"Stimming" and "fidgeting"

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I don't know what the difference is. All I know is that I can never stop moving for more than a few seconds.

I do know that I bounce my knee around a lot, pushing against the ground with the ball of my foot (but never leaving the ground, it's quite a fast shake, almost like a slower vibration). Sometimes it matches the resonant frequency of the room I am in and things on shelves will start to shake (which is my cue to try toning it down a bit).

I also tend to put my fingers together in one hand, place it in the palm of my other hand, and open the hand up, running the tops of my fingernails down the adjacent hand's fingers, then switching off as it reaches the end and doing the same. Sometimes I will also run the tops of my fingernails up the soft side of my arm, starting from my elbow.

I know my leg is almost always in motion, but I'm not actually sure how often I do the finger thing (also because I tend to type quite a bit which means I can't do it). I think I'm usually too absorbed in what I am doing or thinking to take notice of what else I might be doing. I've wondered what frequency determines stimming versus a periodic fidget not necessarily 'AS associated' (a curiosity magnified because I am still waiting to get a formal opinion regarding diagnosis, so I'm elevating my self-awareness to try to come to some likelihood-of-being-diagnosed in the mean time).

It doesn't necessarily bother me to sit still, though. Is it something aspies tend to 'need' to do to 'feel right'? If an aspie who figets/stims a lot is told to consciously sit still, would it bug them, or could they sit still fine until they eventually forget and start doing it again? Or I guess the other possibility is that they couldn't sit still even if they were asked to?

Being that I'm rarely around other people, it's hard for me to get a bearing on if the subconscious things I do have a great enough frequency or magnitude to be considered abnormal.

I think the difference is that stimming is done to receive something (a pleasurable sensation) and fidgeting is done to release something (excess energy).

Also, on average, stimming and fidgeting look different. Stimming tends to be the same movement over and over, with relatively little variation, while fidgeting tends to be a wide variety of different movements. For example, in the same time period, a stimming kid might sit there rocking slightly while flicking his fingers in peripheral vision; while a fidgeting kid might poke his neighbor, flop on his back, get up, twirl around, grab an object within reach, chew on said object, fiddle with moveable parts on said object, set the object down, and then kick several times. Of course this is not a general rule, since fidgeting can be the same movement over and over, and some kids have many different stims and alternate between them, but fidgets tend to be more varied than stims in my experience.