Hey everybody, before we start the show, I want to make a couple disclaimers.

This show does cover a wide variety of topics related to mental health and life in general,

and some of those could be sensitive for you.

I want to simultaneously encourage you to be brave in consuming difficult content, but also respect and recognize your limitations.

So please use your best judgment. I will never be offended if you need to skip a question or an episode entirely but feel free to feel it out

check out the episode and just see what happens if you need to skip that's okay

but you know feel free to give it a shot first I also need to say that while I am a

psychologist I'm not your psychologist and I'm not your therapist.

This is not intended to be direct medical advice and you should not use this as a substitute for professional help.

So with those said, let's go ahead and get into the show.

Let me start with the story. Back in sixth grade we did science camp.

That means we went on a trip to this little ranch where we stayed in cabins with other students and learned about

sciency stuff out in the wilderness. There was this one encounter that I

remember very vividly. My group was gathered around a fire at night and one of the female camp counselors was teaching us about geological

concepts and volcanoes. She just had the most soothing voice, and she was so engaging, and I was sitting there staring off into the flickering flames listening to her talk about magma and I realized that my head and my neck were just tingling

this pleasant euphoric sort of tingling. And that was one of my first

memorable experiences with something called ASMR. Welcome, friends of all varieties, this is the Hardcore Self Help Podcast and today I'm going to do a highly requested deep dive episode all about ASMR.

What it is, how you can use it, and also at the end of this I'm actually going to include a

little bonus ASMR recording for you fans out there. So let's start with

what the heck is ASMR. ASMR is just a total pseudoscience term that the internet made up to describe a common phenomenon.

It stands for autonomous sensory meridian response and like I said I'm not even going to try to break that down because it's just a bullshit pseudoscience term.

But what it refers to is this pleasant tingling feeling that you can get in the back of your neck,

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