Stimming: why Autistic people stim, and why it's worth protecting

What stimming is

Stimming is short for self-stimulatory behaviour. It includes rocking, hand-flapping, humming, tapping, spinning objects, chewing, pacing, fidgeting, repeating words or phrases, and many other things. Stimming isn't only an Autistic thing: most people jiggle a foot, click a pen or twirl their hair. The difference is that the forms non-Autistic people use are socially unremarkable, and the forms Autistic people use are not.

“Self-stimulatory behaviour” is a clinical term that came out of behavioural approaches. Many Autistic people have reclaimed “stimming” as our own word.

What stimming does

When Autistic adults are asked about their own stimming, they describe the same handful of things it does for them (Kapp et al., 2019):

• Regulating sensory input: adding or dampening input so your system stays workable
• Managing overwhelming emotion: giving intense feeling somewhere to go
• Maintaining focus and thinking: movement or rhythm that keeps thought flowing
• Expressing feeling: joy, excitement and distress often show up in movement and sound
• Connection and joy: happy flapping, shared stims and stimming alongside others can be a way of being together. See Autistic Realms' Weird Pride project.
• Coping with difficult environments: a way through places that cost more than they should

Why suppressing stimming causes harm

For decades, stimming was treated as a behaviour to be stopped, on the assumption that it made Autistic people look strange and got in the way of learning and social life. Applied Behaviour Analysis and similar approaches put enormous effort, and caused significant distress, into trying to eliminate it. That was a serious mistake, and many adults are still living with the effects of learning as children that their own way of regulating was forbidden. Autistic Realms explains why behaviourism is harmful and offers alternatives to ABA and behaviourism.

Stopping a stim doesn't remove the need it was meeting. It removes the tool for meeting it, while the sensory and emotional pressure keeps building and finds another outlet, usually a less convenient one. Suppressing stimming is associated with more anxiety, burnout and distress (Kapp et al., 2019; Raymaker et al., 2020). It's also a direct lesson in shame, because the message isn't “do that differently”, it's “the way your body looks after itself isn't acceptable”. That's part of how masking gets learned.

What if a stim causes physical harm?

Sometimes a stim can cause injury, such as biting or hitting yourself hard. The answer still isn't to stop it by force. It's to look, with you and not to you, at what's driving it: often rising sensory or emotional load, pain, illness or unmet needs. Lowering that load, and working with a neuro-affirming occupational therapist on safe ways to get the deep pressure, rhythm or movement your body is seeking, can help. A replacement that doesn't meet the real need won't work, and that isn't non-compliance.

If hurting yourself is connected to feeling overwhelmed, low or unsafe in yourself, you deserve support. Please reach out to someone you trust, or see findahelpline.com and Autistic Realms' support and crisis lines.

Making room to stim

Some ideas for making room for stimming:

• Let yourself stim without apologising, and without checking whether it's “allowed”.
• Keep tools you like within reach: fidgets, chewable jewellery, weighted items, headphones.
• Build movement into your day. Sitting still is a demand, and it's rarely recognised as one.
• If you need to hold a stim in for a while, it can help to plan a time and place to let it out afterwards.
• Look for spaces, like Autistic community spaces, where stimming is unremarkable.
• Stimming in public isn't equally safe for everyone. Race, gender, size and visible disability can all change how stimming is read by others. Choosing where to stim is a valid safety decision.
• For children: movement breaks, fidgets and freedom to stim in class support learning. “Quiet hands” does not. See Autistic Realms' education resources.

Common questions

Is stimming a bad thing?

No. Stimming is a regulation tool. It only becomes a concern if it causes physical harm, and then the answer is a collaborative search for what's driving it and for safer ways to meet the need, not stopping it by force.

Why do I stim more when I'm stressed or excited?

Stimming helps regulate sensory input and emotion, so it often increases when there's more to manage, whether that's overload, anxiety or joy. A rise in stimming can also be an early sign of sensory load building.

Can you stop stimming? Should you?

Many Autistic people can hold stims in for a while, but suppression has costs, including more anxiety and burnout. It doesn't remove the need behind the stim, so it tends to find another outlet.

Do non-Autistic people stim?

Yes. Foot-jiggling, pen-clicking and hair-twirling are all stims. The difference is which forms are seen as normal.

References

• Kapp, S. K., Steward, R., Crane, L., Elliott, D., Elphick, C., Pellicano, E., & Russell, G. (2019). "People should be allowed to do what they like": Autistic adults' views and experiences of stimming. Autism, 23(7), 1782–1792.
• Raymaker, D. M., Teo, A. R., Steckler, N. A., Lentz, B., Scharer, M., Delos Santos, A., Kapp, S. K., Hunter, M., Joyce, A., & Nicolaidis, C. (2020). "Having all of your internal resources exhausted beyond measure and being left with no clean-up crew": Defining autistic burnout. Autism in Adulthood, 2(2), 132–143.