Based on your ASMR experiences…
Explain if you can stimulate or experience ASMR on command or spontaneously, include details like:
- Can you stimulate ASMR on command? If so, how do you trigger it?
- Does it ever happen spontaneously/randomly?
- Do you consider this meditation or something else?
- Do your immediate surroundings make a difference?
- How is the sensation similar or different from ASMR triggered by a video or by a real world stimulus?
Note: Sometimes self-induced ASMR is confused with self-induced frisson. If you feel chills, see your arm hairs rise up (piloerection), or experience goosebumps then you may be experiencing self-induced frisson (AKA voluntary piloerection) rather than self-induced ASMR.
- Read about frisson here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frisson
- Read about voluntary piloerection here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6071615/
If you think you are experiencing self-induced ASMR (rather than self-induced frisson), then please do share your answers and experiences in the Comments section below.
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ASMR University 
Can you stimulate ASMR on command?
I have been able to do this since I was about 4 or 5. I would just lay in bed and trigger it. I remember as a child being afraid that I was somehow damaging my body so I stopped. As an adult, I do it all the time to calm down or get revved up.
If so, how do you trigger it?
I close my eyes (I don’t have to, but I usually do) and actively manipulate something in the lower back of my head, somewhere between my ears. I always thought I was activating some king of gland that sends hormones through my body like waves. I really don’t know what’s going on. I haven’t talked about it with anyone, and I haven’t met anyone else that can do it. I just thought it was one of my many quirks.
Does it ever happen spontaneously/randomly?
Yes. In fact, It can be very intense, like spiritual experience intense. It is often triggered at concerts or deeply meaningful moments with friends and love ones.
I’m a bit reluctant to share the following because I just sounds weird. I have had a few experiences in which the ASMR was involuntary and overwhelmingly powerful and other people around me began to experience it as well like it was pouring out of me and spreading from person to person. Weird right, but it has happened 5 or 6 times.
Do you consider this meditation or something else?
No. I’ve always sucked at meditation because it requires a level of focus and discipline I seem to be lacking. This experience is as easy as moving my fingers. It does send powerful waves of energy through my body and I have always felt like it had some spiritual nature to it. When it comes involuntarily it is often connected to some deep thought or epiphany.
Do your immediate surroundings make a difference?
Not really. I don’t need external stimuli to trigger it, nor do I seek it out, I just can do it, anywhere, anytime I want.
How is the sensation similar or different from ASMR triggered by a video or by a real world stimulus?
I don’t think it is, but I am not really in to the videos. If it happens to me involuntarily, like while listening to music or during a deeply meaningful moment, it is much more powerful than what I can generate voluntarily. At times, it can literally knock me off my feet and become uncontrollably filled with emotion and tears. It’s not a bad feeling, quite the opposite. It is profound.
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Mine can just happen when I walk into a bank and folks are keyboarding and shuffling papers but when I want to sleep or nap and I put on Ina Garten.. her voice, the sounds of her unwrapping butcher paper and whisking eggs are almost orgasmic…. I fall asleep within minutes.
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I can do it on demand at any moment and would be happy to take part in any projects in relation to this.
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For me it’s spontaneous but I have been able to do it to myself. When it comes I have the ability to keep it I make more intense.
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I can do it any time I want to and never thought anything much about it. But I’ve never had it triggered by any event. Or if I did I didn’t notice it, since to me it’s just as ordinary as blinking or yawning.
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