Arms

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I have this problem too. Anyone sometimes don't know where to look?

I like to touch things while I am walking around so that keeps my arms busy. I am usually touching something on my clothing or my bag, like rubbing a button or playing with a zipper pull, or twirling a string around my finger. I can't just let my arms hang. Sometimes I cross them. I usually don't have pockets on my clothes but if I do I like to put my hands in my pockets. But I usually end up rubbing the inside of the pocket and that probably looks...wrong.

I too am always doing that with my wrists & fingers.

About arm/hand gestures. For the longest time, and perhaps still sometimes, I was quite uncoordinated with such things, or I was "blind" to the actual position & orientation of my hands/arms. As an example, when saying goodbye to a friend I would put my arm up and hand open for a "good bye" friendly hand shake. Well one night someone pointed out how weird my arm/hand looked when doing this, I'm not going to explain how it looked but I'll say it didn't look how I felt & thought it looked .










I do this as well. I was actually thinking about this today while waiting for my order of food to be ready. I was thinking about this thread and how not knowing where to look somewhat relates to the feeling I get of not knowing what to do with my arms. Usually when I'm in a place like a restaurant, or a store, any place with a lot of people. Regardless my attention often gets grabbed by lots of things, the worst is when I'm staring at something and don't realize there's a person between my self and the thing I'm staring at.




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I too touch A LOT of things. When I was a kid it was much worse though. When going into a store there would be such a variety of different items and textures I wanted to feel and rub it all, and my mom would get angry at me for touching everything. I liked to smell a lot of things too.


Now that I'm older I've tried to suppress this urge to touch and feel so many things, maybe that's why I now have more troubles with not knowing what to do with my arms/hands (combined with more awareness of my body). But also like you mentioned I'll sometimes use a small item to "stim" and keep my hands busy with, a piece of string, a rubber band, a piece of paper to fold repeatedly, etc. This is something I've tried to suppress as well though. I often have a bottle of water with me where ever I go, so that's at least something to give my hands something to hold, and I'll toss it around and spin it in my hands it a lot.



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I was also really bad about that when I was younger. I would go down the aisles and touch everything that looked interesting to me. Sometimes I still do it, though I try to limit myself and I stop if other people are around.

I also have a hard time knowing what to do with my arms sometimes. I do the T-rex arms that someone mentioned sometimes, but I stop when I realize I'm doing it. Most of the time, I keep my hands in my pockets or even grip the sides of my jeans below the pockets when I walk.

If I'm not holding anything then I don't know what to do with my arms. I don't know what I'm going to do in the summer when I can't just shove my my hands in my coat pockets...

I like to carry a Rubik's cube with me so that I have something to do with my hands. Been doing it since the thing came out. It gives me something to hold, something to do with my hands (and arms since hands are tied to them) and even serves as a short conversation starter.

I distinctly remember as a young girl practicing swinging my arms while walking! Now it is not so necessary to think about, especially since it is acceptable these days to be carrying your cell phone around everywhere you go in your hands. So I usually just hold my cell phone in my hands when I am walking or standing talking to people and then you don't have to really be doing anything with your arms or hands.