Oh, It's Autistic Stimming, Not My Quirky Little Habit!

[@deadlegacy-1337]

I like the tongue clicking, its like I am the predator.

[@laura.bseyoga]

I used to think I wasn't a visual stimmer either, but then I realised every time I was told off for "daydreaming" at school, I was actually looking out the window at whatever green plants were growing/ the sky. Nature is a huge visual stim for me 🌲🌳🌴. I also used to click my tongue as a child - maybe I should revisit this one....💚

[@DanaAndersen]

“I’m not into visual stims!” I starred at clouds out the window for the entirety of school 😂

[@laura.bseyoga]

@@DanaAndersen exactly! 🤣 Edit to add - it confused me so much when I was asked what I was daydreaming about! I wasn't thinking about anything!!

[@ertfester5574]

omg the changing perspective by winking thing i used to do that ALL the time lol

[@PopeiaEhgartner]

Same! Also, I put my hand in front of something so that one eye can see it and the other can't and then feel like I can see through my hand!! Does that make any sense? It's fun!

[@ThoughtfulSparrow]

Me too!

[@PopeiaEhgartner]

Do you know these like hanging things that spin and look like thay do an infinite spin? I LOVE THEM! Every time I used to see one as a child, I was just sitting there STARING at it! I still do, honestly. They're just so fricking amazing to look at!

[@oalevine]

i used to be like that with fizzy drinks, and then some time last year my body just randomly went "nope, no more sugar", and now things are unbearably sweet, and plain water (that i used to hate) finally tastes good

[@DanaAndersen]

I’m reeeeeallllyy hoping that happens to me at some point! I’ve ended up needing more sweetness I think 🙃

[@Zebra_Joe_4TN]

@@DanaAndersen Find a sweet fruit you like. I like raisins.

[@bunnywavyxx9524]

me switching from loving water to absolutely hating it every few months. cant drink water not through a straw, then i switch to wanting a metal rim. metal rim has a taste, and some weird cycle repeats.

[@kkuudandere]

Visual stims have been a big thing for me all my life. As a kid, I used to close my eyes and hold my face towards the sun because I liked the colors and shadows it made (especially while riding in a car). But then I don't get to look at every. single. detail. outside the car as we drive by, haha Or, waving my hands in front of my face while looking at a light to make "flickers". Also, I kept a glitter bottle on my desk at school, with the excuse that I could show the students in my class how to make one for themselves. Not to mention my penchant for organizing items, lol, I can't believe I thought of myself like "I don't have any stims" (yay Hereditary mention!!)

[@Zebra_Joe_4TN]

I still do that.

[@fimarshall2272]

buy a lava lamp!

[@daviniarobbins9298]

I do the leg bounce too. Once I start I find it very hard to stop. Used to do it all the time at school sat at my desk bored out of my skull. I would pick my nose all the time too. To the point teachers would call me out on it. I would get comments like "your brains will fall out" and "do you need a spoon" and "go blow your nose with some tissue." I had no idea at the time I was stimming. Humming and finger tapping is other stims I do. I will be in the supermarket and I will be humming the theme to my favourite TV show even improvising on it, dragging it out adagio like. I even hummed at times the Imperial March from Star Wars doing all the trumpet noises and such like. It sounds great in my head but am sure to others it sounds like rubbish. One thing I hate though is people standing right behind you in the supermarket. I hate that.

[@Zebra_Joe_4TN]

Besides the leg bounce that's mostly the same for me.

[@paulinejulien9191]

My AuDHD partner constantly bounces his leg, and it’s also a big stim for me (I’m autistic) 😊 I would also look at things through one eye and the other as a kid! My partner also struggles with drinking water 😅 I love Pepsi Max and Coke Zero but I can’t stand cherry-flavoured things 🤮 when I was younger I struggled to drink fizzy drinks because it felt like swallowing needles; I’ve got used to it although I still can’t take big gulps…

[@Cat-dw3wi]

My partner dislikes water too. He has long covid now so he can't taste much, but he still won't drink plain water.

[@stephenie44]

I understand what you mean. I LOVE fizzy drinks too. They are sensory bliss!

[@steveneardley7541]

Leg bouncing is my main stim. I've done it all my life. I have never really been called out for it. I think of it as "nerves." But if I don't do it I get an uncomfortable concentration of chi energy in my legs.

[@cefk9944]

I used to call it my "jump thumb", because it seemed like my thumb was jumping back and forth.

[@ninconnue5609]

Hello from a fellow water hater! I finally figured out that fizzy waters work for me. The fizz helps disguise the taste of the water. I usually get the unsweetened kind, either plain or lemon, because I hate the taste of the fake sugar in the sweetened kind. Sometimes I add a bit of juice, like grapefruit juice, pineapple juice, etc. Or else I add Ribena (a black currant syrup meant to be mixed with water).

