User:Soap/stim: Difference between revisions – Wikipedia

14:07, 25 May 2025 (UTC)

I feel it’s time to trim this page down, so the older edits, many of which are still important to me, are here and here.

21:15, 3 September 2025 (UTC)

• Does stimming merely feel good, or is it … at least for some …. an actual painkiller? If the latter, is this mostly true for low-functioning autistics, hence the stereotype of the helmet-wearing headbanger? I may have reached a state where my arms are in constant pain from my hand-flapping stim, and the only way to relieve the pain is to repeat the stim. if I’m not just fooling myself here, this could explain all self-injurious stims. Except those who have compulsive stims (see #tics below).

• it seems researches on animals in the 80s and 90s took this for granted, cf hypoalgesia, and that it might also happen after drinking milk for babies (not clear if breastfeeding motions or milk itself is responsible) . most of the articles about humans are paywalled.
• hand flapping for me will eliminate pain only if I continue doing it for 30 seconds or more. this is not the way most autistics flap their hands. I may be doing what martial artists do, or people who exercise, though thr runner’s high takes much longer to appear.

• it took me more than a year to reach this state. I think this explains why even with millions of other autistics each with their own stim habits, accounts like mine are rare: the only types of people with the ability to relieve pain by stimming are those who consciously strive to reach it and those who have no choice (i.e. nonverbal autistics who have no way to indicate that they’re in pain).

Some autistics (and a few non-autistics; see below) may experience pain relief instantaneously, especially with head-banging. I have no expectation of reaching this state myself; it may be that hand-flapping simply cannot do this, and that I was never a headbanger so I’ll never become a headbanger, as my stim habits formed very early. But just as runner’s high might be three different hormones all at once, stimming might involve at least two, since I’m pretty sure I began stimming for its pleasurable sensations, which really do happen instantaneously, with pain relief only being subconscious or even absent until I specifically began to look for it.

• I’ll need to put this aside for now, as I now even have pain in my fingers, rather than just my forearm (elbow to wrist). This interferes with basic household tasks and can only get worse if I keep going. Fortunately I have other stims, and i can still do “normal” hand-flapping (as I did yesterday when I was stuck on the phone for hours) without the more vigorous movements that seem to give me the analgesic effect in addition to “just feeling good”. i will add though that it seems the pain-relieving form of the stim is the form that also causes more pain later on. it may be simply due to more vigorous hand mnotions, or its possible im even causing pain to myself during the stim that i can’t feel. this might be the same for runner’s high as well.

• i dont consider stimming, even when it leads to pain later on, to be self-injurious behavior (SIB). it seems that some people consider even nail-biting to be a SIB, which I also object to, so I want to make it clear that I’m not saying “i agree with it for everyone exvept me” etc

it would be interesting to see if stereotypic movement disorder clusters with autism in families, in which case i would consider that it may be “autism without autism”, “stimming-only autism”, or perhaps one extreme of atypical autism. my thinking is that if these particular stims are found only in autism and SMD, then SMD must be related to autism.

From this study of a population of children with stereotypic movement disorder but not autism:

Children (but not their parents) liked their movements, which were usually associated with excitement or imaginative play.

Most children said they liked their stereotypies, consistent with parental reports. Many children used names (e.g. ‘imagination game,’‘bouncing,’‘exercises,’‘relaxation,’‘pacing’) and might announce that it was time to do it. Several children volunteered that the movements were associated with active daydreaming, and a few mentioned re-running favorite movies or video games in their mind while performing the movement.

18 of the 42 children also had tics, and 11 of them had Tourette syndrome.

I take this as evidence that there is in fact a connection between stims and tics, since SMD is a disorder that is about stimming only, with no other symptoms. thus it is not merely that stims and tics both correlate with autism, they directly correlate with each other even when autistics are stringently screened out.

