Is stimming a "normal" aspie practice?

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Just wondering... as neither my son or I stim as far as I can work out.

Many of us on the spectrum do stim, but some of us probably do it more than other. I don't keep track of my stims.

Tim

I rock back and forth to calm down.
I moving my legs back and forth. Or something like that.

what is stimmimg?

The only "odd" stim I do is kind of a subtle rocking. I never even knew it was a stim or that a stim was kin of a repetitive movement that psychiatrists call self STIMulating, etc... hence the name.

Steve

I stim when thoughts of my obsessions fill my head and I get excited in bursts of Aspergian joy.

I only do if I get really agitated or excited.

I do a lot of monologuing and pacing. That's how I stim. When I'm alone, I monologue almost always...if someone is there that I am unaware of, and they catch me I get so embarrassed! I know talking to myself, including asking myself questions and then answering them is not normal, and that I am only PRETENDING that a person I'm picturing in my head associated with my topic is not really there, but I get powerful feelings as I have all my life from stimming like this!

http://www.autistics.org/acc/index.html Banner at the top that is stimming, but not everyone Rocks that much sometime's you will not even notice... I do It when my anxiety kick's up to my heart beating in my Neck, but never noticed it before, probably too busy been anxious...

Note In Adv ( Note: This is humor, Site )


Sense Stereotypic Behaviors
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
(Visual) staring at lights, repetitive blinking, moving fingers
in front of the eyes, hand-flapping

(Auditory) tapping ears, snapping fingers, making vocal sounds


(Tactile) rubbing the skin with one's hands or with another
object, scratching

(Vestibular) rocking front to back, rocking side-to-side


(Taste) placing body parts or objects in one's mouth,
licking objects

(Smell) smelling objects, sniffing people


/*
Abstract

Children with autism often exhibit self-stimulatory (or "stimming") behaviors. We present an on-body sensing system for continuous recognition of stimming activity. By creating a system to recognize and monitor stimming behaviors, we hope to provide autism researchers with detailed, quantitative data. In this paper, we compare isolated and continuous recognition rates of emulated autistic stimming behaviors using hidden Markov models (HMMs). We achieved an overall system accuracy 68.57% in continuous recognition tests. However, the occurrence of stimming events can be detected with 100% accuracy by allowing minor frame-level insertion errors.
*/

http://www.breakingtheviciouscycle.info ... _27_04.pdf

It's common but it's not inevitable.

And as with a lot of things, there's a spectrum which can catch a good number of "normal" people too, if you're not careful.
Does stroking your beard, when thinking, count? I've always been something of a hair twiddler (was never a thumb-sucker) but the hair on my head is getting in short supply.

If I actually think about it, I stim quite often, but I'm sure you can be an Aspie and not stim, it's like with every symptom/character traits of AS, we don't necessarily have to have every single one of them.

I think I stim quite a bit, maybe there are even some I don't know about. I usually do it when I'm excited.

Would the fact that I like to drum my fingers in complex rhythms when I feel stressed constitute "stimming"?

Think the rule of (Stimming) is anything that you do allot " self STIMulating " is classed as Stimming...

Ill look it up to make sure that is right,

/*
Stereotypy or self-stimulatory behavior refers to repetitive body movements or repetitive movement of objects. This behavior is common in many individuals with developmental disabilities; however, it appears to be more common in autism. In fact, if a person with another developmental disability exhibits a form of self-stimulatory behavior, often the person is also labelled as having autistic characteristics. Stereotypy can involve any one or all senses.

One set of theories suggests that these behaviors provide the person with sensory stimulation (i.e., the person's sense is hyposensitive). Due to some dysfunctional system in the brain or periphery, the body craves stimulation; and thus, the person engages in these behaviors to excite or arouse the nervous system. One specific theory states that these behaviors release beta-endorphins in the body (endogeneous opiate-like substances) and provides the person with some form of internal pleasure.

Another set of theories states that these behaviors are exhibited to calm a person (i.e., the person's sense is hypersensitive). That is, the environment is too stimulating and the person is in a state of sensory-overload
*/

Most of my life I was told to stop doing what I now know is called stiming.For example: "stop tapping your foot!".Now that I am by myself more and I read all about it,I'm starting to do things that even I consider weird.I've recently "caught" myself hand-flapping,foot-shaking and whistling songs that I don't even like.I find it very relaxing and I don't intend to try and stop myself anytime soon.