Too much stimming

Post Reply New Topic

I don't know if this should be seen as a problem or not. It probably should. I am having problems with too much stimming. As I child and young person I used to only stim in my room, but then I would stim until I reached a completely "stimmed out" state (after about three or four hours maybe). Then I would stop and go back out in public (ie my parents' living room) where I wouldn't stim at all. Now I'm 58 and in the intervening years I just stimmed occasionally throughout each day in the kitchen or bathroom (mine now, not my parents' ) using water. For reasons I don't need to go into here I revived my childhood method of stimming in December of last year, which uses a certain kind of paper which I cut out into the right shape. Anyway, because I'm no longer dependent on water for stimming and because I am always alone in my apartment I can now spend the whole day stimming while doing other things. I have rediscovered that stimming is my favourite activity and when I am out in public I look forward to being back home so I can stim. Because I am fifty-eight and used to doing intelligent-looking things like reading latin texts it feels really inappropriate to be stimming all the time. I also find that my concentration is affected in that I can read an article in. say, German and just home in on the shape of the words rather than the sense of the article, so that at the end of the article I only have a vague idea of what I have read. Obviously I need to find a better way of integrating my stimming into my daily routine.

Is stimming too much harmful? I know that as a child I used to worry about that. Does anyone know of any articles on the topic of advantages and disadvantages of stimming?

Do any of you have similar issues and if so what do you do to integrate your stimming into your daily life? I mean those of you who need to stim a lot in private.

Not to belittle what you are asking but that sounds more like a compulsion rather than stimming

Stimming is a repetitive body movement, such as hand flapping, that is hypothesized to stimulate one or more senses. The term is shorthand for self-stimulation. Repetitive movement, or stereotypy, is often referred to as stimming under the hypothesis that it has a function related to sensory input.

In my case it's leg or foot bouncing...I do it unconsciously and con still perform normal tasks sitting while I do it.

I think I must have described what I do too vaguely. Probably because I just assumed people would know what I was talking about. I AM referring to repetitive bodily movements. The stims I do are listed in all lists of autistic stims under "visual stims". There are plenty of YouTube videos of autistic kids doing the same thing as me. Basically you look at something in a very focussed way while moving it back and forth in front of your eyes. It can be your fingers or an object of some kind, the wheels of a toy car, a piece of string etc. I hope that clarifies what I mean.