Tag: Writing

Sleeping With ASMR

I am so happy that even professional journalistic accounts are now documenting distraction as a valid approach towards dealing with insomnia. Regular readers of the Procrastination Pen know that I have been banging this particular drum for over a year now. The distraction that I choose is sound.

I find that a particular kind of sound is restful. A low calm voice in an empathetic tone is absolutely ideal. It does not even matter to me, particularly, if the adopted tone is a whisper.

Regular listeners to ASMR artists will notice that the whisper is the go-to level in many of these videos and it does all get a bit samey. You will have noticed that I refer to videos and this is because I have been using YouTube as my source of ASMR material, for sleep, for much of the period in which I write about ASMR on this blog.

However, I have made the promise that I will also explore alternatives. This promise is also self-serving since YouTube is financed by advertising and much of that advertising is so noisy it undoes the good work done by the video itself. I lose count of the times I’ve spent forty-five minutes dozing to a relaxing track only to be shocked awake by an advertisement for some undesirable tat.

Unfortunately, money maketh the world go around, so this kind of thing is unavoidable where the website in use depends upon advertising for its revenue. I have therefore been looking at other sites. Of late I have had some success finding material in the Internet Archive. This week I am listening to this one:

https://archive.org/details/asmr-nurse-takes-care-of-you-roleplay/Lasmren/Asmr+nurse+takes+care+of+you+roleplay.mp4

It is from Lasmren ASMR Archive by Lasmren ASMR and straight away I can tell this video is extremely quiet. I had the volume up to eleven and it was still hard to hear it. (Advanced age and encroaching deafness notwithstanding.).

The video is a little over sixteen minutes and is dedicated to someone by the name of “Randy” – if you find the idea of a video dedicated to someone else distracting, I would avoid this one. On the upside there is no startup music. The tone does not involve whispering but on the downside, this is not what I would call my favourite voice.

There are some loud noises that occur in the background (neighbours, I think). There are other noises of course (apart from the loud ones). There are nail clicking noises, rattling noises, movement of a blanket, pill dispensing noises, plastic tapping noises, liquid noises, glove noises, objects being slammed down onto the desk surface, noises from the ASMR artist moving around. Some of these are unwelcome. There are various sounds where devices appear to be knocked against the microphone which, given the rest of the video is quiet, are quite disturbing to any relaxation. I would say that given this the recording level is probably off, and a bit more amplification to the voice was probably required.

Lasmren sounds quite bored; borderline fed up in this, perhaps it is just something in the vocal tone. The presentation seems a bit random, definitely not scripted. I am not certain that it hangs together that well. However, as I have mentioned before, there are as many ASMR preferences as there are ASMR fans, so I am guessing that someone out there will love this.

For a long time now, I have been recommending a track on Calm. I have a Calm subscription and the requirement to subscribe also ensures that you do not need to listen to noisy adverts. The requirement to subscribe also means, of course, that this is not for everyone. Today’s recommendation is this one:

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

Daily Jay

When Fear Takes Over

NARRATOR

Jay Shetty

Which is about making decisions on the basis of fear and when this is not the correct approach. He suggests that the best approach is that will always enable us to grow. He points out that you need to be clear about why you are making decisions; could it be that the decisions you are making are because of fear.

If that doesn’t sound very sleep orientated, this is because I frequently find the Calm dailies more restful than the Calm material that is actually supposed to gentle me off to sleep. A lot of that material involves music or other noises that I do not find restful.

At this stage, and for a while now in this blog, I tend to review a professional ASMR artist. I have tried various techniques to avoid choosing just the latest video that pops up in the YouTube recommendations. Sometimes this has even been successful.

Today it is this one:

the ent exam you didn’t know you needed 🥼 (asmr doctor role play)

There are not many comments on the day I am looking at it but those that there are seem to be predominantly positive. The channel is ASMR Viella with 27.8k subscribers, three hundred and five videos and three playlists. The roleplay playlist has a number of medical videos in it but is not predominantly medical themed:

There are, of course, notes, and in this case, these are, thankfully, brief:

“9 Feb 2026 ✪ Members first on 6 February 2026 #asmrsounds #sleepaid #asmrroleplay

This ASMR role play includes medical personal attention, questions and note-taking, physical exam, tympanometry (yes that one), a hearing test, and ear massage / care. hope you enjoy~!

new upload every Sunday at 8PM ET~! ✨ thank you so much for liking and subscribing. ʚ♡ɞ

become a channel member here ❤️:

   / @asmrviella 

#asmrsounds #sleepaid #asmrroleplay”

Today’s video is a little over thirty-four minutes in length and so is reasonable compared to some we have looked at recently, but it should not over face you if you simply want to listen to just the one video whilst you drift off. There is no startup music (Heaven be praised) and straight away we are back to the predominantly whispering style of presentation. This means we are on familiar ground (a lot of professional ASMR artists seem to do this). The voice is not unpleasant, but I do like it when ASMR artists ring the changes, i.e. do not opt for a whispering style of presentation.

As we have heard before there are occasional mouth click/cluck noises (I suspect because they are an ASMR “trigger” for someone). Of course, the voice is not the only noise. We have pen clicking, scribbling/writing noises, fingernails clicking against a surface, there are noises which seem to be something dragged across the microphone (these are quite loud), plastic clicking noises, equipment noise including items being placed (quite loudly) on a desk surface, beeping noises, rattling noises, mobile phone alerts, liquid sloshing noises, even the distant sound of aircraft/traffic.

I get the sense, as I have before, that a number of professional ASMR artists try to cram every type of known ASMR trigger into the one video. I think this might not be the best approach. I, for example, like a calm voice, so I find nail clicking and liquid sloshing distracting. If you are the type of person that rather likes liquid sloshing, it might be that you’re not so keen on the whispering, for example.

