User:Soap/stim

Trim

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.

What is stimming?

It is possible that some people who stim find great pleasure in their own stims, and little or no pleasure in others, and so they see other people's stims as not stims at all, unless they take the time to think and understand how autistics differ so much even from each other, and how autistics as a group differ from other people with stims. I was never really like this myself because I was able to read literature about autism at an early age, but it may have made my definition of stimming too broad rather than too narrow, as my first instinct when seeing a video such as this is that the animal is stimming, while it occurred to me a few seconds later that perhaps the animal just had very itchy skin.

Punding is called stimming by some, and this is the page that has the famous sweetiepie photo in the lede.

Many stims involve tactile sensation, seemingly with a lot of focus on the hands and mouth, but spinning in circles and rocking (possibly also headbanging) do not involve touch. However it is possible that rocking and headbanging are not stims at all.

Given that I see a clear trend towards expanding the definition of stimming, I won't distinguish between the various types.

Stimming outside of autism

Epilepsy

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

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. 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

OCD

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).

Angelman syndrome

hand-flapping

Angelman_syndrome#Signs_and_symptoms

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

otheri nformaiton

see the German wikipedi article

other stims

Rocking

This seems to be ignored by most definitions of stimming, but if we include stereotypy I believe it would be covered. Is rocking distinct from head-banging? I'm thinking it isn't, but I can only guess. I was never a rocker nor a headbanger so far as I know ... always the hands for me.

Hormones

Like so many other things, it seems that stimming involves endorphins; that is, endogenous opioids.

The Happy Meal theory

opioid excess theory <--- this bothers me in a way Im not sure many others will agree on. i worry that these children will be fed naloxone which makes them no longer able to enjoy stimming, and because theyre not stimming the people around them will assume the drug is working. that is, while the opioid excess theory is clearly wrong (autistics are not getting high every time they eat a sandwich), the treatment applied to stop this perceived problem will affect the patient's ability to enjoy ordinary endogenous opioids, which include endorphins, which may be released during stimming. This last bit is purely speculation on my part, though i think it's a bad idea to inject naloxone even if we're not sure what's going on.

The opioid excess theory seems to rely on fallacious logic somewhat, but it seems it could be easily fixed with tests. If naloxone reduces autistics' pleasure from stimming, that makes them less autistic until the drug wears off, and it just so happens that opioids are found in food products such as gluten and casein. Can we fix this by seeing if autistics stim less on a GFCF diet? We would need to look at existing families, since I wouldnt approve putting a child on a diet just to test the theory.

Since autism is a disorder of development, it seems that naloxone wouldnt help cure autism even if the opioid excess theory were true, since the developmental pathways won't and can't undo themselves. this is just more reason to reject the naloxone treatments. it seems Gillberg, the researcher who made the connection, also didnt think the evidence he turned up was enough to suggest naloxone treatments. I should add lastly that the study uses the term stereotypic behavior, which usually means stereotypy, which we sometimes distinguish from stimming and sometimes not. the term "stimming" was in use in the mid-1990s but may not have been acceptable in academia at the time.

Before anyone says "you think youre getting high from stimming? Oh you sweet summer child" ... as below, i've proven that stimming can in fact be very addictive, though i think much more so in childhood than in adulthood, which may be due to changes in our brains as we age (the same reason why adults cant just run and jump around all the time when they want to feel better). But now, even as an adult, I've been hand-flapping for about an hour every day for the last few months, and lately for the first time in my life I've had to cut back due to a blister on my left hand and some pain in my wrist. Perhaps I never stimmed quite this much even when I was young, or at least not with the bath toys. I've also lost interest in socialization and certain other things, which are signs of addiction, although in this case I'd say the change is nowhere near so much as what alcohol did.

I think as well that comparing stimming to music is an apt analogy, and if listening to music were a rare hobby, we might speak of hobbyists as addicts as well. It may in fact be that opioids are released while listening to music as well, strange as it may seem. Not all opioids are the hard, potent types we hear about.

naloxone can block the pleasurable effects of cannabinoids too, though it seems only because cannabinoids interact with opioid receptors, which means that it seems that at least three pleasure drugs (cannabis, alcohol, and opium) all use these same opioid receptors.

1987 paper

Yeah ... that's it .... we're ... blocking out unpredictable environmental signals to stave off sensory overload.

A paper written in 1987 mentions that stimming releases endorphins as if it were plain to everyone, and yet also mentions just as forthrightly that there are some stims which do not do this, and a third type the authors simply describe as baffling. Could it be that this was once common knowledge among psychiatrists, but it gave birth to the now-discredited opioid excess theory (see also my take on it), and then we discarded both the opioid excess theory and the sound research it was based on? Perhaps to protect future generations of autistics from being injected with naltrexone and naloxone in an attempt to shut down the supposedly malfunctioning endogenous opioid system.

It is possible that the authors of the paper may have felt it was obvious enough to mention without explanation, but that even at the time, their view was not widely accepted and could not easily be proven or disproven. And to be fair, I can't even say that it's true, only that it seems true to me and I'd assumed the same myself long before I understood the science behind it.

