User:Soap/stim

hitting the wall

• 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

SMD

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.

and as below i have seen autistics on social media describe stims that they need to release, whichseems like it might be somewhere in between a stim and a rtic, (a stic?) or even a mild tic.

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? https://www.pedneur.com/article/S0887-8994(08)00012-X/abstract suggests it might have all of them and one more, but perhaps this is a circular definition 🙂‍↕️

FTLD

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.

other questions

possibly thr most important paper

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

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

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?)

putamen volume

a possible uniting factor. better link here foir noiw. this study excludes all with autism, Tourette's, but not ADHD, so although they dont say it it may be a subcategory of SMD (because SMD can have tics). tbh it seems like another study that's a dud (sdudy?) in that they go in expecting to find something and instead get a weak signal that "cries for more research" so im not sure theres much to see here.

fascination with water

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.

hand-flapping

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.

dystonia

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 the motor clumsiness (dyspraxia) that many autistics have (and which used to be diagnostic of Asperger's). 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. perhaps those with the genes for dystonia have a high probability of not developing the condition.

instinctively, i'd say that dystonia is not related to stimming or to tics, but I dont know .... Im learning new things all the time.

other info on dfyspraxia

But dyspraxia (now called developmental coordination disorder apparently) overlaps heavily with autism and with ADHD, and also with sensory processing disorder. There is no obvious reason these conditions should be related, so it's most likely due to common forcing by a gene.

other combinations

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 ^(usually) cannot.

Childhood disintegrative disorder (CDD)

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.

even more pdd's

• Skraban–Deardorff syndrome
• Kleefstra syndrome
• CHAMP1-associated_intellectual_disability_syndrome

h

• a coincidence: Yippee-Like 5 is a gene linked to one autism-like condition.
• another coincidence: one of the researchers writing about motor stereotypies is named Erin Furr-Stimming. Possibly a double aptonym since she did at least some papers on animals.

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

striatal beta endorphins

One paper (that I cant find, but it hardly matters since it was paywalled) suggests that autism exemplifies the failure of striatal beta endorphins to diminish with maturation. (Neutral as to whether it is cause, effect, or merely linked to something else.) This implies followup questions such as

1. If it has been measured,
2. Whether it's an all-or-nothing distinction or a spectrum,
3. Whether it applies to SMD or to other conditions besides autism,
4. At what age the hormones normally disappear,
5. Whether some children lose it unusually early and what happens to them.

apparently, as i'd suspected, the scientists believe that beta endorphins peak at childbirth (for the baby) and decline rapidly thereafter, so that toddlers have less than babies, playing children have less than toddlers, teenagers have less than playing children, and adults have the least of all. this would explain why childhood is not one long series of traumas. (while many people fondly remember their childhoods, i suspect very few would be willing to re-live them; those who do typically have very difficult lives.)

fibromyalgia

https://www.discoverymedicine.com/Brian-Johnson-2/2014/10/fibromyalgia-autism-and-opioid-addiction-as-natural-and-induced-disorders-of-the-endogenous-opioid-hormonal-system/ suggests fibromyalgia and autism are opposites] and a few other things. I disagree with most of this paper .... first, I disagree that opioids are primarily intended to point us towards food and sex. I think this study is wrong about a lot of other things too. but its still interesting. this theory even brings Tylenol into it

PANDAS

PANDAS

https://karger.com/dne/article-abstract/39/5/355/107836/A-Dopamine-Hypothesis-of-Autism-Spectrum-Disorder?redirectedFrom=fulltext these researchers may have admitted they were wrong in a later paper

s

open access paper:

• suggests met-enkephalin could be the stimming hormone but only from two studies around 1985. also, i suspect that the measurement was of resting blood concentration, not after or during stimming, and that it may not be feasible to ever take a measurement of the blood concentration during stimming because even LFA's seem to react differently when they know they're being watched. Even more difficult would be to take a CSF measurement.
• says that blood plasma beta endorphins actually don't decline in NT's, at least not after childhood. there must be something else that does. the test was apparently corrupted by the subjects knowing they would soon be hurt, which means that ALL such tests are corrupt.

if stimming is tied to met-enkephalin this may explain why the pleasure and analgesia come on so quickly and yet also fade so quickly. nonetheless, most research seems to focus on beta endorphins and the met-enkephalin studies samples probably weren't timed correctly given such a short half-life.

a lot of papers just mention nonspecific opioids such as this one.

serotonin ... not reall stim-related, byut may be interesting as bg info

people with Prader-Willi syndrome have high beta endorphin levels just like autistics seem to (but also high substance P levels, and Im not sure if autistics have that too). i had originally written that PWS exhibited stimming but it may be confined to skin-picking, which autistics also often do but is only sometimes included as a stim.

this book claims hormones can cause animals to begin stereotypy and that the ratio of dynorphin to enkephalin is positively correlated with stereotypy frequency ... the opposite of what i said above, but it could also be that two different parts of the brain behave differently, or even that they're anticorrelated (more here means less there). worth noting also that this is not stimming but a much wider category of stereotypy, including the FTD ("memories of learned motor movements") type.

other links

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.

this seems to be just one of several papers stating that ASC (autism spectrum conditions) may result from a failure of striatal beta endorphins to diminish with maturation or a close paraphrase thereof.

03:03, 12 February 2026 (UTC): autistic adult gets clean from stim-like SIB

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7139720/#:~:text=Anatomical%20brain%20abnormalities%2C%20genetic%20anomalies,contribute%20to%20the%20onset%20of