This one certainly has quite an amount of nail clicking and so if this is not the trigger for you, I’m not sure I’d review it. If it is your thing though, this video should be a good fit (the occasional loud sound notwithstanding). It was not, I have to say, my favourite video to date so I do not think this will be a channel I’ll spend a great deal of extra time reviewing for alternative videos. Your mileage may vary.

Now the ultimate section of the blog article of late. At one time the only section in the article but things have expanded a little over the past few months. This is where I seek out a (normally medical) video and review it to determine if it is suitably relaxing. Given the video is designed for a purpose other than relaxation, these are inadvertent ASMR videos. Some of them turn out to be better than others.

The channel this time is Joy McLaughlin which has only seven videos and yet has 13.8K subscribers. Blimey. There are zero playlists so no point trying to evaluate any to see if they’re suitable for us.

The video is:

Pulmonary Exam

It is only a little over seven minutes so blink and it’ll be gone. Comments are permitted and a number are from ASMR fans, that is frequently a good sign (but sadly not always). The notes are: “598,514 views 6 Dec 2017

Lauren Daley is simply “breathtaking” in her latest short film, “The Pulmonary Exam”– audiences everywhere will be gasping to see how it all turns out.”

Checking the channel, all of the material on it is eight years old so watch this one while ye may before someone takes the whole thing down.

The video starts in silence and then is a little loud, including the voice of the medical professional. I would say that the “patient” here has a better voice. The medical professional introduces herself as “Lauren Daley” who states that she is a first-year medical student at “FAU”, at least that is how I heard it. Assuming I have heard it correctly it is conceivable that this is “Florida Atlantic University” this institution seems to have a nursing programme and it is possible this is where Lauren is attending in 2017.

There is reasonably strong air-conditioning noise, which might be why Lauren feels that she has to speak up here. There is occasional humour, which I did not find distracting. The examination is nicely calm, although never truly quiet. There is an interruption from a person off-camera, potentially the person doing the filming. However, it is not excessively loud.

I think I’ll try this in the Procrastination Pen playlist for a while but it may eventually get booted out. I am doing a great deal of weeding from the playlist into the archive list of late as I would swear, I am getting pickier. (Hopefully that will turn out to be a good thing in terms of the eventual overall quality of the playlist).

On that basis, just one video on this occasion.

That’s it for this review, 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 recently read some recommendations around the use of magnesium to aid sleep. Personally, I was sceptical. I consider my diet has quite enough healthy attributes. So why would I need a supplement. I decided to go with cheap and minimal to give it a try. I located some 375mg magnesium and vitamin B6 from Tesco. I figured if the bargain basement variety was effective, then there was something in this magnesium supplement solution.

I also wanted the lowest mg I could find as I had been warned that strong supplements of magnesium can act as a laxative, and I was not too keen on that.

In any case, I now find it slightly easier initially to fall asleep. I have found that it has zero effect on the nights when I am already stressed – so far nothing available off prescription does. It also seems to have no, to negligible, effect on waking up during the night. Taking it, I find I still wake up around 4AM and it is still a struggle to get back off to sleep again.

Of course, this is anecdotal. A sample size of one could hardly be called a scientific sample size. There is also a strong possibility it is all placebo effect. However, if so, I’m all for the placebo effect. It might be worth giving magnesium a try if you haven’t already.

So, again, welcome to the Procrastination Pen, the home of restful material to aid in distraction of the sleepless and, on a good night, towards gentling them off to sleep.

Of late I have been trying to find material that is not on YouTube to give you the option of avoiding some pretty sleep-disturbing adverts. One of the people who is more famous than most is Jack Kornfield. Who, unsurprisingly, has a truly excellent voice and one, which, in the past, I listened to very frequently.

Surely meditation royalty like this would not have material out there in internet land that is free of charge?

Well in fact there is a whole site of it here, including, completely at random, this one: https://dharmaseed.org/talks/85881/20240902-Jack_Kornfield-SR-a_labor_of_love-85881.mp3

We also find the odd content in the Internet Archive including this one:

I’m beginning to understand that, with all this information available, one really does not have to put up with YouTube at all.

Following the structure that was established a few months ago, at this point I tend to recommend something from Calm. I have a Calm subscription and so I am in the fortunate position that I can listen to the content there. I recognise that only a subset of the people reading this will be in that position, so I will keep this section brief:

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

Daily Jay

Soul Grow

NARRATOR

Jay Shetty

This is about becoming a more extraordinary version of yourself. In it Jay explores this letter. I often find that Jay has some of the more interesting content on Calm, although not usually the most restful. I assume most people want to become the best possible version of themselves and so this may appeal.

Following on from the Calm recommendation, regular readers will know that at this point I now turn to YouTube and look for a professional ASMR artist. I am now not clear whether this is to recommend them. Many of my articles have found problems with content from professional ASMR artists. However, at the same time I have found the same artists with positive legion fans leaving sycophantic comments. I have to conclude therefore, that there are many different ears in the world and they all like to hear something different. For this reason, I persist, in the hope that at least one person who happens across this blog will like the content.

This one is unusual in that it has no notes and very few comments. That does not usually bode well, so my expectations are not high from commencement.

ASMR | Nurses Station 1: Nurse on Cranial Nerve Exam 🩺

It is from ALBERTSVOICE ASMR, which is a channel that has 16.8K subscribers, 3.4K videos, eleven playlists with some playlists quite obviously on theme for our medical – related ASMR reviews, such as:

and

and

and

This is such a huge number of videos I can only assume that the person is doing this as a full-time job. In which case all power to him.

