What is stimming?
Self-stimulatory behaviour, commonly referred to as stimming, is repetitive body movement that helps someone to manage their sensory or emotional experience. It can be self-soothing, but it can also just feel good.
Stimming is different for each person, and can range from movements like rocking, spinning, and hand flapping, to repeated use of an object like flicking an elastic band.
While stimming is commonly associated with autistic people, it’s something that everyone does. Things like foot tapping, repeatedly clicking a pen lid, or twirling your hair are all types of stims. Simply put, everyone stims but it can sometimes look a bit different in autistic people.
Why is stimming important?
Stimming plays an important role in mental health, helping neurodivergent people to meet their sensory needs. It’s not uncommon for autistic individuals to have sensory differences, and stimming is a useful way to affect sensory input, which can help with emotional and sensory regulation.
Being free to stim is important for wellbeing and it can be harmful to mask or try to suppress it, which can contribute to feelings of overload, and autistic meltdowns and shutdowns.
What if you feel self-conscious?
Everyone should be encouraged to stim freely without judgement, but unfortunately it’s not uncommon to feel self-conscious about stimming around other people.
If you do feel like this, there are some ways to engage in stimming without drawing attention. If you are indoors, a simple bathroom break so you can be alone to stim freely is an option. If you’re in public, things like chewing gum, eating snacks, and fiddling with everyday items like hairbands, blue tac, or fidget toys can help. Our hands and mouths play an important role in sensory regulation, so using them to stim can be quite effective.
Likewise, you can use tools and aids to balance out sensory input while out in public. For example, wearing ear defenders to block out noise, or spraying perfume on your cuffs or carrying something that you like the scent of to manage smell.
Supporting stimming in an autistic child
If you are the parent or guardian of an autistic young person and want to create a safe non-judgemental space for them to stim, you can encourage stimming activities they like to engage in, normalise this type of movement and behaviour, and even make the room practically safe and suitable for stimming (for example, moving sharp objects and clearing floor space if they like to spin).
However, try to avoid mimicking or copying your child’s actions unless they explicitly ask for you to join in. If they do ask and you want a family activity that serves to enable stimming, dancing together is a great way to share in free movement.
More information
These tips are just some options that can help with feeling self-conscious – but of course, being free to unmask and stim is the most important thing and you should never feel that you or your child have to hide any aspect of yourselves in order to fit in.
The below links might offer some more support and useful resources on stimming and sensory regulation:
- Recognising and regulating emotions (blog)
- What is autistic stimming? (video)
- How autistic masking affects mental health (video)
- Autistic masking & unmasking (video)
