Latest news with #AutonomousSensoryMeridianResponse
New York Post
2 days ago
- Health
- New York Post
NYC's first ASMR spa offers tingly sensations — what it's like
For a moment, I felt like a child again. My head rested on a silky pillowcase, fingers gently combing through my hair while a soft voice whispered in my ear. But this wasn't bedtime — and that definitely wasn't mom. It was actually 3 p.m. on a scorching summer day in NoMad, and I was in the middle of a signature therapy session at Whisper Wave, New York's first and only ASMR spa. 7 Whisper Wave offers a unique experience that combines gentle touch, soothing sounds and a calming atmosphere to trigger ASMR. Tamara Beckwith ASMR, or Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, is the tingly, goosebump-like sensation some people get from certain audio, visual or tactile triggers. If you've spent more than five minutes on the internet in the past decade, you've probably seen so-called 'ASMRtists' whispering, tapping, scratching or even chewing into a mic, trying to generate that fuzzy blissed feeling that some have likened to a 'brain orgasm.' Some of the most popular ASMR clips on YouTube have racked up over 30 million views, and TikTok hosts a whopping 346.2 million videos related to 'ASMR Sounds.' At Whisper Wave, founder Rebecca Benvie is taking the internet craze offline — and straight to your nervous system. 'A lot of people think ASMR is a technique, when, in fact, it's a physiological response to different types of stimuli,' Benvie, 40, told The Post. 'People can get ASMR from literally anything.' 7 Whisper Wave founder Rebecca Benvie aims to bridge the gap between sensory healing and accessible wellness. Tamara Beckwith While researchers are still studying the science behind ASMR, fans swear by its calming effects. Studies suggest it can ease stress and anxiety, boost mood, improve sleep and even offer temporary relief from chronic pain and depression. But it's not for everyone. Some people feel nothing, and for others, the triggers can actually have a distressing effect. Benvie, a longtime ASMR enthusiast with a background in somatic therapy and energy healing, discovered its healing power firsthand while seeking ways to manage her own PTSD. 'This is something I had personally been seeking out, and I was very surprised to see that nobody was doing anything like it in New York,' she said. 'I wanted to offer it to this very productive and stressed-out community.' 7 ASMR videos have attracted millions of people online. Tamara Beckwith What it's really like to get an ASMR treatment I hadn't dipped much into the world of ASMR myself, but when I heard Whisper Wave was offering live sessions — and charging $150 or more a pop — I had to find out what the buzz was about. At my appointment, the room was cozy and dim, lit by a flickering candle and a warm sunset lamp. It looked like a massage studio, but instead of lotions and hot stones, Benvie's toolkit was packed with feathers, brushes — and, as I soon found out, a few surprise items straight from the pet store. 'I want people to be taken back to a time when they were children being nurtured and cared for.' Rebecca Benvie She had me lie face-down on a silk-draped table under a light blanket. Clients are encouraged to dress comfortably, but Benvie is clear: The goal here is serenity, not seduction. Benvie greeted me with a serene smile, asked how I was feeling, and if there was anything specific I wanted her to focus on. Then she got to work — wafting essential oils through the air and gently combing my hair while reading a fairy tale in a soft, hypnotic whisper. 7 Not all people respond to the same ASMR triggers. Others never feel anything at all. Tamara Beckwith Before long, I was lulled into a dream-like state, my breath slow and steady. The first tingles hit when she lightly traced thin wooden sticks across my back. Then nylon brushes swept over my shoulders and neck, sending shivers down my spine. I was happy to join the club of people who feel those famous ASMR chills, but at first, I kept thinking: What on earth is Benvie using to make this happen? Eventually, I stopped analyzing and just surrendered. My racing brain finally shut up, letting my body take the wheel. Next up: soft makeup brushes gliding across my face, peacock feathers drifting lazily down my arms. At one point, I heard a faint metallic crinkle in my ear — which, it turns out, was a cat toy. The exact kind my tabby uses to stage 3 a.m. zoomies. Relaxing? Weirdly, yes. 'ASMR isn't just relaxation, it's a gateway to emotional and physical healing.' Rebecca Benvie Benvie followed that by slowly swirling a singing bowl over my head, its vibrations humming through my body. She traced words of affirmation on my skin, gently scratched my back and playfully mimicked cracking an egg on my scalp, letting her fingertips trickle down my neck like yolk. As our session came to a close, the usual hum of my anxious thoughts had quieted. The tension I'd lugged in — rush-hour stress, inbox overload, and brutal New York summer heat — had faded away. 7 Audio stimuli is one of the most common tools used to trigger ASMR. Tamara Beckwith More than anything, I felt cared for, transported back to girlhood as my mother tucked me into bed. 