Most interesting to me is that the children with SMD have autism-like hand and body movements but they link them to imaginative play, which is very different from traditional autistic stimming. Or is it? I suppose yet again I cant assume that everyone online is telling the full story when they describe their stims. After all, my own hand-flapping usually involves (but doesnt require) me to imagine a specific thing, but I’ve never described that as part of the stim before.

an adult with pleasurable SMD . also this suggests head banging and rocking may not be the same after all … one involves the head, the other involves the whole body.

does SMD have ALL the stims of autism and ONLY the stims of autism?

Among people with frontotemporal lobar degeneration, more than half (60%) had stereotypies. The time to onset of stereotypies in people with frontotemporal lobar degeneration may be years (average 2.1 years).

i think these may be in the category of stereotypies that are not stimming. It seems these patients are involuntarily acting out motor movements frequently used in their life, such as holding a landline telephone. Very interesting, but clearly unrelated to stimming.

• Are head banging and rocking the same stim? Does head-banging provide short-term pain relief so strong that headbangers don’t even feel the pain when their heads hit the wall (or other object in front of them)?

some autistics flap their hands because theyre happy, rather than to become happy. often you will see someone flapping their hands while looking at flashing lights or something on a screen. does this mean hand flapping is not a stim at all, but only a visible sign of the happiness that accompanies a stim? is the flashing lights the real stim?

i think it may be like dancing. we are happy when we hear music, and dancing heightens that pleasure, but if there is no music we cannot dance. these people are responding to a pleasurable sensation by flapping their hands, in much the same way an NT would respond to a pleasurable music track by dancing. thus they are doing a stim in response to another stim, and that’s two stims at once.

also, i suspect that there must be some people who flap their hands in isolation, without flashing lights or any other such thing to trigger them. but i know very little about this specific question. i’ve explained above how i think i’m an exception because although i;’m also doing two stims at once, they both involve my hands.

remember that especially with nonverbals what appears to be pure isolated hand-flapping (or any other stim) may in fact have a trigger that no one else notices. of course, I have no inside track to anyone’s mind either, so it could be that unprompted hand-flapping is common after all.

this paper suggests hand-flapping really does pair with positive emotions more than other stims, though since frustration is also listed, excited might be a better cover term.

[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1750946721001392 similar inmfo here

some people prefer to limit the term to only those stims that associate with autism/SMD. but I think autistics have a high usage of even the wider category of stims.

• Do some autistics find other autistics’ stims not just uninteresting, but in fact repulsive? I know I’m a sensory-seeking type, and what I do might be very off-putting for some others with autism since i enjoy the very things they flee from. I dont think I’ve ever experienced sensory overload, for example.

• Why is headbanging associated only with low-functioning autistics? Is it because higher functioning autistics tend not to take the stim to such an extreme, and instead simply rock gently? Or are they completely different stims? is headbanging limited to autism?

• Do low-functioning nonverbal patients also flap their hands? Does anyone have both headbanging/rocking and hand-flapping habits so much that we might call them addictions?

x

possible sensory avoidance https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/030437628390144X

if thumb sucking is oral stimming, then breastfeeding almost certainly is too. it’s not clear to me if the milk provides the opioidergic effect, or if the baby’s lips do. I saw a study but it was paywalled, and I’m not sure anyone really can figure this out since we’d have to run tests on babies that few parents would be willing to subject them to. There are animal tests that suggest that it’s the latter … the baby’s mouth movements calm the baby, rather than the milk that comes with it … and that this is why not just human babies, but also some animals will do movements similar to thumb-sucking with their own thumbs or (for four legged animals) whatever they can get their mouths around.

this paper more or less says autistics are swimming in endogenous opioids, and also that ordinary children are. I’ve suspected the latter myself as it would explain why so many childhood pleasures are simple and why adults can’t seem to enjoy them. but the paper also links endogenous opioid production directly to autistic-like stimming, which i see as a weak link because small children don’t stim in autistic ways unless they are also autistic. this assumes swingsets are not a stim just like rocking chairs are not.

he runner’s high article suggests that endorphins can’t be the main cause of runner’s high.