[@TheCassierra908]

Oh my yes fizzy drinks are one of my favorite sensories! I always have to get the cans or small bottles as the big liters lose their fizz too quick. Cannot stand that. 😂

[@AmarisFrede]

Not me starting to bounce my leg as soon as you said: "Oh. It feels good." 😆

[@-shenanigans.]

Camera 1, camera 2 😉😜🤣 I was obsessed with Wayne's World, I was 12 when it was released. I had it on VHS and watched it countless times, I still have so many scenes and the opening monologue memorized to this day!

[@-shenanigans.]

I also love fizzy drinks. I got a soda stream, worth the investment to me. I drink plain carbonated water almost exclusively at home. I don't need it to be flavored, I just want the bubbles!

[@youprettywow]

I had an "ooze timer" when I was a kid and I would spend hours staring at the ooze. I have one on my Xmas wishlist this year

[@UnvisibleGirl]

Yay water hater gang *high fives*, but yeah done all those, not so as intense on the hand one, I do have to clean them when random crap gets on em but I won't be wiping them every 5 mins, I do tend to fidget with zips, buttons, seams etc to stim throughout the day. I feel ya on the fizzy drinks, I rarly drink them now as I forced myself to stop but I loved cola. Also keep meaning to find the lava lamp I have somewhere, I just worry it's inefficient, need to look into that xD

[@jesunfiltered1652]

I cannot stand water. The only way I can do it is if it is sparking water with a flavoring. I love the bubbles and the flavoring drowns out the taste or water. The only non bubbly drinks I can have are tea, lemonade, and apple juice.

[@Authentistic-ism]

i have to filter my water and put expensive Liquid Iv electrolyte powder in it for it to have the right mouthfeel

[@sejhammer]

oh my god I want like a pink lava lamp now!

[@brbrbrbreannad3610]

I was also really into switching between eye “cameras” as a kid! You might have already tried sugar-free flavored sparkling waters, so disregard this suggestion if you’ve tried them and they didn’t work for you, but I would suggest sparkling water as a way of getting water with some of the features of soda. They provide that nice refreshing and stimmy mouth feel, and a lot of the flavors are pretty good even though they don’t have sugar. I’ve never seen any sparkling waters that are Pepsi flavored-most of them are fruit flavored, so it might take some getting used to for some people. They have a pretty significant presence in the US; I don’t know how much of a thing they are in the UK.

[@LilysDoorway]

Tactile Textile is my new favorite phrase. 😊 I am a corduroy lover too. This gave me a trip down memory lane to all my childhood stims. Thank you! Also I was/am obsessed with Charmed. ❤

[@Zebra_Joe_4TN]

when I was a kid I had a pair of corduroy pants (👖LOL). I loved to rub my legs.

[@sammich373]

I've been bingeing your videos this past week and I love your content! :3

[@AttenuatedNecronym]

With the clicks there's 3 you can make. I like to do little tunes with them. The back click is hard for me to do so i use front and side clicks. You can also affect the sound by making different vowel shapes. It's stimmy but to outside observers it's like a weird song. And if they ask i tell them about the clicks i learned about in my intro to linguistics class and think they sound cool

[@radishraven9]

Great video! I have discovered many stims since my diagnosis, i realize i often want to wiggle my fingers or bounce on my toes. I would also do the eye switching thing and i really loved lava lamps. My mom used to be addicted to Coca Cola but then switched to bubble water. I like water but sometimes it is boring, and bubbles make my stomach bubbly unfortunately. But here in sweden we have a lot of flavoured bubbly waters that taste like pomegranate or raspberry but have no sugar, i think you would like that 😊

[@helenaskew4851]

I like lava lamps very colourful and bright. I like pepsi too!

[@diospore]

I noticed that the thing I do a lot is chew on my cheeks. The inside of my cheeks are just covered in little ridges from where I chew the skin off and eat. People used to get mad at me because they thought I was making faces at them to make fun of them. I noticed if I put my hand on my face when I do it, people think I'm just thinking, so I ended up with the secondary stim of constantly touching my face. Do you like Sprite? That's the one drink I pretty much live off of. It used to be Sierra Mist but that was replaced and I hate Starry with a passion. People get weird when I refuse to drink whatever knockoff beverage is at the restaurant, but I don't like pops that aren't Sprite.

[@AM-sw9di]

You look so much happier living here, great to see! I used to hate water a lot, so I always put squash in the water and then I'd drink loads. I don't know why I like water now tho. I guess you could also put squash in sparkling water, or get one of those drink carbonators.

