Understanding Stimming: A Guide for Autistic Individuals

my mom's getting on me about taking better care of my skin and I cannot even do it. I use her special goat milk soap and good hair products because its nice feeling on skin and gives me nice fluffy hair but I have issues with how things feel when my hands have been in prolonged contact with water that I used to wear disposable gloves in the shower to combat that somewhat. I'm picky about skin lotions/creams/etc because of how it affects the skins on my hands (and other skin areas) doesn't help that they also like actually numb too. It can make me agitated and want to peel flesh off type of feels (best way to describe)

I don't do this anymore. I'm now obsessed with skin care and Jesus lmao.

Stimming is basically just anything that itches your brain and helps you regulate yourself. It can be anything from biting your lip to singing to playing with your hair or jewelry to echolalia (repeating words or phrases) to picking your skin to watching the same movie/video over and over again to banging your head to just anything like that. Everybody stims, but autistic people need to do it more because we need to regulate ourselves more.

I really like listening to loud edm music in a parked car to feel the vibrations against my body and vibe or body bounce. Like really bouncy and bassy and edm is perf for movement stims for me. I also did music stuff so like tapping my hands/fingers to beats, foot tapping wasn't reprimanded because my dad was a music person (and suspected asd too, but he barely acknowledges he has anxiety now). I had one that I stopped doing by preteen age because it was admonished. I can not describe it well though. I also have oral stim fixation (its why im a smoker), thumb sucker in utero and for most of my childhood but not publicly after a time, chewer of non food items (but not eat, except for sand as a small kid because i like the texture). I wanna find a chew toy thats....adult like and not a childs My negative stim is also an ocd body focused repetitive something. I have spent multi-hours to multi-days manually manipulating all the knuckle joints in my hand to the point I've partially dislocated one before kn my bad bad joint, and they no longer make the traditional pops/cracks of the knuckles after some time and are super swollen. I literally cannot stop unless I sedate myself with benadryl or my vistaril when I had an active script (it was to help for my fake itchiness due to skin numbness and feeling...creepy crawlie/bugs...turns out its used for ocd so it helped for the knuckle issue). I also like to pick at things (started out as the seams on my blankets as a toddler and kid and the like) and consider it a negative stim when it's my skin because my ocd forces me to pick (my nails or small pointy objects) at acne, blemishes on body, leg hair follicles, scabs especially itchy scabs(but im mindful if it's like say my back surgery wounds I was really good about not picking at them while healing because I knew what a big infection could do to the overall health of my spine and had my mother to keep an eye out on that).

For a long time I figured I wasn’t autistic because I “don’t stim”. But have since realized that when I was little I got in trouble for doing anything “weird”, so hand flapping, repetition, rocking, etc was not allowed. Got it beat out of me I guess. 🤷‍♀️ So.. I have hidden stims. I chew the inside of my lips raw, and scrunch my feet inside my shoes. I’ve done these since I was a kid but these are harder to notice.

As its a spectrum some are very good with body language etc as you are "masking" or mirroring what you've learned or looking for anything to point you in proper directions. You may think your a people watcher or may not realize but we adapt sometimes and work harder to notice things normies may notice. Stimming can be motions (flappy hands, wiggling, swaying etc). Everyone's stim is different and we are so use to it we don't notice it sometimes. Sometimes we get corrected by parents on weird behavior and stiffle it. I flap my hands when happy a little bit.