far less write about if I could.

(Although I’m sure some of the drug-related relaxants probably do work).

This week I saw mentioned a former monk by the name of Scott Tusa. I wondered if it would be possible to find any relaxing material outside of YouTube that I could direct you to. It appears some are available for download (if you also wish to sign up for a newsletter) on his website, here: https://scotttusa.com/.

I did find some resources in the Internet Archive though which are more readily accessible

https://archive.org/details/ggbc-2020-04-24-scott-tusa-mindfulness

https://archive.org/download/ggbc-2020-04-24-scott-tusa-mindfulness/GGBC 2020-04-24 Scott Tusa Mindfulness.mp3

https://archive.org/details/GGBC20180915ScottTusaMakingLifeMeaningful

https://archive.org/download/GGBC20180915ScottTusaMakingLifeMeaningful/GGBC 2018-09-15 Scott Tusa Making Life Meaningful 1-of-3.mp3

https://archive.org/download/GGBC20180915ScottTusaMakingLifeMeaningful/GGBC 2018-09-15 Scott Tusa Making Life Meaningful 2-of-3.mp3

https://archive.org/download/GGBC20180915ScottTusaMakingLifeMeaningful/GGBC 2018-09-15 Scott Tusa Making Life Meaningful 3-of-3.mp3

https://archive.org/details/GGBC20180914ScottTusaResilienceAndHappiness

https://archive.org/download/GGBC20180914ScottTusaResilienceAndHappiness/GGBC 2018-09-14 Scott Tusa Resilience and Happiness.mp3

https://archive.org/details/GGBC20190412ScottTusaCalmBodyClearMind

https://archive.org/download/GGBC20190412ScottTusaCalmBodyClearMind/GGBC 2019-04-12 Scott Tusa Calm Body Clear Mind.mp3

https://archive.org/download/GGBC20190412ScottTusaCalmBodyClearMind/GGBC 2019-04-13 Scott Tusa Calm Body Clear Mind 1 of 4.mp3

https://archive.org/download/GGBC20190412ScottTusaCalmBodyClearMind/GGBC 2019-04-13 Scott Tusa Calm Body Clear Mind 2 of 4.mp3

https://archive.org/download/GGBC20190412ScottTusaCalmBodyClearMind/GGBC 2019-04-13 Scott Tusa Calm Body Clear Mind 3 of 4.mp3

https://archive.org/download/GGBC20190412ScottTusaCalmBodyClearMind/GGBC 2019-04-13 Scott Tusa Calm Body Clear Mind 4 of 4.mp3

It looks like these are freely available to download, such that you can use them to build up a night-time listening playlist of your own, quite independent of YouTube adverts, and indeed this blog come to think of it (although I hope you will return for the next instalment).

This week’s Calm recommendation is from Jay Shetty, who often has something fascinating to say:

This one is about self confidence

https://www.calm.com/app/player/v-BzceA7Vs

Daily Jay

Sing Your Own Praises

NARRATOR

Jay Shetty

or how bigging yourself up can have some positive effects.

I try not to dwell on the Calm recommendation. It does take a Calm subscription and I recognise a number of those reading are never going to be interested in taking out such a subscription, no matter the cost.

So, moving swiftly on…

I tend at this stage of the article to look at a professional ASMR artist in the hope that I can find one that actually beats the inadvertent ASMR material into a cocked hat. Thus far it’s been something of a curate’s egg.

This week I am drawing on a memory in which I remember an ASMR artist I saw a single video of many years ago and I think I have located the same artist (although almost certainly not the same video).

It is this:

Arctic Secret Base ASMR Physical Therapy |#42

A video that comes from the channel ATMOSPHERE this has 768k subscribers, two hundred and sixty videos, a quick scan of which seems to indicate a heavy Sci-Fi theme to a number of them. I’ve been focused on medical style ASMR for a while, although there are fourteen playlists none of these are on a medical theme as such.

The video is just shy of twenty six minutes in length so not huge. It has notes which are the standard ASMR professional length, i.e. verbose in the extreme: “Arctic Secret Base ASMR Physical Therapy |#42

ATMOSPHERE

768k subscribers

740,803 views 22 Dec 2021 #asmr #relax

#asmr

#relax

ATMOSPHERE summary by TemplePhoenix: https://templephoenix.weebly.com

This is a part of a story. All the videos and characters are interconnected.

✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧

Arctic Base. Room #14

Previous episode:    β€’ Pulling Spy Bugs out of Your Hair | ASMR S… 

Next episode:    β€’ Relaxing Ambush ASMR |#45 

✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧

Created by Anastasia

My Gear (affiliate link):

My best friend Laptop: https://amzn.to/3vZY7sy

Camera: https://amzn.to/3Wd47sF

Two Microphones: https://amzn.to/3CJrpPW

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If you wish to support me and get a behind-the-scenes access:

  / atmospherea 

More ASMR videos:    / @atmospherea 

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Instagram:  / anastasia_atmos “

I’ve edited the notes down a bit, I do tend to find that ASMR professionals produce encyclopaedic notes.

Comments are permitted; there are a great number and the habitual fan worship of professional ASMR artists is well represented here. So far – so good.

The video starts with extensive background noise which, given the content of the video seems by design. The voice is great but so muted I could not really make out every word. One of those videos where you either need to relax and hear some of what is going on or turn the volume up. However, if you do the latter you are going to get a number of extraneous noises turned up to eleven.

This is a video aimed at creating an effect and there are glove noises, rustling noises, whirring noises, clothing-related noises, noises related to the weather (which appears snowy), there is the odd clunk, water dripping, scrunching noises, a robotic sounding voice making announcements, glass stirring noises, strange technical noises – various whirrs, boings, plinking and digital-style feedback noises, noises like a metal can being oscillated, a noise which sounded like a transformer hum, a sound like two plastic surfaces grating against one another, equipment noises including a kind of motorised hum, a sound like plastic beads being rolled over a surface, and plenty more besides.

All of this fits with Sci-Fi style of presentation but perhaps not the best for dozing off.

The presentation is on the whispery side of whispery. That is fine but I do prefer a non-whispery presentation personally. The noises are probably way more than I could tolerate when trying to get to sleep but I am betting that some ASMR fans love this one. Worth a review I would have thought.

The inadvertent ASMR this week is this one:

Quick neurological examination

it comes from the channel Khaled Farrah three hundred and fourteen subscribers, thirteen videos, twenty two playlists of which this one seems firmly on the medical theme:

The notes are fantastically brief: “69,678 views 26 Jul 2020

rapid neurological examination to be used in the setting of GP in under 3 minutes”

There are comments. Some are quite strange, and I notice some ASMR fans are here way before me, which hopefully is a good sign.

Despite the notes indicating three minutes the video is a little over eight minutes in fact. There is loud startup music which is thankfully brief. The medical professional is apparently Giles Elrington Consultant Neurologist Barts Health NHS Trust

His is not the quietest of voices, but on the upside, he isn’t whispering. The tone is good and is also level. No nasty surprises here (well, excepting that music anyway). There are silent intervals where text is displayed (after all this is supposed to be a teaching video). If anything, I felt this made the video more calming. As the video proceeds it seems to get more measured and quieter. I also notice that Dr Elrington is quieter during the examination proper (which I have noticed others do as well, there must be something about medical examinations).

One great thing is that it does not end with music.

I think this one was is worthy of a review.

On that basis, just one, video this time.

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