'I want it to feel very nostalgic,' Benvie said. 'I want people to be taken back to a time when they were children being nurtured and cared for.' From insomnia and anxiety to PTSD, Benvie said many of Whisper Wave's clients are struggling with personal challenges and come back regularly to recharge. But she emphasized that live ASMR can help others too — from stressed-out workaholics who can't relax to people dealing with breakups or major life changes. 'By addressing the nervous system and taking it down from its heightened, dysregulated state into a place of its more baseline calm, we're able to perform miracles on ourselves in terms of our own healing journeys,' Benvie said. 7 Many people experience relaxation, reduced anxiety and improved sleep after engaging with ASMR. Tamara Beckwith Some Whisper Wave clients, she noted, are just starving for human connection. 'Loneliness is one that we talk about a lot,' Benvie said. 'Outside of romance, many people aren't receiving enough physical touch, and can go weeks without more than a handshake.' Believe it or not, that can take a serious toll on your wellbeing. Studies have linked a lack of physical contact to feelings of loneliness, depression, anxiety and low self-esteem. It can spike cortisol — the body's primary stress hormone — and lead to sleep issues, weakened immunity, digestive problems and even heart trouble. 'Massage is one of the few services for human contact, but it can be physically challenging, and often lacks the softer, more nurturing element that so many of us crave,' Benvie explained. She knows firsthand. During a busy spell traveling for work, Benvie said she started booking massages not for sore muscles — but just to get some non-sexual, nurturing touch. 7 Why some people are affected by ASMR and not others remains to be seen. Tamara Beckwith For those less drawn to ASMR's tingly quirks, Whisper Wave offers treatments centered around hairplay and back rubs, designed to spark feelings of calm and closeness. There's also a 'Sleep Induction' session, where clients lie under a weighted blanket while Benvie performs rhythmic tapping and back tracking, paired with hypnotic whispers and gentle ambient sound. For anyone looking to go deeper, she's crafted a spiritual reset experience that blends ASMR with energy healing techniques like Reiki, herb smudging and aura cleansing. 'ASMR isn't just relaxation, it's a gateway to emotional and physical healing,' Benvie said. 'I just want people to leave feeling really cozy, like their whole system's been taken care of.' While ASMR might not be my new everyday escape, Whisper Wave delivers a rare dose of calm — and a few spine-tingling surprises — in a city where slowing down is easier said than done.
Black America Web
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Black America Web
Nottoway Plantation Fire Stokes Emotions On Social Media
Source: Google / Google The Nottoway Plantation in Louisiana burned down, and social media users expressed a wide range of emotions in response. The Nottoway Plantation in Louisiana, billed as 'the South's largest remaining antebellum mansion', was devoured by a fire over the past weekend. The responses to the fire have been a mix of emotions ranging from jubilation over the destruction of a symbol rooted in the horrors of the enslavement of Black people, to some expressing sadness as it represented 'the good old South' and their memories of weddings held there. Located 65 miles northwest of New Orleans, the 53,000-square-foot mansion had been rebranded as the Nottoway Resort in recent years, featuring amenities such as 40 overnight rooms, a honeymoon suite, a lounge, fitness center, and an outdoor pool and cabana. According to the National Park Service, 155 enslaved people were recorded at Nottoway Plantation in 1860. The website for Nottoway doesn't mention those people at all. And according to property owner Dan Dyess' words in the New York Post, there is no intent to do so: 'We are trying to make this a better place. We don't have any interest in left wing radical stuff. We we need to move forward on a positive note here and we are not going to dwell on past racial injustice.' That sentiment contrasts with how social media rejoiced in Nottoway burning down. One historian, Dr. Mia Crawford-Johnson, shared a selfie taken across from the site of the mansion burning down, which went viral. Others also shared videos celebrating the mansion's destruction by fire as justice for those who were enslaved, with some using it as an Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response video and editing the video with background music choices like Usher's 'Let It Burn.' Some historians have lamented the lost chance to preserve Nottoway as a site to illustrate the skill and ingenuity of Black enslaved people. 'There are no perfect answers here,' writes noted author and chef Michael W. Twitty in an MSNBC article. 'Nottoway could have gone the way of Whitney Plantation, also in Louisiana, which is a museum dedicated to helping visitors understand who the enslaved people were.' When contacted, Whitney Plantation Museum Executive Director Ashley Rogers felt that Nottoway's chance to go that route was lost long before the blaze. 'It was a resort,' Rogers said. 'I don't know that it being there or not being there has anything to do with how we preserve the history of slavery. They already weren't.' Nottoway Plantation Fire Stokes Emotions On Social Media was originally published on Black America Web Featured Video CLOSE
