More Than a Feeling
Review of the HarperAudio audiobook edition (November 2019)

Unwind Your Mind is a combination memoir, history and self-help book on the ASMR ( Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) phenomenon. Emma WhispersRed describes her own personal experience with the sensation and her gradual discovery of its online community and its history. The internet has allowed for this previously private experience to become a shared one. Anecdotal evidence suggests that in the pre-internet age, experiencers would never meet any one else in real life who also had the sensation. Most would then not discuss it further when met with puzzlement and disinterest by others. This has changed quite dramatically in the past 10 years or so and also with the sensation having been assigned a name. There is now a gradual trend towards academic studies to examine the sensation which has been shown to demonstrate the beneficial effects of a relaxed heart rate and a meditative state.

Emma WhispersRed is the ASMRtist performance pseudonym of Emma Smith, who lives with her family outside of London, England. She is one of the veterans of the ASMR performance world having amassed over 900,000 YouTube followers in 7 years. Emma narrates most of this audiobook edition except for a brief passage narrated by Kristin Atherton.

Trivia and Links
Emma Smith's co-authored research paper More than a feeling: Autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) is characterized by reliable changes in affect and physiology is available online here.

On a personal research note, I have been collecting instances of ASMR in fiction and have tagged those on a fiction shelf. If anyone reading this comes across further examples I would be very happy to hear about them. Thanks in advance!

Example passages will usually describe a tingling sensation triggered by sound (usually a calm voice or a tapping/friction sound) that moves down from the head into the body (shoulders and spine) such as:

"K...R..." said the nursemaid, and Septimus heard her say "Kay Arr" close to his ear, deeply, softly, like a mellow organ, but with a roughness in her voice like a grasshopper's, which rasped his spine deliciously and sent running up into his brain waves of sound which, concussing, broke. A marvellous discovery indeed - that the human voice in certain atmospheric conditions (for one must be scientific, above all scientific) can quicken trees into life! - excerpt from Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf.

I was listening to the quick regular tapping of a woodpecker when slowly a chill feeling seemed to grow up from the small of my back to my shoulders, in a constricting spasm like a shudder, and at the roots of my hair a tingling sensation began and ran down over the surface of my flesh, leaving me goose-fleshed and cold, though I was damp with sweat. - excerpt from the short story The Old Chief Mshlanga in This Was the Old Chief's Country by Doris Lessing.

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Life is stressful. I know that's not breaking news. However the last few weeks have been stressful in an entirely different way. Stress can be harmful to your health, so learning how to deal with it in a healthy way is important. Everybody deals with stress differently, and Autonomous Sensory Meridian response (ASMR) is one of those ways.

Before I began listening to this audiobook, I had no idea what ASMR was or how it helps with stress. But in fact, I did know. I just didn't know that the sensation had a name. And I'd actually experienced the sensation before. My daughter does know what it is, and when I mentioned I was listening to a book about ASMR, she showed me a bunch of YouTube videos that were dedicated to different ASMR sounds.

Unwind Your Mind is great source to learn about ASMR. Emma WhispersRed does a fantastic job in explaining what ASMR is and its history. Listening to the audiobook was a great way to experience ASMR firsthand. Emma has a very soothing voice that almost put me to sleep because it was so relaxing. Emma explains how you can use certain techniques to apply ASMR to your everyday life.

I found this book to be fascinating. Unwinding my mind is something that is hard for me to do at times, and I intend to put some of Emma's suggestions to use. If you suffer from stress, anxiety, and/or insomnia, you might want to check this book out.

*My thanks to HarperAudio for a digital copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own. ( )