[@lukexfd4679]

💀ing my mouth with a whole 150g bag of coop irresistible hand cooked sea salt & chardonnay wine vinegar crisps

[@DanaAndersen]

How have I not tried these 👀

[@MICHhimself]

I kid you not, a few videos above this one, someone I subscribe to posted some lava lamp footage. Not even "related videos" or whatever, just really good timing. :p Anyway, the whole switching between eyes to see how the view changes is not one I'd clocked as a stim before, but one I do a lot of the time- especially if I've got something nearby and further away, I'll move my head to line them up from one eye, then switch to the other one and adjust. Bouncy leg is also a very common one, when I've not folded my legs under me in some weird configuration or have them draped over my desk as I slump in my chair like a sack of potatoes. Clicking my tongue is/was also one, but I weirdly made it a point of pride I could do it... really loudly. I'm still likely to do it when I walk or cycle under a bridge, to get that reverberation. I think probably my weirdest stim that I really only do when no-one (save for partner) is around, is taking a deep breath, tilting my head back a bit to open up my throat, and the exhaling in such a way that my uvula audibly rattles. Not sure if this only works because I don't have tonsils or something. Regardless, it's a very satisfying one that feels like a levelled up sigh, but it's so deeply weird that it goes from "lol quirky" right into "wtf was that" and oh god should I even post it. (If anyone else does this I'd appreciate you mentioning it) 😅

[@letsrock1729]

Is it a bit like gargling without liquids? If so, I did that a lot as a child although, these days, I'm all about the humming 😉

[@MICHhimself]

@@letsrock1729 Kind of, except if I did it with water it would splash everywhere, much more airflow than for gargling lol. I'm also constantly humming :)

[@letsrock1729]

@@MICHhimself I think water would have splashed everywhere if I'd done that too. Nice to meet a fellow 'hummer'....I do it constantly and, most of the time, I'm not even aware of it until I suddenly become conscious of the fact that I've been doing it for hours. It wouldn't be quite so bad if I wasn't just humming the same part of one song over and over again (day in and day out). It drives me a bit crazy sometimes.

[@MICHhimself]

@@letsrock1729 My partner's pretty tolerant of it, but on occasion she has to interrupt and ask if I could please try to stop lol.

[@letsrock1729]

@@MICHhimself My brother once heard me from a different room and asked if I could hear a 'strange humming noise'. When I sheepishly told him that it was probably me, he refused to believe it until we did a little 'stopping and starting' experiment which proved that it was, in fact, me 😆 These days, I am alone almost 24/7, so at least it's only me who gets irritated by it.

[@ThoughtfulSparrow]

When I first found out that I'm autistic, I thought I didn't stim, never having noticed it before. However, now that I know what it is, I discovered that I stim *so much*. Tapping fingers, bouncing up and down in a chair, wiggling my hands, spinning a pen, drumming my feet, rubbing finger ends. It reached a level a couple of weeks ago when I had to sit in a language class for two hours with a bad back and I felt like I had to apologise to the teacher afterwards because it must be really distracting. I realised that I've been doing all of these *forever* but it's never seemed odd to me, so I never noticed it as something different. Oh - yes, I need a lava lamp, even thinking about it makes me feel *calm*.

[@Cedrinya]

buy a lava lamp

[@thethegreenmachine]

I used to do the leg bouncing. What happened to your lava lamps?

[@miezepups15]

I just managedto drastically improve how easy it is for me to drink enough water, and maybe it could help you, too: The tap water where I live is pretty hard and alcaline - 16.7°dH and 7.48pH to be specific. It never felt particularly good ln my mouth. If your water is similar, try this: To 3l of tap water add: - 1/5 to 1/4 teaspoon of table salt (push the spoon 1/5 to 1/4 of the way into the salt, then pivot it up) - 1 teaspoon of sugar - 1 teaspoon of lemon juice (from those squeezy bottles). This makes the water taste so much less chalky (try a side-by-side comparison) and makes it feel much better in the mouth. It's much less sugar and acidity than a fizzy drink. I usually had half a litre of water left in my pitcher when I went to bed. Now I drink the last two glasses for dinner, just because it feels better to drink this.

[@miezepups15]

Addendum: The analytic data for your water should be available on your water provider's webpage :)

[@miezepups15]

Addendum 2: Just learned that less salt is better, so... less salt.

[@AutisticAwakeActivist]

I have the leg bounces whether standing or sitting. It was Tardive dyskinesia from meds. I still have it but it’s not as bad as it was.

[@KentAndrewHazara]

Hmmm, wow, you got another “Like” and a “subscribe”!