New York Times
21-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
This Hong Kong Art Show Aims to Put You to Sleep
James Taylor-Foster, a 32-year-old British-Swedish curator, wants you to fall asleep at their exhibition. Taylor-Foster, who uses he/they pronouns, said that would be the ultimate compliment for 'WEIRD SENSATION FEELS GOOD: The World of ASMR.' 'It's a weird space of public intimacy that requires a certain degree of vulnerability,' said Taylor-Foster, who curated the show, which explores what was once a little corner of the internet that's now become a global phenomenon. A.S.M.R., or Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, is a vaguely scientific-sounding term coined by a medical forum user in 2010 to describe a tingling feeling that spreads through a person's scalp; a warm, effervescent wave that can also make its way down a person's spine and could be produced by a variety of stimuli such as whispers, caresses, and looking at people playing with things like kinetic sand. A.S.M.R. soon took on its own life, and became an entire genre of videos on the internet that now number in the millions. The exhibition, which unfolds in five sections, opened last week and will run through July 13 at Gate33 Gallery in Hong Kong's Airside mall. With a focus on the auditory, visual and tactile, the exhibit brings the online world of gentle tapping, whispers and caresses into the real world. Over 40 pieces in various media will be on display, including a mechanical tongue dripping with saliva created by the Swedish artist Tobias Bradford; a motion graphic of synthetic vegetables made by the Copenhagen-based art duo Wang & Soderstrom; and what's thought to be the first A.S.M.R. video, a whispering video uploaded to YouTube 15 years ago. There will also be a room dedicated to the American painter Bob Ross, known for his dulcet tones, gentle affirmations and careful paintbrush scratches; and the coup de grâce: a giant chill-out area, made of a kilometer-long soft plush sausage pillow, sculpted to mimic the folds of the brain, where people are encouraged to watch videos and fall asleep. 'We do live in an incredibly noisy world, an incredibly loud and noisy world that is increasingly complex,' Taylor-Foster said. 'And I think ultimately, A.S.M.R. is guiding us to have, even if briefly, that little kind of moment of focus, of sensorial focus.' 'It helps some people's anxiety or insomnia, whatever, for a reason, because it is deeply important to what it means to be human,' they added. In putting the show together, Taylor-Foster spent a lot of time thinking about what attracts us to A.S.M.R. in this day and age, and how the phenomenon fits into our values as a society. 'It's completely subversive,' the curator noted. 'You know, it, like literally takes the ever-increasing speed of the internet or the processes in our smartphones. It takes that almost impossible accumulation of speed and proficiency, and it says, 'Wait, no, I'm going to use all this and I'm going to make something that is soft, slow, particularly antithetical to the world in which we live in.' 'And that is a form of radicalism. I do think that at its core, A.S.M.R. is a kind of radical response to something that we all know deep down inside is probably not good for us long term.' Taylor-Foster has seen the public perception of A.S.M.R. change over the years. 'When I would talk about A.S.M.R. in 2019, 2020, people would laugh,' Taylor-Foster said. 'Like they would laugh either because they thought it was stupid and irrelevant, or they would laugh because maybe they watched it every day, but they didn't want to tell anybody.' The early days of the pandemic, the curator said, changed all that as people looked for forms of self-medication against insomnia, anxiety and isolation they felt as countries across the world entered lockdowns. The first iteration of the show opened at Taylor-Foster's home institution, the ArkDes museum in Stockholm, in 2020 — first online, at the height of the period when people were coming to terms with social distancing, and later in person. The second edition of the show opened at the Design Museum in London in 2022, as people grappled with being back in the crowds. Taylor-Foster noted that the London iteration of the show saw some 97,000 people attend over several months. New to the Hong Kong show is an installation from two local sound artists, Kin Lam, 32, and AK Kan, 30, that recreates the soporific feeling of being on Hong Kong public transportation. 'Hong Kong people, we sleep in buses and the MTR and the minibus,' Kan, a sound engineer, whose Cantonese name is Kan Hei-chun, said on a recent video call, using the shorthand term for the Hong Kong subway. 