Young adults increasingly struggling offline turn to ASMR videos, report finds | Mental health

Younger adults are increasingly overwhelmed by in-person interaction and soothing themselves instead with sensory online content, according to a new report on the wildly popular online content known as ASMR.

ASMR – autonomous sensory meridian response – describes a particular sensory phenomenon that is triggered by specific sights or sounds, which usually begins with a tingling sensation across the scalp and results in feelings of deep calm and relaxation.

Platforms such as YouTube and TikTok are crammed with thousands of these visceral videos, in which ASMR creators play with squishy slime, role-play braiding the viewer’s hair, whisper loving affirmations or paint the camera lens with spit, all aimed at stimulating these “tingles”.

Now the award-winning behavioural insights agency Revealing Reality has published a landmark report on the phenomenon, interviewing viewers and creators of ASMR content and analysing thousands of videos based on common triggers – such as exaggerated whispering, breathing and mouth sounds, tapping and crinkling sounds, gentle or fluttering hand movements – which many people use to help them unwind and sleep.

But the researchers note their “shock” at the “significantly higher” rates of younger people who said they found face-to-face interaction and noisy public places overstimulating, and question what the growing appeal of ASMR videos for this cohort reveals about their ability to navigate the messy unpredictability of offline life.

In a survey of more than 2,000 adults, Revealing Reality found a close correlation between age and sensitivity to both social and sensory stimuli: younger adults, aged 18-44, are more likely to find the world overstimulating, to want to shield themselves from external noise and face-to-face interactions as well as reporting greater enjoyment of ASMR.

In some cases, the age differences were pronounced:

• 47% of those aged 25-34 said they felt overwhelmed in noisy or busy places such as shopping centres or a train stations, compared with 35% of those aged 55-64.

• 39% of those aged 18-24 felt the need to shut out noise, for example using noise-cancelling headphones in public, compared with only 21% of those age 45-54.

• Younger age groups were also more likely to prefer chatting to people online rather than face-to-face and to prefer to work alone rather than around other people.

The research comes as audiologists raise concerns about an increase in young people referred to them with auditory processing problems, which may be linked to the overuse of noise-cancelling headphones.

But with data from the UK and the US showing that, compared with previous generations, young people are spending less time out in the world and experiencing more anxiety, the report also questions the impact on those who “shun the messy unpredictability of in-person interaction and try to meet all their human needs through a screen”.

In detailed interviews, users of ASMR content explain the comfort and pleasure they take from it: the “visceral calming” and “escapism”, from a world that is “too much”, and where even a stranger appearing to give you their full attention is “a luxury experience”.

But the researchers question whether ASMR is “like digital soma” for “increasing numbers of young people seeking to meet their natural wish for comfort and connection, for tactile experiences and messy play, for intimacy and attention” through these “synthetic” experiences.

“What if we forget that sometimes it’s good for us to do things that feel hard? What if, in shying away from the messiness of embodied human interactions, we miss out on things we need as individuals and as a species – pheromones, non-verbal communication, adaptability, emotional growth.”

Likewise, they question whether life really is more overwhelming than it used to be, or whether by “opting out of its more abrasive aspects” people are reducing their ability to deal with them.

Jenny Radesky, an associate professor at the University of Michigan and expert in the interaction of technology and child development, said the report offered an opportunity to reflect on how young people built resilience. “If life feels overwhelming then ASMR is an easy, fast, accessible resource that calms them down without having to do the work demanded, for example, by practicing breathing exercises or mindfulness.”

The difficulty was that ASMR calmed but did not necessarily enable young adults to reconnect with the wider world, she added. “Learning skills to apply at other times in your life is not usually an explicit part of ASMR. If you’re dependent on this content and you always need to access it to feel better, that is a problem for developing those skills independently. We need other options in young people’s real world, their social and physical context, so that there is more potential to learn resilience.”