What is stimming?
This is going to be a long post.
Stimming is a slang term in the autistic community derived from the medical term self-stimulation, although the term can be used for a wide variety of self-soothing behaviours as well. The term is used widely in the autistic community and can refer to more obvious stims like hand-clapping or more subtle ones like muscle clenching.
Autistic people may stim either deliberately or automatically. Sometimes you’re not even aware that you’re doing it. Some stims might even feel like they happen to a person rather than are done by them, such as when they’re associated with zoning out or if the impulse is very difficult to suppress (if this is the case, it might even feel akin to OCD).
Some stims are very pleasing to engage in but other stims may be unwanted by the autistic person for a variety of reasons. For example, they may be harmful or perceived to be socially inappropriate. Unwanted stims can include jaw clenching, tooth grinding, hair pulling, skin picking, finger biting, and others. Sometimes these urges are there and can be avoided by switching to another stim, but other times they can cause problems for an autistic person.
Some autistic people are proud of their stims, and may even feel sorry for non-autistic people for not being able to enjoy the sensory experience of stimming as much as autistic people do. However, due to social stigma, other autistic may feel embarrassed or ashamed of their urge to stim and may suppress it or only do it in private.
Stimming, in general, is life-enhancing. Many autistic people consider it essential to their mental health. Stims can provide an escape and act as a coping mechanism.
Stimming can include any of the senses:
- Sight: Visual stims might include zoning out while watching shadows of light on a wall, looking into a light source, rapidly blinking, and so on.
- Sound: Auditory stims can include listening to sounds, making sounds, or repeating them (such as repeating phrases or words over and over).
- Taste: Eating spicy foods can be an enjoyable stim for some, or eating food with specific textures or colours.
- Smell: This might include smelling “smelly” things like essential oils, or smelling different items like the sleeve of a jumper you are wearing, and so on.
- Touch: Touch is a very common stim as it can be very subtle, such as tapping your fingers on your leg or holding your own hands, or touching things around you.
- Temperature: Feeling hot and cold things, or making yourself either hot or cold.
- Proprioception: This is the sense of self-movement and can involve running, rocking, pacing, spinning, jumping up and down, or dancing (even when there is no music!).
- Pain: Pain can feel pleasurable to someone regardless of whether they are on the spectrum or not. The difference is context, quality, and amount. Examples of pain as a benign stim include gently biting your lip, pinching your skin with your fingernails, hair pulling, or eating a very spicy chilli pepper.
- Balance: Standing on one leg, spinning, walking on tiptoes are all examples of balance stims.
- Vibration: Humming can cause one’s lips to vibrate, electric massagers can vibrate muscles, and so on.
- Various internal stimuli: some autistic people might allow themselves to feel hungry or thirsty, or hold their breath.
There is also the sense of time, but I think you’d have to be another kind of being altogether to use that as a stim… that’d be, like, The Highest Level Autistic: Able to Stim With the Concept of Time.
Non-autistic people “stim” as well, but not to the intensity as autistic people do. If you are reading this and thinking, “Well, everybody does that…” you’re partially right. Non-autistic people should be able to relate to some stims but won’t necessarily be able to relate to how important they are to autistic people. This is partially evidenced by non-autistic people telling autistic people to “just stop it”. Autistic people need to stim.