'I used to sleep every time when I go to school and I just lay on the window, like that,' he said, making a leaning motion, 'and just sleep like that. And I was thinking, 'Why?'' He couldn't grasp why he could sleep in such an uncomfortable position, and wondered why people tend to sleep so much while riding public transportation. Lam, his collaborator — a percussionist and electronic sound artist who teaches at the Hong Kong Baptist University, where I also teach — agreed. Lam said, 'I would think all the white noise, all the people talking in the busy transportation, this is not going to be good for A.S.M.R. But then when I start doing the recording, it's like, actually, it's quite nice, because of all the low frequencies and all the hum.' 'And also, you are in a moving vehicle, there's also, like, some vibration and that actually makes you feel quite nice,' he added. It's something a local travel agency also noticed at the height of the pandemic. The company sold tickets for a 5-hour bus tour designed to allow people to take a snooze (ear plugs and sleep masks included in the price of the ticket). Tickets were snapped up in three days, with people paying between HK$99 (US$12.70) and HK$399 for a seat. Lam and Kan — along with Daisy Chu, the curator with the property developer Nan Fung Group, that owns Airside, who brought 'WEIRD SENSATION' to Hong Kong — have also created a do-it-yourself A.S.M.R. station at the exhibition. In it, people can use locally sourced objects like a bamboo dim-sum steamer, calligraphy brushes, jade massage balls and 'villain-hitting' slippers to explore what sounds give them the tingles, and record it. 'A.S.M.R. is usually, to me, quite gimmicky,' Lam said. 'But the more I do research, and the more I think about it, it's actually something really close to sound art.' 'Sound art, it's how you listen, how you change the way you listen,' he added. He holds up the bamboo steamer as an example of an ordinary object that can take on an auditory life of its own. There's a gentle rustling as he runs his fingers across the side, a crunchy rhythm as he taps the lid. 'When you have contact with this object, it responds to you,' Lam said. 'We always look for something interesting, or for something new constantly, but actually, you need to sit with one sound for a long time. 'It tells you 'Oh, this is my sound.''
Associated Press
14-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Associated Press
ASMR Stars® – The New Platform for ASMR and Relaxation is Live
The ASMR community has a new home! ASMR Stars® 'We wanted to create a space where ASMR Content Creators are truly valued and rewarded for their work, while also giving newcomers a real chance to grow.' — David Sroka, CEO ASMR Stars® NEW YORK, NY, UNITED STATES, March 14, 2025 / / -- The ASMR community has a new home! ASMR Stars ® has officially launched, offering a dedicated platform for ASMR creators to share their content with a global audience—either for free or through paid access. Meanwhile, ASMR fans can now explore an extensive range of whisper videos, relaxing sounds, and exclusive content, all in one place. ASMR Stars®: A Game-Changer for the Creator Industry ASMR Stars® is designed to empower content creators in the growing ASMR industry. Unlike mainstream content-sharing platforms, ASMR Stars® puts creators first, offering one of the highest revenue shares in the industry. Creators earn up to 75% of their revenue, while the remaining 25% supports platform maintenance and growth, ensuring a high-quality experience for both users and creators. The ASMR content creator industry has exploded in recent years, with millions of people using ASMR for stress relief, sleep aid, and relaxation. In fact, 'ASMR' was the most searched term on YouTube in 2024, proving its massive and growing global popularity. However, many creators struggle with monetization on traditional platforms due to ad restrictions and algorithm changes. ASMR Stars® solves this by offering a direct way for fans to support their favorite creators, while ensuring content remains easily accessible and ad-free. Unlike other platforms, creators have full control over their pricing and can freely set the value of their exclusive content, allowing them to monetize their work in a way that suits their audience and business model. Key Features & Benefits of ASMR Stars® ✅ Fair & Transparent Revenue Model: Creators keep up to 75% of their earnings, one of the highest payout rates available ✅ Monetization Options: Free content, premium subscriptions, and pay-per-view models allow creators to diversify their income ✅ Premium Relaxation Experience: High-quality audio and video streaming for the ultimate ASMR enjoyment ✅ Global ASMR Community: A dedicated platform connecting creators and fans worldwide Beyond Whispering – ASMR as the Future of Digital Well-Being ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) is more than just a trend—it is an established tool for mental well-being. Scientific research suggests ASMR can help reduce anxiety, lower heart rates, and improve sleep quality. ASMR Stars® is built to support this growing movement, providing a safe, fair, and distraction-free environment for creators and fans alike. Whether you're looking for soothing whispers, tapping sounds, or immersive ASMR experiences, ASMR Stars® offers the best curated content in the industry. Join the ASMR Revolution Today! Whether you're an ASMR lover searching for the perfect relaxation content or a creator seeking a fair, sustainable way to monetize your work, ASMR Stars® is the place for you! mindrix sl +34 644 31 46 82 YouTube Legal Disclaimer:
