There is a trend on the internet these days for ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) content. It’s a pseudoscientific name for a stimulus that gives you a pleasurable tingling feeling accompanied by a sense of calm.
For someone who doesn’t do TikTok, I’ve only come across it on my mindfulness apps, where I find it extremely annoying to have someone telling fairy stories in French in a grating whisper rather than in a perfectly nice normal speaking voice. However for the target audience, generally young people, the videos are watched to soothe feelings of being overwhelmed by the outside world.
I would dismiss it as hooey except one of the examples given in an article I recently read was being groomed for nits. When our kids were young, this was always my job. My husband’s eyesight was apparently too poor, and time too precious (this was unspoken), to do it. His approach, if left to his own devices, was for a full scale chemical blitzkrieg of Agent Orange proportions, if you’ll forgive my conflating war related metaphors. When one of the offspring complained of an itchy head, my heart would sink, knowing that I’d be spending hours each evening for the next week or so, literally going through all their hair with a fine toothed comb. You’d think that children would rebel against being forced to sit still for large periods of time, having their mum rummage around their scalp, but that wasn’t the case. They were usually surprisingly cooperative. I have subsequently discovered that at least one of them would tell me they thought they had an infestation when really all they wanted was some mother-daughter bonding time. I suppose I should take this as a sad indictment of my parenting skills – join the queue! – but there was certainly something satisfying, soothing, and simply simian about it. One joy in the process was mine alone – locating the offending nit or louse, pulling it out, and then squashing it on the tabletop with my fingernail, where it made a very satisfying popping noise and occasionally left a bloodied smear on the piece of paper that I recorded my kills on. Delightful.