It is possible that their happy stim was rocking, which is something that many people do, and might be known to release endorphins. The hand-flapping might then be in their baffling category. I still don't know if rocking and headbanging are the same stim.

I'm not aware of any research having been done, but I think it's highly possible that even among autistics, the brain changes from childhood to adulthood and that stims tend to be less addictive and less enjoyable to us as adults. However, if my theory that it patterns like music is correct, in this case teenagers and even young adults would behave more like children than like older adults.

other info

echolalia

is there any relation between echolalia and stimming? most likely not.

we say Children often first babble syllables and eventually words they hear. For example, a baby may often hear the word "bottle" in various sentences. The baby first repeats with only syllables such as "baba" but as their language skills progress the child will eventually be able to say the word "bottle". and this is almost certainly a mistake.

It's possible my first words were echolalia, since my mother claims I was speaking at 7 months, but that my first word was whassat ... at that age I'm pretty sure I didn't understand what I was saying and must have just liked the sound of it. And I admit I'm skeptical of being able to produce an S sound at that age, too.

Scratchpad

Small children may be more likely to engage in stims, and break the habit at an early age.

Reddit's staple man may have been punding or something else.

What hormone, if there is one, is common to all stims? Is it dopamine?

more thoughts

10:13, 27 July 2024 (UTC)

it's occurred to me that i may be unusual even among autistics in how much pleasure i get from stimming. i actually doubt this ... i think many others, perhaps a majority, are just like me, but that even with our somewhat odd social skills we understand that it's embarrassing to stim in public, or even to talk about it, and so stimmers just dont bring it up even amongst each other. there may be some social media groups that i could find.

but since i've shown addictive tendencies towards alcohol, perhaps i have addictive tendencies in stimming too, even above what other autistics have. it's also possible that my high fever euphoria has something to do with this, and that my brain might be wired differently from most people, whether autistic or not, and therefore i am unusual in two different ways that interplay. i can at least say i've never heard anyone else with autism describe being so addicted to stimming that they tricked their parents into driving them to a store to buy stim toys, claiming to be shopping for something else. but Reddit's staple man, who did not claim to have autism, did something even more extreme than this, so it's clear i'm not wholly alone.

either way, it seems if stimming is pleasurable for most who do it, people are largely unaware of this. our article, and other resources elsewhere, keep talking about how stimming is an escape from sensory overload, never mentioning that it's a pleasurable activity at all. is this honestly what scientists believe, or is this a sort of noble lie intended to protect stimmers, especially children, from parents and other caregivers who might see it as no different than masturbation or perhaps even drug use?

Sensory play

Sensory play seems to be big nowadays. it's possible it always was, but didnt have a name until recently. like I said, LiteBrite was around when I was a kid, and its popularity seems best explained by the fact that it has lights, and that's pretty much it.

Im surprised there is no page yet for sensory play or stim toy. The latter shows the more mainstream usage of stim and would likely be just a redirect to the former rather than being about autism.

This has nothing to do with sensation play.

I wondered if I would have to write about the similarity between stimming and sexual play (and masturbation) sooner or later. I dont think the stims typically found in autistics overlap with sexuality in any significant way. If anythiung, someone who grew up playing with slime would find slime a reminder of chldhood and therefore a turn-off. But everyone's mind is different. (Likewise I dont think there is any overlap between stimming and masturbation, perhaps because masturbation cannot be prolonged the way stimming can.) essentially, this confusion only exists because the termninology overlaps. stimming is no more the same as masturbation than it is the same as taking stimulant drugs.

chewelry ~ wikt:chewelry

other links

hand washing post in an autism subreddit not related to OCD compulsive hand washing. drumming is probably a typo for stimming since there are other typos in the post. In the comments are other people talking about the same thing. i found this by searching for something like playing hands water autism because otherwise the OCD sense dominates even without OCD in the query string.

File:Tall_Autism_Happy_Hands.png

i will keep my distance but i believe the speaker in this video is wrong. Not everyone with autism sees flickering fluorescent lights (and many who dont still flap their hands), the explanation doenst make sense (111011101110111 overlaid with 110110110110110110 does not produce all 1's), and some people enjoy strobe lights.

assorted papers

most google scholar papers are inaccesible for me, and maybe some of whati can access will be inaccexssible for others. even so: A Serbian study indicates that LFA's stim more, boys stim more, and younger children stim more, but that, oddly enough, students in mainstream education stim much more than students in special education. The paper's author seems to deny this in writing it up, and it may be that if true, it's because mainstream school teachers cannot easily tell their students to stop.

This paper says that adults actually stim slightly more than children, though here I wonder if, as above, it's because nobody's going to tell a grownup they need to stop. Sample bias is always a problem when matching children against adults, since adults are more likely to stand out and need therapy. Also note that this study was not for people with autism specifically, although it does mention that autistics had higher rates of stimming than those with other sensorimotor conditions.

https://www.proquest.com/openview/248fba64ea3340f899a3fc7914efeae5/1