NYT article circumventing the paywall, and the study it’s based on. it actually seems like a fairly solid argument, and shows that apparently, even mice have similar responses to cannabis as humans. i note, though, that they seem to define a runner’s high as a feeling of general euphoria, and dont mention analgesia (insensitivity to pain) in the NYT article, which makes me think my intuition is still correct that the runner’s high is not just one thing, but two or possibly three things happening all at once.

one thing that doesnt make sense to me is the assertion that endorphins can’t cause runner’s high because they don’t cross the blood-brain barrier (BBB). i’d always assumed endorphins are produced in the brain, where the pain perception takes place. so i ask:

1. If endorphins are produced elsewhere in the body, what do they do there?
2. if endorphins can’t be the cause of pain relief with the runner’s high, then how do they cause pain relief in other situations?

   it is possible that theyre not talking about pain relief. personally i’d always considered pain relief to be part of the high, since otherwise it’s not much fun to keep on exercising,.

https://europepmc.org/article/MED/37788244 only 44% of autistics have stims, which sounds like what i heard around 2000. and 3-4% without autism (stereotypic movement disorder). these people are using the older, narrower definition of stims.

https://karger.com/msy/article-abstract/13/4/263/825198/Distinct-Autism-Spectrum-Disorder-Phenotype-and TRAPPC9, but if the sample size is just 2, we can’t be sure that TRAPPC9 is even involved here. it oculd just be that they also had some other condition that led to their autism.

Photosensitive epilepsy#Television

Some people with PSE, especially children, may exhibit an uncontrollable fascination with television images that trigger seizures, to such an extent that it may be necessary to physically keep them away from television sets. Some people (particularly those with cognitive impairments, although most people with PSE have no such impairments) self-induce seizures by waving their fingers in front of their eyes in front of bright light or by other means.

sure sounds like stimming to me. although autism and epilepsy have a slight positive correlation, I’d think we’d mention it if this were only common among epileptics who also have autism

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/070674377602100306

the mother, although she had no seizures, showed an unusual type of photo-sensitivity in that she was disturbed when driving along a road when light flickered through the trees.

i also have this condition. and I think my hand-flapping stim may actually be a hybrid between the traditional autistic hand flapping and the epileptic style, since i need to be looking at my hands when I do it and I used to hold my hands close to my eyes while flapping them. since many stimmers seem to flap their hands in response to a visual stimulus, it may be that I have made my hands both the stimulus and the stim. This may mean that most other hand-flappers are actually not much like me at all.

Much of the literature regarding TV’s and epilepsy is old, but from what I gather, it doesnt depend on the snow we used to see, and therefore a computer screen would work just as well, and some newer papers do mention computers.

It’s possible that these papers in the 1960s were missing features of autism because autism wasn’t that well known at the time, but I think the overlap between autism and epilepsy is still rather small.

Photosensitive epilepsy#Fluorescent lighting

When functioning correctly, mains-powered fluorescent lighting has a flicker rate sufficiently high (twice the mains frequency, typically 100 Hz or 120 Hz) to reduce the occurrence of problems. However, a faulty fluorescent lamp can flicker at a much lower rate and trigger seizures.^{[medical citation needed]} Newer high-efficiency compact fluorescent lamps (CFL) with electronic ballast circuits operate at much higher frequencies (10–20 kHz) not normally perceivable by the human eye, though defective lights can still cause problems.

though not really stimming, this is curiously reminiscent of autism as well. i’ve read that autistics often dislike fluorescent lights because the autistic brain runs at a higher frequency, but perhaps this was just a comforting lie, and that it really is in fact related to epilepsy. (but then why wouldnt NT’s notice the lights too?)

it may be that proprioceptive stimming (apart from hand-flapping, which seems curiously common) is unique to autism, while visual stimming is shared between a large number of autistics, a small number of epileptics, and perhaps some people with neither condition. one gene that apparently can cause both epilepsy and autism is SYNGAP1, and this may explain why it is only some autistics and only a few epileptics who have this particular characteristic (and also note that much of epilepsy is not genetic).