Today’s video is a little over twenty-three minutes. It starts very loud for an ASMR video including a ringing tone, loud speech, and loud keyboard sounds. The phone gets a good clattering and the video continues in the same loud manner. This is certainly not your classical ASMR video. Although we have heard videos with excessively loud keyboards before, this is quite possibly the loudest yet.

There seem to be very loud equipment-related sounds every time a piece of equipment is selected. On the upside, there is no sign of whispering or breathy presentations. There are no mouth clucking sounds or any of those other sounds we have associated with a number of professional ASMR artists. In fact, it is so loud, I do wonder if it is in fact a parody of ASMR videos rather than an ASMR video as such. Although we have encountered videos with loud noises in them, I have rather assumed that this was a mistake rather than by conscious choice. Here it would appear that it is by design. I suspect that unless you give the volume control a healthy downwards turn you are not going to get much rest whilst listening to this one.

It is odd, when I started to review professional ASMR artists I was convinced that the content would be so good that very soon all the inadvertent material I had initially focused on would be shown to be excessively lacking. Actually, the more reviews I do, the more I find that much of this inadvertent material stands up rather well.

Perhaps I made the correct choice, quite by accident, when I started writing this review series of blog articles all those months ago.

As to that, this week’s inadvertent ASMR video is this one:

Neurological assessment video

It has no notes and comments are denied – so reassuringly quite unlike a professional ASMR artist then. It comes from the channel Lila Kalman, which has 1.08K subscribers. This is quite an achievement given there are only sixteen videos and no playlists.

The posts to this channel start three years ago, conclude two years ago and have all the appearance of student assessment videos. Today’s video is not going to break the bank timewise given it is less than eight minutes long. Other parts of the channel look worthy of investigation however, so I will most likely be returning for a further look in the future.

It starts with the typical student video pantomime knock. Usually this precedes attempts at privacy using thin air, which fortunately does not happen here. The medical professional introduces herself as Lila, so I am guessing the owner of this channel. The “patient” seems to be Lauren Hager (assuming I heard that correctly). There is no excessive background noise (somewhat of a miracle for videos of this nature). Lila seems to have an excellent voice. Lauren’s is almost as good. If I happen across Lauren’s channel in my travels I may give it a review. (Assuming that she was a nurse in the same year as Lila, which is by no means a given).

The video continues quiet, and the approach is methodical. Would that we had seen many more such videos. There are occasional equipment noises, none of which seem to me to be excessive. If anything, the recording seems a little on the muted side. One of the rare occasions in which you will be rolling over and turning the volume control up. (Whereas more usually you’ll be turning it down, often quite a long way down). There is occasional noise, which sounds like it might be traffic noise, outside of the building. In which case the building could probably do with some more insulation as it sounds unusually noisy.

There’s the odd pregnant pause, I assume while Lila attempts to recall what it is should come next in the process. So far, so typical student assessment video. There is occasional speech from an adjacent room, which is also the kind of thing that we have heard before.

All told I think a rather good video for us and it is going into the Procrastination Pen playlist.

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

YouTube has intermittently started to require me to log on. This only seems to happen on the tablet; it does not seem to happen on the laptop. The upshot is that whilst I am reviewing the videos (on the laptop), I can play what I like and I can write these articles. However, when I go to bed, I try to play the playlist and I get stopped and asked to log on. My password is a lengthy one; I am not at all interested in raising myself from a partially sleepy state to start typing in passwords. I’m sure it is possible, I just don’t value the change in requirements, and I have alternatives that do not dictate to me in this fashion. (Not least a number of videos I have found on the Internet Archive – some of which I have featured of late).

For example, this week I found this one:

Sadly, it is in a language I do not understand. The person is listed as “Emma Smith” but the content sounds Russian to me. I only worry in case I recommend something which contains language that I wouldn’t recommend if I did understand it. If anyone understands this content and finds it to be filled with undesirable language, let me know and I’ll delete the recommendation. It references a channel, I tried that for further details but found it did not exist. So not a lot of help.

The voice is not what I would call tip-top, but the video does lack background noise, startup (and tail end) music. It is an odd one in that I have seen a few head-to-tail videos (usually by medical students), and this content does not look like any I have seen so far. It is possible that it was extracted from a much longer video. Have a listen and see what you think.

For this week’s Calm recommendation, I am back with Jeff:

https://www.calm.com/app/player/DDw6S3ZLMF

Daily Trip

Can You Live with This the Rest of Your Life?

NARRATOR

Jeff Warren

AUTHOR

Jeff Warren

As Calm dailies go this is quite a long one. It is close on 11 minutes, possibly even enough to drop off to. However, the thing I love about Jeff is how often he comes up with something which reflects some of the things I have either dealt with or am dealing with. Even where he doesn’t do that, I find the subjects that he brings up to be fascinating in any case. This one is about being able to welcome anything that happens to you in your life. This, to me, sounds like a rather daunting expectation. Even where what has happened will last for the rest of your life. As I get older, I begin to understand there are a number of changes that are just not going to go away. In which case, I think practices like this may increase in relevance.

For this week’s professional ASMR video I have been looking at this one:

Removing a foreign object from your Arm | ASMR Medical role play

It is odd for a professional ASMR video, in that it does not have a description. There are comments but they are decidedly on the surreal side – very normal YouTube then. It comes from the channel sillystarASMR. This channel has six hundred and fifty-seven videos and 7.63K subscribers. There are seven playlists none of which obviously fit with the medical theme which we have been following for a while now.

