I’ve never felt more insane. I’ve always liked people who speak softly with little guttural pauses between their words to help me relax. I watched Bob Ross—the ‘fro-haired painter who created representations of happy clouds and 500-branched Evergreen trees—and tracked down clips of him on YouTube to help me relax. On the sidebar of all of his videos are hundreds, if not thousands, of other softly-spoken or whisper videos.
Aside from some professionally-guided masseuse videos, the videos are not short clips taken from already-established soft speakers like Bob Ross. Instead, they are mostly role plays of various professions with soft speakers like hair stylists and makeup artists. The makers of the videos speak softly to an imaginary person who doesn’t respond, carrying on a dialogue with oneself, essentially. Other videos include soothing noises like marbles being rolled on a flat surface, typing and water splashing.
In the comments for one video, a commentary asks what would happen if a roommate walked in on someone making a relaxation video of this kind. It would be hard to explain, but I think there’s a large community of people who enjoy relaxing voices like these, although I don’t know that before the YouTube age these people would call themselves a “community.”
I find spoken word videos more relaxing than soothing sounds or soft music because on some cognitive level, I think it slows down my brain. For the most part, I don’t actively listen to what’s being said, but inactively, my subconscious is listening to the words. I’m no psychologist, but I feel that the fact there is active soothing and inactive listening doesn’t allow my mind to wander to the dishes I have to wash or the homework I have to complete. It’s definitely more relaxing in my book than made-for-relaxation artists like Enya, who make me critique their lyrics or musical choices.
That’s why I don’t know about these made-for-relaxation videos. Bob Ross is soothing because he has another purpose—he wants to teach people to paint—and his relaxing voice is just an afterthought. With these videos, I find myself critiquing their choices like I do on relaxation music—does anyone find a potato chip bag rustling relaxing?—rather than simply listening to relaxing voice. Plus, it’s just kind of weird to listen to someone pretending to be an optometrist.
Do you listen to made-for-relaxation videos on YouTube? Do you find them more relaxing than music?