 What is stimming and what are some examples of it? Stimming is self-stimulatory behavior and it usually has the focus of regulating through repetitive action. It used to be thought that stimming had no purpose, that it was purposeless repetitive action. Thankfully they figured out that it serves a purpose that it is very regulatory for many folks not only autistic people stem, non-autistic people stem, neurodivergent and neuro-typical people stem. Autistic individuals just tend to stem more often. Although stimming is not a mandatory criteria to receive an autism diagnosis. I also just want to add to the definition of stimming, I think a lot of the time folks think of stimming as something that autistic individuals do only to regulate negative emotions like frustration, overwhelm, anger, maybe like a routine change, different things like that. When in fact autistic stimming often is an expression of regulating joy, happiness and other positive feelings. So we might see individuals stem in a variety of ways using and tapping into sensory input from seven out of the eight senses. So we have eight senses. Most people think we have five. Sorry mind blown. There's eight and I can briefly describe each one. The first five are the easiest. So we have sight which is when we take in sensory input from what we see. We have hearing where we take in sensory input of sound, smell which is the whole factory sense, taste which is the gustatory sense and touch which is when we take in sensory stimuli from our skin primarily and it is what clocks and things like texture but also sometimes clocks and things like pressure which is directly related to the sixth sense which is not to be related to the movie the sixth sense. We can see the ghosts, you know, we can sense that. I mean some autistic individuals do have a lot of strengths in that due to our ability to tap into the senses and it's not what this podcast is about. Maybe another one. Yeah. So the sixth sense that I'm referring to is proprioception or the proprioceptive sense and I like to think of this as our sense of body-ness. It helps us know where our body is in relation to space and how close to get to something, how far away. It also really helps us with hand-eye coordination as well as how much pressure to apply in the push-pull experience like if you're going to push a ball or push a chair in or put a glass down. Then we also have the vestibular sense which is my favorite. That's right. I really love the vestibular sense too. We'll get to that. Well, I mean it's good in a sense that I really enjoy stems that are related to it but that in a sense because I keep falling into stuff all the time. Yeah, so the vestibular sense is located in the inner ear which is interesting because we often think of the vestibular sense as the sense of balance and most people when we think of balancing we think of our legs or we think of our core but if you were to spin your head around really fast several times you get dizzy and that's because the vestibular sense is located there. So this helps us to know where our body is in relation to gravity and the vestibular sense and the proprioceptive sense combine into what I like to call the senses of movement and they help us move our body in all the day to day. So we also have an eighth sense which is not a stimmy but it's the interoception sense, interoceptive sense which I like to call the internal sense. It helps us clock our heart rate cues. It helps us to clock our hunger and thirst cues and whether or not we need to go to the bathroom. So that's a very important sense especially in relation to self-regulation but like I said it's I'm sure there's a way to stim with it. I'm sure someone stimming with the interoception sense like I'm sure it's happening but there's not really a list. I don't know like. Maybe like plug your ears and like count your heartbeat things like that I could see being a fun stimmy thing for some but examples so if we're stimming with our sense of sight we might love to look at flashing lights like your light there in the background or my microphone here. We might like to look at music visualizers that go round and round and round and those sorts of things can be very stimmy or the 8D kind of or I know I know that you have things like ASMR streams and stuff like. Oh would they show? Would they show? I usually think of this out. Yeah I think even gaming we were talking about gaming before there in some like RPGs there's such fascinating and gorgeous and beautiful graphics that I've just paused and stared at like a waterfall and an ocean and an RPG and just stared at it for like 10 minutes like now I'm living my character and I've actually started crying because it's so like joyful for me as a stim. Yeah I think a lot of people don't really recognize or consider visual or sight based stimming because it's not really something that we see an autistic person doing unless we notice they're staring at visualizer for a really long time or staring at a flashing light for a really long time but it generally doesn't affect other people and since most folks when they think about autism they think about how it affects them as an outsider there's not a lot of discussion around sight based stimming. There's also stimming through our sense of hearing and the first thing that comes to mind with that is listening to the same song on repeat and whenever I tell someone I've been listening to the same song on repeat and they're like oh I do that too and then they look at like my play count back when I used to use like iTunes they would look at my play count and they'd be like wait you've listened to this song 10,000 times. They think that you're putting it in a playlist and you sort of play it around but we're actually literally just like got it on the repeat one just like over and over again. And I would have like maybe a really stressful day at work and come home and just lie down on the floor and listen to the same song on repeat for 30 minutes to an hour as a means of self regulating that stress. There's other ways to stim through the oral sense or through hearing like just by playing sounds I think we often like think of maybe an autistic person who has an app on their phone that makes sounds and they like do you press those sounds again and again. Like a storybook like with the little things that you get. Yes, I totally forgot about this. That's a dream when I was a kid. A water, water or pebbles, sand like I know it's a little bit sort of tactile as well but I think definitely like the sound of water you know you get those sort of indoor waterfalls or fires or you know I think for me that kind of stuff really helps. I hate silence like silence is really really hard for me like I always have to have something playing on in the background or even whilst we're talking I have like a Spotify playlist of it's like chilled music that I