The video is just less than seventeen minutes in length; it starts without music and straight away we hear that this is not classical ASMR. For a start there is no whispering involved and definitely no breathy moments. There is some mouth clucking noises and some background keyboarding happening. There are, of course, other noises: equipment noises, hand sanitiser noises, plastic sheet noises, beeping noises, Velcro noises, rustling noises, clicking noises, even the occasional clunk.

I would say that the voice isn’t high on empathy (this is in common with a number of student videos we have seen). Which shows how valuable a person who has some empathy in their voice actually is. At one stage there is even some sighing going on, as if the person is tired of the whole thing.

For the inadvertent ASMR this week I’m looking at this one:

Health Assessment

It is from the channel Dylan McCollough. This has four videos, 1.54K subscribers and no playlists. That seems a fair few subscribers for so few videos. Hopefully this bodes well for us.

Today’s video has no notes (usually a sign that it is not a professional ASMR video). Comments are permitted. There are a number of these and quite a few are uncomplimentary. That does not sound good for us.

The video is just less than twenty-two minutes. It starts without music but does have some strong background noise – almost certainly air conditioning. Unlike some of the commentators I rather like the voice. Some parts of the presentation are a mite hesitant so it strikes me as one of the student assessment videos which we are so familiar with. The voice then gets very quiet indeed and personally I was straining to make out much. The auto subtitles seem quite good for that if you really want to watch (I assume you’ll just be listening). Fortunately, it becomes a lot more listenable quite swiftly.

There are noises from other people (presumably in adjacent rooms in the medical establishment). These are unwelcome and quite loud. There’s the occasional clunk from equipment and slamming of doors sufficiently nearby to be quite loud. There is the sound of water running at one point in an adjacent room. There are noises from the patient moving around when requested. I would say that the patient does not have such a great voice and he is a bit louder than the medical professional here as well. However, he is very respectful in his responses so I was quite taken with that. Whoever is operating the recording equipment occasional thumbs the microphone, fortunately that isn’t too loud. The examination is methodical, even gentle, shame about that air conditioning and those extraneous noises, but it is often thus with student assessment videos. I can see why people take videos and edit them to retain only the quiet bits, but how they get over the copyright issues I have no idea.

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

I occasionally listen to a podcast by “Getting Things Done” guru and productivity expert David Allen. I always aspire to be a productivity God but find myself more in the “rushing around trying to get a lot of things done at once” category. Still, I do find his material inspirational in a “if only I was that organised…” kind of way.

I was surprised to find an episode that was focused on sleep. Indeed, an entire discussion with a sleep expert, which I felt certain you would rather like to listen to. You can listen to it here: https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/forcedn/gettingthingsdone/Episode_342_David_Allen_and_Dan_Pardi.mp3.

It also reinforces to me how important the subject of focus for the Procrastination Pen blog is, and has been. Given that the drive of these articles is to get more and better-quality sleep using distraction as a technique.   

Distraction mainly by making use of restful, calming sounds, that soothe a racing mind and make it ready for some rest (where it might not have been before listening).

I have found that there are as many calming sounds as there are people prepared to listen to them. Personally, I like a quiet, peaceful sounding voice. If I can find one that sounds even a little empathetic so much the better. For this reason, for a very long time, I have been focused on YouTube videos with some medical content. (I found that medical professionals often have the better voices, but sadly, not always).

However, the longer I stayed with YouTube, the louder and more frenetic the adverts have become. Also, the more often I seem to have problems with it like a recent iterative logon prompt which went away by itself after twenty-four hours, indicating, to my mind, that the problem wasn’t mine.

On that basis I have started to cast around for material that does not rely upon YouTube, and I have found that some of the video content seems to have been archived onto the Internet Archive.

For example, this one, it is only eight minutes but the voice is excellent. It is also available as a physical file

PE: Shoulder Pain – OSCE Prep (Pulm, Cardiac, Pulses, Screening OSE, UE Neuro, MSK, Special Tests)

This seems to be the advantage of this site. Ostensibly you could download the files and assemble them into a playlist offline, without needing to listen to those adverts. Sadly, there do not appear to be a huge number of these in the Internet Archive so it isn’t any YouTube replacement. However, it maybe sufficient to assemble a few videos from various sources and that maybe enough to drop off to.

For some time now I have been reviewing Calm material. I’m making the assumption that at least some of the people that happen across this blog one way or another can access Calm. (Calm requires a subscription). I like it because I have a subscription and more importantly it does not have adverts. I will readily admit that the content is a bit on the variable side and the ones I feature here are just the ones I have got on with the best (so far anyway).

This week, I recommend this one:

https://www.calm.com/app/player/4xcp92NKYa

Silence

NARRATOR

Tamara Levitt

AUTHOR

Tamara Levitt

I’ve often reflected that I like most of the artists that record the Calm dailies on Calm (well their voices anyway) but perhaps Tamara has my favourite voice.

This is ten minutes on the value of silence. Including doing everything that you can to preserve silence when you find it.

I have reflected that it is a fortunate person who can find much silence in the modern world. I also recognise that some people with conditions such as tinnitus might find absolute silence to be too distracting. Where you both have and want silence what a privilege it is, and in some cases an asset to sleep as well.

For this week’s ASMR professional I came across a video from an artist who I first discovered by visiting a forum where someone was saying that this person was their favourite ASMR artist. The forum entry seems to be lost now and in my brief reviews of the videos (at that time) I did not find this to be my favourite artist.

I also discovered that all the original YouTube material for this channel was removed some time ago. It is therefore only where someone has reposted a video that you will even get the chance to listen:

ASMRaurette – Cranial Nerve Examination

The channel is Sapper MacDonald so not ASMRaurette.

A search reveals no ASMRaurette channel.

