Playing with hair?

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Hi everyone,

I have an odd habit I've had for as long as I've had long hair (years, and years). My two usual stims are bobbing my knee rapidly and flapping my foot, but this one's slower, so it makes me wonder. It can go fast & intense too, but never with the whirriness of the other two. I twist my hair around and around my finger(s), then bring it through itself in a loop, then pull it tight until it releases. Often I find myself running it against my lips, too. It's really soothing, so I don't generally mind, even though the last bit makes me hygiene-squick occasionally. It seems to happen at the same times/frequency/intensity as the other two, and have the same effect (calming), and also happens without me realising at first.

Is that a stim?

I played with my hair as a kid and now I twirl my hair.


I don't know if it's a stim.

I think it's a stim. I do all of these things, too.

I still have the bad habit of twirling my hair

Playing with my hair is definitely one of my "stims".

It didn't used to worry me when I was young because a lot of girls seemed to play with their hair; it didn't look exactly calm and collected, and I almost always found it irritating when others did it, but it seemed to be "socially acceptable". I used to fiddle with it in a number of ways, pushing fingers through it, lifting up the back, twisting and twirling front and side sections, pushing the front off my face, etc, in a repeated rhythmical way.

But in the last ten years or so it has come to seem out of place, and now irritates me too, so I am glad to have found a solution to it; wearing caps and hoods with almost everything. They stop the activity "dead"! And I fiddle with other things instead!

Hair has always been a sort of "significant" zone of expression for me though. With only a few exceptions I have cut my own hair since I took over from my mother in my early teens. And it has very often taken the brunt of depression, mania, anxiety, etc, ( shaving it off during mania, "pruning it rigorously/cruelly" in depression, bleaching/dying it when feeling particularly optimistic/excited, and most of all cutting nervously away at it, to "get it absolutely right" several times a week when I have been anxious ). My hair tends to get longer only when I have been feeling calm for several months on end.

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I've always twisted my hair. I stop myself by keeping it cut too short to twirl.

Hi Whisper---the hair twirling thing was a stim of mine when I was in junior high school. The lady who cut my hair told my mother I was breaking my hair. So...I began a different stim (a variation of the finger flapping that I have done since childhood). The hair thing was very soothing though. That would be hard for me to do now since we guys normally don't wear our hair that long anymore. But in the 1970's, when my avatar picture was taken, you can see that most of us guys wore long hair which made hair twirling easy.

My daughter alway always twirl my hairs, no stop

I like to braid my hair. Sometimes I'll just take a handful of it from my ponytail, braid it, and then unbraid it, and start over.

I also rub my hair on my lips. As I'm, er, hisute and I'm not allowed to shave my arms, I'll sometimes rub my lips on the hair on my arms.

That's one of my stims too. When I was little I used to chew my hair like mad. My mom would always get me these really short hair cuts so the hair couldn't reach my mouth.

Now I pull my hair. My hair's wavy and I like taking the individual curls and feeling the loops and curls in them and then pulling them until they bounce up.

My son runs his bangs between his first 2 fingers. He does that when he starts to feel uncomfortable or starts stressing out. He twirls MY hair as much as he can. It totally puts him to sleep. He does that as much as he rocks, so I have always seen it as a stim.

Yup, I twirl my hair too...in addition to shaking my leg when sitting, tapping my fingers together in a particular order, fidgeting with pens or other objects and rubbing the palms of my hands with my thumbs. I also need to rotate my foot a certain way in order to fall asleep.

The hair twirling thing drives me insane as I worry it looks childish and unprofessional...however some of the other ones probably look more unusual...

I pick my head a lot. I think it makes my hair grease faster. When I had long hair, I used to grind the end of it between my back teeth when it was long enough. And, I had loads of other fiddles with my hair which didn't look right for a guy. No problem now it's short!!

I also play with my hair. I think it is one of my stims.

I used to tug at my hair rather badly; sore scalps are no fun... eventually my hair just annoyed me so much I shaved it all off (twice), and that solved the problem. Of course it's growing back now, chin-length, and I find myself tugging at it again, or shaking my head, or obsessively tucking it behind my ears (yes, I have it pinned back with clips). No headaches yet, though, so maybe shaving it off for a few months helped enough for me to stop giving myself headaches with hair-tugging. It's just that if I don't keep it out of my face, I constantly feel it brushing against my forehead and ears and the nape of my neck and it's just one more thing to add to the sensory barrage...

Why oh why is it not socially acceptable for females to have buzz cuts?

Braiding and unbraiding my hair is fun. That's one of the reasons I keep it long. As a child, I often chewed my hair though.