Would this be a type of stimming?

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This is kind of a weird question, so bear with me. But for pretty much my entire life I’ve had this habit, and it only recently occurred it might be related to the idea of stimming.

A little hard to describe, but I have a tendency to shake books. Usually little pamphlets or instructions manuals, thinner books. I’ll open them a page or two, hold them between my fingers on one page, and just kind of idly shake them while doing other stuff. Not violently, but enough they fall apart after several weeks. Game collectors would hate me with all my destroyed manuals. I don’t even like losing them myself, but I’ve just acclimated. I at least try to use things that are more disposable, like those little instruction pamphlets medication comes with.

Hard to say why I do it, it just…feels good? And helps me concentrate a bit. I tend to do it while playing games and stuff. It also isn’t a need or anything. I go about my public day without doing this, it’s only at home.

Does this sound relatable at all to anyone? Obviously I doubt anyone I know does this, nor would I want to ask. My friends do know I do it, I think they just sort of accept it as an oddity. One friend even gave me a particular booklet I, um, liked the feel of more? Which was nice, though I doubt he remembers.

When I was a pre teen/early teen I would NEED to smack the corners of the walls in the hallway leading from the living room to my bed room... with my right index finger and the adjacent finger...as I walked by. If I "missed" and hit empty air...I would step back to smack it again....to set things right.

Mom had to use a lot of 409 clean the body oils off the spots I would smack.

I out grew it and never looked back sometime in jr. high. But it was like what you're talking about.

Maybe you should buy a copy of a book you hate. And then do your ritual thing with that book...so the only book that gets destroyed is that one hated book, and the material you want to use/read/consume is spared. Kinda like a kitty cat's scratching post!

Given that you don't like doing it and have destroyed stuff, this falls into OCD or obsessive compulsive disorder.
I just had someone confide to me that he has OCD. One of my feminine traits is that people will share deep dark secrets like that.

You are pretty much stuck if you have OCD. I recall an OCD site called stuck in a doorway.

Some of the stuff I do looks like OCD, but I can be easily distracted by "shiny bright objects."
That never happens to someone with OCD.

If, by chance, all books disappeared from this world, you would find something else to replace it with.

Yeah I like it it sounds like something I'd like to do that does

I'd call it a stim

I once knew a boy who would walk into a house house and start swinging all the pictures that where hooked on the walls

It was hilarious. The whole living room would be swinging and he would be laughing and laughing while he was doing it.

It’s possible it’s some sort of OCD, but I don’t know if that description is exactly right. I wouldn’t say I don’t like doing it, it’s more that it has a negative trade off that I don’t think outweighs the positives in my mind. It’s not a compulsion per se, my mind still sees it as a “hobby” that’s fun to do. Maybe like, I don’t know, popping the bubbles in bubble wrap. Meaningless but amusing.

Same thing if I were forced to stop doing it. I wouldn’t choose to do so, and yeah I would find things to replace it with it. But if it was vital I could, and I’d likely forget about it over time. Though obviously I can’t say for certain.

I’m not really looking for advice to stop or anything, I’m content with this. This was moreso just for curiosity as to why I do this weird and random thing.

Yeah you should do it if your happy and you're not harming anyone

I can't see why anyone here would try and tell you to stop doing it

2 to 3% of the population has OCD.
It is quite likely that many are in denial.

My wife had OCD which is how I learned so much about it.
The GF of a professional who have me an unofficial autism diagnosis also has OCD.

Part of my job was answering questions quickly and efficiently, as there were a ton of them.
Some of the questions were rhetorical. In the interest of efficiency I got good at answering those as well.
You asked a question and I came up with an answer.

I'd say that's a stim! It's a repetitive behavior (which is the basis of a stim) that feels good to you!

I do a lot of stimming with paper as well--I like to bend paper between my fingers when I am reading, and run my fingers between the pages at a specific angle repeatedly (feeling the texture), and open and close a paper fan I got in Hawaii over and over again.

I used to do something with magazine pages when I was a kid that made me feel really good

I can't even explain in words what it was...I'd literally have to show you but that's not really an option and I don't even know if I could do it nowadays

I still do that occasionally. I used to do it a lot as a child. I was hyperlexic and obsessed with books. I would smell them, shake them, get immense pleasure from feeling certain types of paper...