It seems that some personal information was leaked and ASMRaurette left YouTube for keeps.

However, there is some content on the Internet Archive.

Including

and

and

and

So, plenty of opportunity to try out the odd video and see if you like the sound.

Today’s video is a little less than seventeen minutes long. The notes are incredibly brief: “712,958 views 23 Jul 2014

20121010″

Comments are denied (perhaps wisely). There is no startup music but there is some background noise. The voice is very muted and almost childlike in fact (perhaps ASMRaurette was very young when she recorded this). The background noise seems to rise and fall which makes me wonder if it is the fan on the computer this was recorded on or similar. The visual quality is poor which may reflect the fact that this has probably been recorded from somewhere and not that well… (such as a piece of software used to stream and record a YouTube video, for example). Although not my favourite voice, this is still a very good voice and if someone caused this artist to leave YouTube then it was a sad day for ASMR fans, I fear. Perhaps a good opportunity to celebrate the videos that we still have.

You may recall a previous post in which I mentioned a URL which linked to thirty two videos. The URL is this one:

Medical Training Videos

It has thirty-two videos (discounting the introductory one). Last time we managed to review just four of these, so there is a fair few left to look at…

The next one in the series is this:

Airway Adjuncts – NPA, Guedel, BVM

Just less than eight minutes. The notes are: “272,764 views 13 May 2012

This video – produced by students at Oxford University Medical School in conjunction with the faculty – demonstrates the safe and correct use of airway adjuncts in maintaining an open airway.

It is part of a series of videos covering Respiratory Medicine skills and is linked to Oxford Medical Education (www.oxfordmedicaleducation.com)

This video was produced in collaboration with Oxford Medical Illustration – a department of Oxford University Hospitals NHS Trust. For more information, please visit www.oxfordmi.nhs.uk”

The narrator has a reasonable voice; there is a small amount of hiss on the track, however. As before there is no music (hurray) and the approach is nicely measured.

The actual examination is silent, and so rather useful for us.

Oxygen Therapy and Delivery – How to Prescribe Oxygen

it is seven and a quarter minutes and the notes are: “695,126 views 13 May 2012 Nursing Skills

This video – produced by students at Oxford University Medical School in conjunction with the faculty – demonstrates how to deliver oxygen therapy through various devices, as well as the prescribing of oxygen. It is part of a series of videos covering Respiratory Medicine skills and is linked to Oxford Medical Education (www.oxfordmedicaleducation.com)

Please see the BTS guidelines for more information:

http://www.brit-thoracic.org.uk/guide…

This video was produced in collaboration with Oxford Medical Illustration – a department of Oxford University Hospitals NHS Trust. For more information, please visit www.oxfordmi.nhs.uk”

The narrator has a good voice and the background noise consists merely of a muted hiss whenever the narrator speaks. The actual medical procedure is conducted in silence – which is quite useful in this context as we only have the narrator’s voice to attend to.

Inhaler and Nebuliser Explanation – Asthma

Just over five minutes and the notes are: “183,310 views 13 May 2012 Nursing Skills

This video – produced by students at Oxford University Medical School in conjunction with the faculty – demonstrates how to use a nebuliser and explain correct inhaler technique to a patient. It is part of a series of videos covering Respiratory Medicine skills and is linked to Oxford Medical Education (www.oxfordmedicaleducation.com)

Please see the BTS guidelines for more information:

http://www.brit-thoracic.org.uk/guide…

This video was produced in collaboration with Oxford Medical Illustration – a department of Oxford University Hospitals NHS Trust. For more information, please visit www.oxfordmi.nhs.uk”

The narrator is not as good as the last video but still reasonably quiet. Background noise is absent as is startup music. The lack of startup music really distinguishes this set of videos from a number of others that we have reviewed.

The medical process is initially silent and so we only have to attend to the narrator which is rather good. However subsequently we realise that the narrator and the medical professional have either the same or similar voices (i.e. it is more than likely it is the same person) which makes for great continuity.

Peak Flow and Spirometry – Lung Function Tests

A little less than seven and a half minutes, the notes are: “464,178 views 13 May 2012 Nursing Skills

This video – produced by students at Oxford University Medical School in conjunction with the faculty – demonstrates how to perform the basic lung function tests of spirometry and peak flow.

It is part of a series of videos covering Respiratory Medicine skills.”

The narrator has a reasonable voice (not the best we’ve heard in this blog article) but it is adequate for us. The actual medical procedure is actually better than the narration in this one. However, the breathing exercises are too loud for this to belong in the Procrastination Pen playlist.

I think that I will conclude the blog post at this one and continue in another 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 Oxford Medical Education 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 remember that during lockdown I used to read https://laterbloomer.com/ and the course https://imaginarium.debraeve.com/courses/479032/lectures/8819588. It is material that is designed for those, like me, who would rather like to imagine that there are some aspects of existence still remaining to them, despite their advancing in years.

I suppose it is material like this which encourages me to resist some of the effects of aging like declining sleep quality, and to try to do something about it. Who knows, I might suddenly take up something amazingly fulfilling in later life which I would have missed out on if I’d allowed my sleep to just continue to get worse.

I hope that because I mention advancing years this will not dissuade any young people with sleep issues from reading further. Assuming such a person found this blog, I think the relaxing material which is featured here is very likely to be applicable both to young and old.

By all means, feedback if you disagree.

I think I kicked off Calm recommendations in this blog greater than six months ago. Such that regular readers will recognise what comes next. I have a Calm subscription and I make use of it reasonably frequently because I can guarantee that it is not going to have a loud, unpleasant advert kick in sometime during the track. That said, much of the content is variable, and some of it I do not find as calming as the name would suggest. The one thing I am finding out however, through listening to different ASMR tracks is that everyone is different, and some of the ones that I feel are marginal may turn out to be your favourites.