I may be mistaken here, as SYNGAP1 apparently causes only one type of epilepsy and that type is not the famous photosensitive epilepsy. however there seem to be at least 5 other genes that link both conditions.

This site refers to OCD’s behaviors as stimming, but still carefully distinguishes them from the stims of autism. I would not approve this, as I think even under an expanded definition of stimming, OCD’s characteristic movements are better grouped with tics (though we distinguish them from both stims and tics currently).

others

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK537721/ but probably only in patients who also have autism

[ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27751663/ a possible uniting factor]

i may want to moge^[1] the content to stereotypy when i get set up with the new PC and back on my Soap login. even though it seems that stereotypy also includes involuntary movements, the terminology for all disorders besides autism seems to prefer stereotypy over stimming.

https://journals.viamedica.pl/neurologia_neurochirurgia_polska/article/view/PJNNS.a2020.0058 various stereotypies of non-autistic adults … suggestion that autistics just don’t hide them as well

I am curious what is meant by the description of Angelman patients having attraction to/fascination with water. it is possible that this is no more than a warning to beware of unintentional drownings, which doesnt apply to adults and isnt really about water as water so much as the inability of the patient to perceive danger.^[2] this study also claims an attraction to water appears in patients with, of all things, cri du chat, which is unrelated to all of the other conditions on this page.

It is interesting that hand-flapping is a sign of many unrelated conditions, while head-banging seems to be exclusive to autism (and SMD, but this seems like a circular definition).

Angelman_syndrome#Signs_and_symptoms

Pitt-Hopkins syndrome

A note that hand flapping currently redirects to stimming but there may be more to hand-flapping than that.

If hand-flapping can be caused by so many genes, maybe it’s actually a default human behavior that gets suppressed the way the snout reflex does, and re-appears when the suppression mechanism is stopped.

Children with Pitt-Hopkins syndrome typically have a happy, excitable demeanor with frequent smiling, laughter, and hand-flapping movements. However, they can also experience anxiety and behavioral problems.^[3]

probably not stimming: Wilson’s disease. unlikje all the other conditions on this page, this is a progressive disorder caused by a chemical, rather than a disorder of brain structures present from before birth.

this may or may not be useful to maintain. I’m going to use a highly specific definition of hand-flapping here, excluding what I perceive to be involuntary movements and some others that I can’t easily explain.

My definitio nof “yes” is a step higher than “often”, because if i demnaded 100% there would be no “Yes” at all, especially since behaviors like dancing and music aren’y 100% in the general ppulation. but i may chanve that.

i use “Maybe” when a source says yes but i doubt them, or when the source itself is not sure. i’ve explained above why i think attraction to water may be something else entirely… unless they all love baths and showers, it seems more like these children simply had no time to learn how to swim or even about the risks of drowning.

i may end up grouping all proprioceptive stims besides hand-flapping into a single column if i can’t find any examples outside autism/SMD.

this chart is not intended to be complete, but only to investigate possible links. for example, chewelry is a stim, but there is no literature on it being used to calm people with Angelman syndrome, Downs, etc. so I cannot fill in any column for it.

add FragX

stimming

	PROPRIOCEPTIVE				others
	hand flapping	headbanging	rocking	any others[4]	strobe lights	attraction to water
idiopathic autism[5]	Yes	Sometimes	Usually	Yes	Sometimes	Rarely[6]
cri du chat	Sometimes[7]	No				Sometimes
Angelman	Often	No				Maybe
Pitt-Hopkins	Sometimes
Rett’s	No[8]
Photosensitive epilepsy	to simulate light flashing				Maybe
Fragile X
Wilson’s disease				involuntary
ADHD

im not sure what explains the surprisingly large overlap between dystonia and autism on the chart above. this seems to have nothing to do with stimming. i remember seeing someone who seemed to have some sort of spasm, but it seems odd that eight different genes would lead to both autism and dystonia if dystonia were so rare.