play and I do it for pretty much every single thing that I do whether it's like standing up and doing like some public speaking or chatting to people or I don't know it just kind of I think it for me it fills up spaces I think I feel like I always need to be like stimulated by some kind of noise. Yeah it can be really fun and exciting and also really calming in a lot of ways and then we have smell stemming through smell might look like using lots of essential oils on the nose and might look like you know just smelling everything smelling the same thing over and over again we have taste often when I think about stemming through taste I think of that person who really likes intense intense flavors and wants to like have all the spices in their food and they use them often and then when I think of touch I think of you know rubbing plushie blankets and maybe something that's rough yeah some people might even like rough textures or bumpy textures just really tapping into that touch and taste often get confused with different proprioceptive senses or I mean proprioceptive stemming because we might think of someone who choose on things constantly and think taste but or think touch but it really often is proprioception because that has to do with applying pressure to the body it is a little related to muscles contract and so using jewelry or just chewing on pens that is a proprioceptive stem another proprioceptive stem as to use weighted blankets and different things like that you might also have someone who rolls things a lot across the floor or across a table that's tapping into that sense as well we have vestibular so we've got this spinning spinning spinning spinning and swaying and rocking maybe even pacing those stems are actually the ones that we think of the most and we think of autistic stemming and what's funny is that we often don't even know what sense that's tapping into we don't know about the vestibular sense and so that's a really big one I personally love spinning good day viewers and listeners apologies for my very rude introduction to our regularly scheduled broadcast I just want to remind you that if you have enjoyed the podcast thus far please make sure to rate subscribe like comment and share all of these actions are pretty much the lifeblood of a small independent creator like myself and it will help me get most of my work more of my work to people who really need it if you want to stay up to date with my life get behind the scenes content check out my daily blogs head over to the instagram at Thomas Henley UK you'll find a link to that down in the description alongside my range of neurodiversity clothing just like this strong powerful autistic hoodie I love so much and my website of course where you can find a contact email to book me for one-to-one autism coaching interviews workplace training and speaking so thank you very much for listening to this very annoying self out there and I hope you enjoy the rest of the show I love walking on my tip toes to challenge my balance not that I'm thinking about it when I do it but it's getting me that sensory input and I also rock a lot and then we had interception but we also said that maybe maybe fucking your ears and listening to your heartbeat maybe something something was I think you could you could think of a lot of different things but I do think I do think is there any of the ones that you want to touch on or is it I think I covered all the senses I think I actually did that yeah yeah yeah I went when you were talking about sort of like the different sort of senses specifically using like the scientific names for like the senses and stuff I was thinking about you know obviously I obviously but I went to university to study via med and one of one of the modules was around like senses and things like that and we were talking about all like the inner mechanisms and like even even senses as we as we see and view them they're very like multifaceted for example the thing like to do with touch you know different neurons or different nerves are like activated by different kinds of sensations and pressure and you know so like the light light touch can activate different neurons than the ones that are involved in like heavy pressure even going so far as to things like nociception or like to do with like pain you know things like specifically for me I know it's not to do with stimming but I feel sharp pain very very intensely and they're like related to these these group of neurons called alpha delta fibers and they're very like they've got loads of lots of this stuff called myelin around it which allows them to go like really quickly and that's why when you know you get a cut or you get like a prick or something it's like you jump away from it quickly because it's like such a fast sort of electrical signal and then you also have like stuff around blood pain around the C fibers which are like very very slow you know the system doesn't react to them very quickly but it's sort of like a weird sort of dull pain you know like if you have like an achy leg or something you know you bang that or something and I don't feel that a lot so it's it's you know obviously it doesn't lend well to me taking injuries seriously if I you know me me being six six three I tend to I tend to bash my head on a lot of things unintentionally and I did not know you were six foot three I had no idea yeah yeah and it's also one of the reasons I'm actually a little bit annoyed at that fact because like I used to spin so much when I was younger and you know being my height it's it's very hard to no more than find a space to spin unless I'm like doing it on a chair or I'm going on like a round about or what are those cool park contraptions where you're sitting and just spin around all of those and also if if I just trip up or if I mess up I am like plummeting towards the ground at a very very dangerous pace so I tend not to do that a lot anymore and a lot of my stimming tends to be sort of related to like exercise like you know I was saying about the hyposensitive to blunt blunt pain and that also kind of plays into a little bit you know in terms of like going to the gym and stuff because for me I don't feel sort of that that pain from exercising very easily so it means that I can sort of push it a lot further than most people can obviously again it's like a it's it's a double edged sword because I can injure myself and not know about it or you know unless it's like a sharp pain so there's there's a lot of ways that like sensory systems I think can be very sort of complicated you know I think even in terms of like the visual system in terms of like you know we often see it as just visual but there's the aspect of like the hue of the lights like the colour of the light or the the brightness or the contrast or you know there's there's so many aspects to like how we sort of interpret in our environment