One of the tracks dedicated to sleep is the Calm Nighttime Wind Down, it is a little less than seven minutes:

https://www.calm.com/app/player/zX75qkm1AI

As such, personally, I do not think it is long enough to get me off to sleep, particularly on one of my more wakeful evenings.

It is also music-based and as I have commented before, I do not actually find music that restful or at least not restful enough to fall asleep to. So, I doubt I’d do much more than lie awake listening. The other problem, for me, is that it isn’t the quietest. I have had more restful moments listening to ITV in the early hours, to be honest. But I guarantee that there will be someone out there who will love it.

Give it a try and see what you think, assuming that you have a Calm subscription in any case.

I have been looking at resources that are not on YouTube (as I wish to avoid the adverts). I came across this one which seems to me a tad surreal:

The notes I can pick up from it are as follows:

“【ASMR】 detailed medical exam for sleep ♡🏥

By: pillowdear ASMR

Published: Jan 20, 2025

Views: 95

Topics: YouTube, video, Entertainment, vtuber, anime, girl, gamer, calm, cute, ASMR, let’s play, spooky, cozy, comfy, relax, funny, cupid, love, waifu, holo, scream, scary, gf, kawaii, stream, gameplay, game, live, asset, clip, comp, voice, female, affirmation, dere, jumpscare, girls, happy, sfw

Collections: Mirrortube: Mirrored YouTube Videos, Social Media Videos, Additional Collections – Video

Ready for your medical check-up? I’m nurse pillow, here to take good care of you and help you get nice sleep! ════ ⋆♡⋆ ════ If you’re thinking about donating, please consider doing it through the link below!!! All tips “

It is animated, it is somewhat peculiar, and the voice is not the greatest. However, it does lack adverts. I’m not sure that you can download it sadly, I could not see a mechanism for doing that. It starts with music – grr. However, it isn’t the loudest music that you ever heard.

The video is in excess of two hours in length! Certainly, long enough to drop off to.

Why not take a listen.

For several months now I have been reviewing just one professional ASMR video per blog article. I have now concluded that if I just review the latest stuff in my YouTube feed it is probably not as useful as picking out a YouTube video at random from the past.

Those of you who do not spend your time reviewing YouTube videos I suspect would not be trawling the historic entries for something that just might be worthwhile. That said I have found a number of professional ASMR videos are not as scintillating as one might otherwise expect and that doesn’t seem to change no matter how long ago, I look back.

Today I am looking at the channel  Alleviate ASMR which does seem to be doing the job that I would like to do myself. It would seem that the channel is nicking other people’s ASMR videos and assembling them into a playlist. I shudder to think what copyright implications there might be. It is my lack of awareness in this area that causes me to shy away from similar behaviour. I tend to review original videos where I can find them and keep the videos in the location and in the state that the originator intended. This often results, in my opinion, in a less successful video than might have been the case had they been heavily truncated (notably to remove any branding music from the start and end of some videos). However, I do not want to disturb anyone who can charge a fortune simply for writing a letter. Especially if they are the kind of person who takes to wearing a frighteningly expensive suit.

The channel has 6.9K subscribers and only eleven videos so go Alleviate ASMR for achieving so many subscribers from so little material. There are two playlists one of which is right on theme for us and one of which is not:

and

The channel seems to have been very active a couple of years ago and then swiftly to have fallen into abeyance. I do not have any idea why that should be.

Today’s selected video is as follows:

Cranial Nerve Exams for Unintentional ASMR

As a welcome change this has very brief notes (rather than the lengthy ones we are more used to): “1,167,336 views 2 May 2023 #unintentionalasmr #compilation #cranialnerveexam

A compilation of three incredibly relaxing cranial nerve examinations to fulfil your Unintentional ASMR needs, perfect for relaxation, study and sleep. All credit goes to the owners of these clips. Check out my other Unintentional ASMR videos on my channel 🙂

Check out more Unintentional ASMR medical videos here –     • Unintentional ASMR Medical Videos 

Be sure to Like and Subscribe for more! Sweet Dreams 🙂

#cranialnerveexamasmr  #cranialnerveexam #unintentionalasmr #medicalasmr #compilation #asmr #study #sleep #relaxation”

There are quite a few comments, and many are either strange or for ASMR afficionados in the know. If you have been reading this blog for a while you will swiftly appreciate what I mean by this as at one time or another I have tried to translate such comments.

The video is less than twenty minutes long. It breaks the rules of this section as, although this has been professionally assembled, it is not by a professional ASMR artist as such. I hope that you will give me some latitude. Normal service will be resumed with the next blog post.

It starts with some background noise – probably air conditioning. Then the medical professional introduces herself possibly as Dr Pitford. Two other medical professionals are in attendance and are making notes. It is possible this is an example of one of our favourites the student assessment video. I am used to these coming from a number of the nursing establishments in the US but this person has a resolutely English accent so I assume a UK offering instead.

I would say that this person has a very good voice for our purposes. I have no idea how extensively the video was edited (I’m certain that this is not its usual home) but if I do happen upon the original version, I will review the whole thing for the blog. (I do try to find original videos where I can do that).

There are equipment noises, clunking against metallic objects. None of these is excessively distracting.

Around six minutes in, the video segues without warning to a brand-new medical professional, Vicky, who informs us that she is at the Swindon Academy. As I have mentioned before, I do not like videos that have been crammed together like this. By all means use a playlist, but assembling them into one whole is, I find, jarring when you flit from one place to another, one person to another, and in many cases have changes in sound to go with it.