this seems to have nothing to do with the motor clumsiness reported in Asperger Syndrome for example.

autism is NEGATIVELY correlated with cerebral palsy in a certain subpopulation, but it seems the rate of autism is still somewhat higher than the wider population’;s background rate. it may be that disorders tend to cluster, but that certain disorders within a cluster depend on muitually exclusive triggers. this is similar to how i remmeber it being impossible to have both schizophrenia and autism, …. we now allow it, but many of the symptoms rule each other out. in theory, the children with both CP + autism mayu have been slightly more likely to die in infancy, thius reducing the sample size. also ,the sample size is small.

i suspect there may be a conneciton between stims and tics. besidse the one paper that mentioned a genetic link. im sure someone besides me has coined the word stic to refer to a stim that’s a tic, or to something that seems to fall in between.

I get the impression some would disagree with me that stimming feels good, because i see on social media autistics referring to stims that they have to release. they describe the moments leading up to the stim as unpleasant, so for them it’s just getting back to normal. in my mind, that’s not a stim at all, it’s a tic. I feel lucky that I don’t suffer from this. I saw an article saying there is a genetic link.t for some people it couold be both at once.

i will say that for the time being, i feel unsatisfied with my “regular” hand-flap as opposed to what i’ve come to consider the “bad” hand-flap (more vigorous, causes pain relief, but also causes pain later on). but i dont htink this is the same at all because the ones whose stims sound like tics are PROBABLY not talking about pain and pain relief.

since orgasmic seizures exist, it may be that some autistics can combine stimming with masturbation, but i expect it would be very rare and kept secret even in communities where people talk openly about the two subjects independently. its worth noting that stims can be repeated and prolonged for minutes or hours, whereas masturbation cannot.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1005596502855

I dont think that childhood disintegrative disorder should be considered a form of autism. it seems that it’s a cluster of symptoms, caused by at least five unrelated conditions, and that there is no medical reason to group these five conditions with each other, let alone with autism. the only common ground seems to be early childhood onset, and for four of the five causes of CDD, this early childhood onset is only because “the brain can only hold out so long”, when in fact the disorder was present from birth or even before birth.

grouping them with autism may make sense if autism is regression, but its increasingly likely that autism is always or almost always both present and expressed at birth.

i can understand grouping them together with each other from a treatment perspective even though they have different underlying causes, but it seems unhelpful to group them in turn with autism, even for the sake of treatment, since treatment really needs to address the symptoms even when the underlying causes are not treatable. I consider this the same sort of error we used to make when we classified Rett’s syndrome as part of the autism spectrum, as some people still do.

the paper linked early in the CDD article confirms that the genes of CDD have no connection to autism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childhood_dementia goes through the entire article without mentioning CDD.

h

a coincidence: Yippee-Like 5

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1056499320300183?via%3Dihub

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Five_point_scale check to see if this has achieved wider use over the last 20 yrs, maybe even outside autism

it is called the Dewey Story Test, after Margaret Dewey. it seems that the point scale had four judgments, not five, so maybe the five point scale was a derivative of it. Dewey story test is still empty; it may fit in an article about its creator, which is still also red. Dewey Social Stories Test is one other name; it has been translated into other languages and may have originated in Sweden despite its name (but i think it was maybe English > Swedish > English).

those who know me and comr across this page may wonder if this is merely a coping strategy for me, knowing that i used to love alcohol so much that i might feel better if i could convince myself that i’ve found something just as good or even better rather than submit to the displeasure of being a dry drunk. this is why there’s less information about me on this version of the page, but for the time being i will still need to write about myself some of the time.