oral stim – little thoughts

This post is part of my april autism series for autism acceptance month. Visit the first post here for links to the rest of the series!

Before we began Rondel’s diagnostic process, I had never heard the words “stim” or “stimming” – so I’ll assume it’s new to a lot of you as well.

“When we feel an emotion or a collection of emotions very powerfully, stimming can help us manage these feelings without overloading. Often emotions like sadness, anger, or anxiety will prompt stimming as a way to both experience these less pleasant emotions while also keeping our cool.” – The Stimming Checklist

Essentially, a stim is a behavior that provides sensory, social, or emotional regulation to a person. Some of the most familiar (or stereotyped) stims among autistic people are hand flapping, rocking, and head banging – but to stop at those would be extremely limited and inaccurate. The Stimming Checklist has accumulated over 1400 different stims from user submissions (although some are essentially repeats as people submitted different wordings of the same behavior, there are still a lot), just to give you an idea of the diversity and range of stimming behavior! They also give a more detailed description of what stimming is and why people may stim, including the above quote about stimming for emotional regulation.

From the Ausome Cork facebook page: 8 Functions of Stimming

My most reliable stim is skin picking. It can be embarrassing at times, since my upper arm is dotted with scars and scabs, but in the moment it is less noticeable than something like hand flapping (or running away screaming, lol), so I keep doing it. The sensation of it helps to alleviate almost any kind of tension, and also helps me stay focused on something if my thoughts are wandering (maybe by occupying the part of my brain that would otherwise be distracting me!). For example, if people around me (or even in a movie) are arguing and saying hurtful things, even if they are sarcastic or joking, I will start to pick to help calm down my physical reaction to the emotional turmoil I’m sensing around me. On the other hand, I’ll also pick if I’m bored and can’t do anything because I’m stuck waiting somewhere.

Hand flapping and deep breaths with loud exhales are stress-reducing in the way that pushing down the valve of a pressure cooker reduces the internal pressure – they cut out a lot of tension very rapidly but in a very dramatic manner – and I tend to only stim that way in the privacy of my own home. In class or other lecture-type environments, I write (notes, thoughts, or the alphabet), calculate irrational square roots by hand, draw geometric designs on grids, play games on my phone or laptop, or else generally become unable to sit still or pay attention due to my mind wandering off into some far off land and my physical tension steadily rising.

While stimming behaviors may appear strange or odd on the surface, therefore, it is important to understand that they can play a significant role in the life of an autistic person, as I am hardly a unique or extreme example. Trying to force someone to stop stimming altogether is going to be harmful in the long run: it will deny them access to some of their coping strategies for sensory overwhelm or emotional stress, and force them to spend significant amounts of energy and focus on holding in their stims at the expense of other things.

“If anything, stimming improves my concentration. It’s a release, like sneezing or scratching an itch. Have you ever tried to ignore an itch? What if someone told you it was wrong to scratch yourself to relieve an itch? What would that do for your concentration?” – Cynthia Kim, Musings of an Aspie

However, not all specific stims are healthy, no matter how helpful they may be in the moment. My skin picking certainly falls into this category, as does any other self-injurious stim. In these cases it is worth the effort to find a replacement stim, if at all possible (I haven’t found one for myself yet), and it is emphatically better to consciously redirect towards a positive replacement stim than to simply try to eliminate the damaging one. Without that deliberate replacement, it is likely that an equally unhealthy stim will take over instead (for example, I tried to stop picking my arm last year and ended up creating sores all over my legs. Not helpful at all, that.) So if I ever figure out a good strategy for finding a replacement and making it stick, I’ll be sure to update you…

Do you stim? What do you do and why? Does someone you know? What do you think about it? It’s ok if it seems weird 🙂 – I sometimes think my own stims are weird even though I know why I do them and how it helps me!

Rondel is not exactly a stereotypical picky eater, but he is quite particular when it comes to food, for clear sensory-related reasons. Texture and temperature are probably the most important aspect of a food for him – his favorite foods tend to be either frozen or in the dry-to-crunchy range. So he can be quite happy eating some tortilla chips (sometimes he’ll tolerate them with melted cheese) alongside a bowl of frozen mixed veggies, he loves toast and frozen blueberries for breakfast, he prefers crackers to fig bars, he only enjoys chicken nuggets if the outer coating isn’t at all “mushy”, and he won’t eat any fresh fruit at all (except perhaps melon in the summer or pear in the fall) after having decided his primary previously acceptable fruit (apple) made his mouth feel funny. He will eat noodles and potatoes in moderation, but not consistently. Mexican refried beans and rice are acceptable, but runnier beans and rice dishes (I have a few really good ones) are not. I don’t think he has ever consented to eat soup or oatmeal, and the thought of sweet potato or avocado is enough to make him emotionally upset. Also, having a favorite food to accompany a merely tolerable one seems to help by resetting or calming the tactile receptors in his mouth.

I had never really given much thought to picky eating prior to having kids, because I tend to be a more adventurous eater, but I am realizing now that I have my own sensory quirks. I heavily prefer foods where each bite will have a variety of textures, or where the level of spiciness is enough to leave a burn, or where dedicated chewing may be required – so in a peanut butter sandwich I will use crunchy peanut butter and orange marmalade and toast the bread if at all possible; I attempt to make even normal bland foods more bold by adding extra seasonings (cayenne in the mac and cheese, double the recipe’s amount of every single spice for spice cookies); and I enjoy fairly tough meat but can only rarely handle creamy soup.

The appearance or smell of a food can also cause an overwhelming or challenging sensory reaction. Rondel reacts quite strongly to anything that looks mushy or gooey (like yogurt or banana); I recoil from unevenly bumpy foods (I avoided looking at peeled bananas for at least a year as a child). Rondel can be bothered by the smell of the food other people are eating or even by food that he enjoys eating (which I have only observed in myself during pregnancy – I notice smells quite well but am not usually bothered by them), but we’ve found that lighting a candle on the table makes things significantly better for him.

Interestingly enough, I have also recently noticed that eating painfully spicy food actually helps lower my anxiety levels, and temporarily decreases my reliance on other stims. I’m guessing it is similar for Rondel, and may be part of why he’s been a bit pickier and more wild lately as we are out of both tortilla chips and frozen blueberries. It makes me wish some of his earlier oral stims were still helpful for him – he had been able to translate overt licking of his hands and arms into chewing a wooden necklace, and it made a big difference for him in more stimulating environments especially – but he hasn’t shown much interest in them since this summer. I was beginning to think he would take after my grandmother, who still surreptitiously chews on her hands to stim! And who knows, maybe he will 🙂 in my experience, stims can ebb and flow over time, even if some are more enduring or central.

In the meantime, we’ll keep on freezing our yogurt into creamy cold dots, stocking our house with plenty of whole-grain bread for toast, lighting our candle at dinner, and continuing to try new foods in hope that some of them will cooperate with his unique blend of sensory cravings and aversions!

Tag: oral stim

picky eating, oral stims, and anxiety