If anything, Vicky has a slightly better voice than Dr Pitford. A shame that we are not starting a new video. I’ll go with the “I’ve started so I’ll finish” philosophy and plough onwards. However, if I was reviewing this for the Procrastination Pen playlist this would disinclude it. In fact, if I was as brave as Alleviate ASMR I’d take ownership of the video and divide it back into individual videos again. At eleven and a half minutes the video segues again, this time to Tom Sutton who (at the time this was recorded) was a final year medical student. The background noise hikes up a bit and the sound recording is somewhat less successful. Tom sounds a little distant and muted to me in comparison to the two that went before. I would say he has a good voice but by this stage we have been spoiled by the two voices that we have just heard and, in my opinion, both of them are superior voices. Another argument for not gluing these videos together like this.

At this stage in a normal blog post (and since the ASMR part of this blog started) I have been reviewing inadvertent ASMR videos on YouTube. These are videos, ostensibly established for one purpose, but which turn out to be relaxing, possibly even giving ASMR-effects (to those that can feel them).

I don’t give guarantees on the ASMR-yness of the videos because one thing I seem to have established is that one person’s ASMR is another person’s annoying video.

For me, I really like a calm voice. It is hard to define what tone is best, as I have listened to a number, but I would like (I’m sure) a tone that was empathetic even supportive. I’m making a guess that many other people would find such a voice restful and might find my reviews of such material to be helpful.

This week, I have chosen this video which is a little off-centre from the usual medical material that I have chosen to review for months now.

SCEHResources ElkinsHypnotizabilityScaleEHS 2014

This is a professional video so, of course, it comes with notes: ” 487,753 views 17 May 2018

The Elkins Hypnotizability Scale (EHS) is a measure that correlates at 0.86 with the Stanford Hypnotic Susceptibility Scale, and can be administered in 30 minutes.  Find this and other Hypnosis Clinical Resources on the SCEH website.

This video demonstrates the Elkins Hypnotizability Scale.  For more information, see Hypnotic Relaxation Therapy: Principles and Applications by Gary Elkins Ph.D., ABPP, ABPH.  Copyright 2013, Reproduced with the permission of Springer Publishing Company, LLC ISBN: 9780826199393.”

Which, fortuitously, are refreshingly-brief. Given the title, it seems to have been recorded in 2014 but not posted until 2018. There is no obvious explanation for the delay.

No comments are permitted, which, given the nature of a number of comments we have seen, is probably the safe option, to be honest.

The channel is: Society for Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis this has 1.08K subscribers from eleven videos. That’s pretty good performance in my opinion.

There are just four playlists with only one looking a good fit for us, I think:

Today’s video is in excess of forty-three minutes in length. That is not bad at all, in terms of videos we have reviewed of late. A video of two hours in length, so far, being an uncommon thing to find.

There is a fair amount of background noise, an ongoing hiss that could be in the recording technology used perhaps. The voices of both participants turn out to be rather good, calm and nicely paced. I can understand why the professional is good at hypnosis if the voice is anything to go by.

There are paper shuffling noises. These are not excessively distracting and are the only extraneous noises apart from the background hiss.

At thirty-five Minutes the video changes over to a presentation by Dr Gary Elkins at Baylor University. Although a presentation, his voice remains calm.

Many people when presenting seem tempted to project, as if they didn’t have a microphone. The upshot is that presentations tend to be louder. Thankfully this is avoided here. That said, I would not say that this part of the video was the most fascinating thing I’ve listened to. However, given I am reviewing material for its usefulness in driving someone into sleep, I would say this is nigh ideal.

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

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

I am reflecting on the double-edged nature of companionship. On the one hand, many resources now indicate that loneliness is a killer. That having people regularly in one’s life is a source of happiness. On the other hand, it is rare that you will find yourself having arguments with yourself… It isn’t often that you find you’ve made a profound social gaffe whilst completely in your own company. It is hard to get stressed and anxious over a quiet evening in, accompanied only by a book.

If you find that social events have got on top of you and you’re lying awake when you should be asleep, mulling over the various errors you made and perhaps the need to go back and apologise afterwards. Be assured a good night’s sleep may ameliorate some of those feelings, and a good night’s sleep is what this blog is here to promote.

Of late, I have been starting the blog articles with something provided by Calm. I am lucky enough to have a Calm subscription and I do so love the absence of advertising. In many ways Calm is not ideal, the need to pay for it being a big one. The absence of the ability to create playlists is a second. Third the fact that every day the content changes and that item you so loved yesterday will now be absent, unless you remember what it was called and go search for it.

However, I think the content provided is great. I like the voices of the professionals involved. Much of the material is not only restful but educational as well. So far, I have not encountered one loud and distracting advert deliberately interposed with the restful content in order to grab your attention.

Today’s suggestion is this one:

https://www.calm.com/app/player/b-gRGIQlxn

Daily Trip

Vertical Thinking

NARRATOR

Jeff Warren

AUTHOR

Jeff Warren

Jeff has an excellent voice, second only to Tamara on this site for me. I also really enjoy a lot of the content that Jeff chooses. We seem to have similar interests and concerns in some areas. I hope you also enjoy his stuff. (If you have a subscription, that is).

This is just a little over eight minutes so it won’t take you long. This concerns rumination and the periods of quiet in between.

If you’ve been following the blog for a while you will realise that, of late, I like to review a professional ASMR artist. Mostly this is in contrast to the inadvertent ASMR which is the bread and butter of this blog. Also, I thought anybody meandering across this blog might enjoy the variety.

This week we are looking at a video which is brief in comparison to many professional ASMR videos we have examined.

