Hand flapping.

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I hand flap while pacing, but I think I only do this at home. Out in public I tap my fingers on my leg, or arm, or neck.

My son flaps. A lot. He is four though, I don't know if that will start to go away as he becomes more socially aware? We used to have an occupational therapist that worked on a whole "clap, not flap" thing with him. Fail! LOL. He still flaps. We call it his "happy hands." One of my other kids has a whole repetive finger movement that she does when she's thinking, and my husband taps his foot. Because they're not on the spectrum (supposedly), it's just considered a "nervous habit." My opinion is that things are considered a nervous habit when they're not that noticeable and don't freak other people out. My son's flapping is noticeable and surprises other people, so it's a "spectrum" behavior.

Maybe? I do it with my ring, middle and index fingers without even realising, they wave up and down amazingly fast.

Not many diseases have this as a symptom which narrows it down a bit.

Probably most famous disease that does have finger/hand flapping as a symptom would be mercury poisoning.
There's really no way to test for the mercury itself reliably, so get your glutathione levels tested (blood test).
If you have an odd gait/walk as well as hand flapping then that narrows it down a heap. I'd be confident you had mercury poisoning if you had both of these. (Another sign is red knuckles and ears which may sometimes appear). Tinnitus and vertigo may also may appear.

Glutathione is what flushes out mercury and other heavy metals from the body, studies have shown autistics have severely deficient glutathione levels.

So if you don't have this chemical mercury will build up in your tissues meaning there's no reliable way to test for it other than multiple biopsies.

This was one of the reasons people were so mean to me in school. I hate to even think about it.

TheHaywire, thanks for posting that. I have the feeling that my son's "happy hands" are adorable to us but will be a social problem in school.

I´ve never flapped or rocked either. My only stim was a vocal stim in which I pronounced words with very high or very low pitch. I stopped it when people said it was annoying and strange! I don´t miss it.

I like to rock a bit, and tap my fingers on hard things, but I like hand flapping best. My mom got me to stop doing it in public, but it really helps me calm down and feel good when I'm getting anxious. I need to stop rocking so much, it starts as swaying that can pass for normal, but soon it gets noticable.

I tap my foot and like to rock back and forth. I try to not do the hand flap in public but I do it AlOT when I'm driving alone for some reason. I drive with my right hand up and when the music comes on, it's like I just can't help myself.

Claw-hands! I do that too, but I call it tai-chi hands. When my boyfriend sees me doing it, he pretends i'm a velociraptor (rawr). I sway and drag my finger-tips and toes over textured surfaces too. Fun.

The more I read the posts on here, the more I see behavior in the rest of my family (including me) that is spectrum-y. One of my daughters, who is NT, does a lot of finger-flicking and needs to run her hands over textured surfaces too. I asked my son's neurologist if that is what is meant by "broader autistic phenotype," and he agreed that in many families, there lots of family members with some autistic-type traits. The autistic chid in that family is "just the tallest mountain in a very large mountain range." I liked the analogy.

Oh yes! I do a bit of Aspie spotting, but it's only because I'd like to have more Aspie friends in my life.

I'm not an Aspie and I hand flap a little, not necessarily as a stim but if I'm trying to think of something or am very excited. I think of it as a girly thing, no offense to the guys who do it.

My eldest Aspie son is a rocker and chews on everything. I'm going to try to make him some chewelry that looks manly.

Middle Aspie son does chicken wing arms, and toe walks, and does this thing with his ear and thumb.

Another follow-up. I just realized my (supposedly NT) daughter also does the claw-hands thing. It's fascinating because it seems like it takes so much muscle strength to do it, and yet she has a fine motor skill delay.

I tend to do hand-flapping from time to time but, it's not as frequent as when I was a kid though..

I don't do that. I push the ring on my finger up and down, tap my fingers on things and rock my leg back and forth. I never noticed these were stims until recently.

I'm a hand-flapper, but not as often as I did when I was little, and only when I'm by myself. I also rock back and forth sometimes when I'm feeling agitated. I know several NTs who don't know much about autism but know that hand-flapping is a sign of it. When I was in kindergarten my parents actually wondered if I had Asperger's because of the hand flapping. Too bad they didn't ever follow up on that.