When do you stim?

Post Reply New Topic

I do it at odd times but alot of times being bored. (AKA now I'm moving a pen around in my mouth.) LOL! At times while watching tv relaxing I gnaw on my knuckle and play with my flash drive in my mouth. I also tend to move my ring alot. My older sister HATES this trait! LOL! the ring thing is random or nervousness. (Example everyone talking and I'm playing with my ring LOL!)

It's almost entirely dictated by my level of physical energy. When I'm calm or tired, I don't stim much. When I'm excited, anxious, interested, thinking hard, frightened, or angry, I'll stim so much you'd think I couldn't do anything else; but really, I'm probably thinking very quickly and often quite efficiently. This is notable because both "good" and "bad" states can make me stim more. At the very top of the overload scale, near-meltdown, I don't stim much at all; what I do will be a single, repetitive thing, often banging my hand or head against something, rubbing or pinching skin, usually not hard enough to cause injury, just trying to overwrite the stuff that's getting to me. Could be that some of the stimminess is also ADHD fidgeting. I do some of my best studying while in constant motion.

I wonder how many other autistic, especially children, just get too overloaded to move much, and whether it is perceived as a good thing by the people who care for them because they're stimming less...

Could be one of the reasons I'm OK with predicting/preventing meltdowns: At the anxiety or frustration stage, before I lose the energy, something about the constant-motion stimming tends to give me enough mental energy to avert the problem before it gets out of hand. If I deal with it at that point, I never quite lose control and go to the sluggish, repetitive sort of thing that happens just before I lose it.

Many of my stims are muscle-twitches and aren't extremely visible; but the rocking, flapping, finger-tapping, leg-jiggling usually shows.

I tend to stim a lot when I am anxious or excited.

Rocking to me is what purring is to cats....They do it when they are in a state of deep contentment
or when extremely agitated.

When I'm stressed or talking to people I don't know very well I tend to stim - finger tapping the side of my thigh. It is fairly subtle though so I'm not sure many people notice it.
As a young child I used to flap my arms up and down against my sides but it got too much attention from parents teachers and other children so the stims became more discrete. The most discrete of all is the constant counting which never seems to stop, or tapping out numbers with my teeth.

I don't know if I stim when I'm excited - I'm too busy talking a thousand words a minute at high volume to notice.

I don't stim at all. Or rock or anything at all.

I rock when I am anxious, which is often. I get up and pace rapidly about the house at random, usually when something intellectual has excited me. When I can't (because I'm in a class or something) I vibrate one leg. I fiddle with small objects all the time. I smoke, a form of fiddling, and I hand-roll my cigarettes, a more complicated one.

I have this video of myself talking into a microphone from when I did radio-type stuff. I'm all fired up and excited about what I'm saying and the vocal performance. It is disturbing to watch -- my voice is smooth and attentive, speech almost perfectly well-organizsed, but I'm hyperkinetic in just about every way, waving my arms around, wiggling my fingers, and doing super-short fast rocking movements. I had no idea I look so spastic when I'm impassioned about what I'm saying, but I realised after seeing the video that I do the same thing when talking to certain people. Fortunately I'm pretty still when talking most of the time. Though I did a presentation to a class recently and knew I was gesturing too fast and too sharply.

same here,even when using laptop.

Ditto those. As a school kid I used to vibrate my legs and remember being told off for doing it.
If I'm at home and something is really intellectually stimulating I pace up and down the room really quickly.
If I'm talking about something interesting or complicated my arms gesture wildly. A former boss used to mock me in a joking sort of way - when in a meeting and I was talking he would often wave his arms about and smile at me. I don't think he meant any malice. One of my nick names at college was Magnus Pike - named after an English Television personality who used to do science demonstrations and also waved his arms around with wild gestures.

I also tend to speak very, very quickly when excited - I sometimes see people backing away as though I'm physically assaulting them with the barrage of words.

I sometimes rock when socialising. Probably once a day for a moment or two?

It happens more during super stressful situations.

Yeah. I have to carefully slow my speech. I remember working really hard at that when I was in High School and did speech-making contests. Then I had to remember to be expressive with my body and move around some, rather than having to try to tone down the movements. Now I'm comfortable enough with public speaking that I don't naturally stand perfectly still and am instead trying not to be hyperkinetic.

Maybe they're backing away because you're waving your arms wildly? Maybe not, though. A friend of mine told me that her sister is afraid of me (they are both in their forties) and once I'd heard it I started to look for it whenever I see the sister. She backs away just a tiny bit even if I'm halfway across the room and have a load of books keeping my arms still when I'm talking. I've been told by many people that my attention is too intense. It's why I've chosen the little goshawk picture for an avatar, those birds can't look at anything without seeming like they've chosen it as a target.