ASMR Inspecting Your Entire Body, Soft Spoken, Personal Attention

it’s a little over seventeen and a half minutes in length so it is not going to keep us very long.

As a professional ASMR artist’s video, we would expect there would be notes and we would expect that a fair proportion of the notes would be about self-promotion. The notes associated with this video are: “47,900 views 5 Oct 2025 #asmr #asmrsounds #asmrvideo

Hey my friends, I hope you’ve been well! Tonight, I am going to be random inspections on your body to help you unwind and relax! Let me know what your favourite part was! Thank you so much for watching! xx

Instagram ➤   / brittneymay__ 

Business Inquiries ➤ brittneymay.asmr1999@gmail.com

Throne Gifting ➤ https://thronegifts.com/u/brittneymay

(Please don’t feel obligated to gift me anything! I just set this up for if you are feeling generous and would like to support myself and my channel!)

My Upload Schedule:

Wednesday’s ➤ 4 PM PST/ 7 PM EST

Saturday’s ➤ 4 PM PST/ 7 PM EST

Thank you for watching and supporting my channel, I am so grateful! ✿

✿

#asmr #asmrvideo #asmrsounds #asmrinspection

Brittney May ASMR

138K subscribers”

It is enormously gratifying to find such restrained notes associated with such a video. In addition, the video does not start with whoever is sponsoring the video today. You don’t get to see videos of that nature on this blog. Sponsor’s information in a video is, I find, hugely distracting. I can see that someone has to buy the groceries but I would have thought the place for details of the sponsor would be in the associated notes, not taking up ten percent of the actual video.

Comments are permitted and, whacky feedback allowing, mostly reinforce the idea that ASMR artists are held in high-esteem by YouTube visitors (well the ones who can be bothered to leave comments, in any case).

The voice is, as expected, excellent. It is very towards the whispery end of presentation which seems to be where a number of ASMR artists find themselves. Perhaps this is what the listening public is demanding. It isn’t a terrible idea; I just cannot envisage a medical professional actually holding a session in that way. It has a tendency to be a bit on the breathy side, again a number of ASMR professionals also do this. Perhaps a quantity of ASMR afficionados find that characteristic appealing. Personally, I am all about the quality of the voice.

There are various other noises, gloves, rustling, cloth-related noises, thumping noises, wood against wood noises, scribbling noises, finger drumming noises, brushing noises, spraying noises, scraping noises.

At least there is no startup or tail-end video music which seems to mar many inadvertent ASMR videos I have reviewed.

I would say the setting appears to be more domestic than hospital-related but as you’ll be listening rather than watching I doubt it will phase you. The channel is Brittney May ASMR it has 138K subscribers from five hundred and three videos there is one playlist containing thirty-four videos. Interestingly from our point of view these are on a medical theme (which this blog has been for several months now).

You may want to check that playlist out for yourself:

I rather liked this video. I certainly can see some value in you giving it a review.

If you wandered into this blog article without previous awareness of the blog, you might like to know what it is all about and why you should be interested.

The Procrastination Pen, for over a year now has been searching for medical videos (and sometimes other videos) predominantly on YouTube (but not uniquely so) for content which might cause ASMR symptoms (in people lucky enough to feel ASMR symptoms).

In this case, it is for people who get “tingles” or similar ASMR symptoms from people speaking quietly and calmly (even so far as whispering). However, this does not cater for people who like scratching, squelching, paper turning or other stimuli.

For those who sadly do not feel ASMR symptoms, the aim is that the video will be quiet enough to relax you. The hope is that you will relax sufficiently that sleep will come more easily. If you leave the Procrastination Pen playlist playing, it is also hoped that it is calm and quiet enough that if you do awaken during the night, you will find it more straightforward to fall back to sleep.

Sometimes life is too busy to read a review of individual videos and for people who find themselves in that situation, the playlist is always found at the end of each blog article – simply scroll straight to the end and pick up the link from there.

This week we come in with a video which by title is part way through a sequence of videos – such is the way that recommendations on YouTube seem to work. Logic does not necessarily appear to be relevant.

The video is this one:

Examination of the Hand – Part 3

It is a little less than ten minutes and features Roger Pillemer as the medical professional and he has an absolutely excellent voice for our purposes. Quiet, gentle and moderately slow paced, what is not to like.

The channel is called Roger Pillemer and has twenty-five videos as at the date I am looking at it. The oldest seems to be seven years old and the latest just a month ago. There are two playlists one of which has seventeen videos and the other five. Our video of course occurs in the longer playlist and I do think the longer playlist is a little – long.

Any review of seventeen videos will probably have you reaching for the TV remote control, or similar, part way through.

However, there are three videos called “Examination of the Hand” so let’s review the other two.

Examination of the Hand – Part 1

As before, Roger’s voice is what carries the day. The presentation isn’t necessarily fascinating but above all, it is relaxing. There are no disturbing noises, no background air conditioning racket and no equipment noises. Sadly, there is start-up music but thankfully it is muted. There is also a continuing background music which plays continuously throughout. Sadly, I think this discounts this video from being included in the Procrastination Pen playlist.

It is nearly thirteen- and three-quarter minutes which is a presentation regarding the hand. Usually, I reject videos involving presentation as being excessively loud, as if trying to project from a stage to a large audience. Roger does not make that mistake. He remains as quiet as he was in the first video of this blog article.

Examination of the Hand – Part 2

This is just less than twelve minutes and the same problem as the last video i.e. a music track that plays continuously. A great shame as Roger has a really great voice.

So sadly, just one video on this occasion.

However, the playlist is now really quite large so plenty there for you to enjoy.

That’s it on this occasion, 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

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