Until recently I had never heard of ' Stimming ', although My 17 year old ' High functioning AS ' 'Stims' quite badly ( for want of a better way of putting it) & almost constantly, a lot of hand flapping, talking to himself VERY LOUDLY, genital holding & so on.
I know only what I know & what I can see, so anyone out there please tell me:-
Can 'stimming' be cerebral rather than physical ? ( take place in the mind rather than in physical actions? )
Only someone who does this & knows they are doing it could tell me.
I do it all the time and I would have to say it's both. I seem to hyperfocus when I draw and listent to music and do simular stims (handflapping, rocking and having coversations with oneself) When I seem to be in my "world" if you would call it, and I stim sometimes unware, my BF has caught me a few times so has my mom...
I do it all the time and I would have to say it's both. I seem to hyperfocus when I draw and listent to music and do simular stims (handflapping, rocking and having coversations with oneself) When I seem to be in my "world" if you would call it, and I stim sometimes unware, my BF has caught me a few times so has my mom...
What is the cerebral thing you do?
I *do* have a vast amount of extraneous mental activity going on. The most notable is a constant strain of thought, rehashing my latest obsessions and making up stories, like mentally composing fanfic. It's very repetitive and goes on literally ALL the time. This is in addition to the actual thinking I need to do to work and get through the day. It's always fantasy, never related to real life stuff like obsessing over my latest social gaffe - I have a separate stream of thought for that.
I really don't know whether it's a "stim" or not, but it IS an Aspie/ADD thing - there's a few other people round here do similar things.
Sometimes the mental activity spills over into physical stimming - pacing, acting out or mumbling the lines that a character in my fantasy train of thought is 'saying'. (All in private! I can control it totally in public, although sometimes if I have a particularly strong story in progress I might need to duck out from work for a quick walk to 'stretch my legs'.)
No, this is NOT about hallucinations or having trouble telling fantasy from reality. I know it's not real on any level.
I am very grateful indeed for these responses & they are verifying what I suspect.
Thanks very much.
Any more please.
Sometimes the mental activity spills over into physical stimming - pacing, acting out or mumbling the lines that a character in my fantasy train of thought is 'saying'. (All in private! I can control it totally in public, although sometimes if I have a particularly strong story in progress I might need to duck out from work for a quick walk to 'stretch my legs'.)
I too have had a certain dialogue going in my head and have always just managed to catch myself from responding to said dialogue outloud. There have been a few time when at home I have reacted or laughed... but not in public.
But this is for me usually thinking about the latest social gaffe. Actually, its really just whatever my brain is running on at the moment. Latest project or an event from earlier in the week. Some argument I wish I could redo is sometimes involved if it was a big argument that I'm still stressed about.
I would imagine that since the point of a stim (from what I know about it) is that its supposed to calm you down and help you be able to manage the problem, whatever it is. So I would imagine that mental thoughts that do the same thing are somewhat related to a stim.
Someone that used to post on here often sent me a link once about stims and some obvious and not obvious ones... like staring at things can all be stims. I'm still not sure what I think about it. I'll see if I can find the link and share it, if it still works!
http://malakh.com/articles.php?article_id=355
Here you go... not sure who wrote it or how credible it really is. Has some angry NT-bashing in some spots... but its interesting.
As I've known about AS, hubby has been pointing out the couple of physical stims that I do. I rarely do them and their not atypical of AS or NTs.
the point of a stim (from what I know about it) is that its supposed to calm you down
That's my understanding too, and it's why I'm reluctant to use the term for my own unusual streams of thought. (I'm trying to get out the mindset of thinking of it as a problem and something I should resist and conquer, hence the word "unusual" instead of "defective" which I would have used this time last year.) Some of them actually wind me up further, the way listening to frantic music or an exciting movie before bedtime winds you up and stops you sleeping.
But on the other hand, the effort of controlling this stuff is huge, and I can't consciously control it for more than a few minutes. So if it wipes me out that much to NOT do it... does that mean it does serve some purpose? Some sort of outlet for misdirected mental energy bouncing around my uniquely (note again the deliberately neutral term!) wired brain? So maybe it *is* a stim.