Why Stimming Deserves the Olympic Medal

If stimming were an Olympic sport, I'd back our son for the gold. He wears headphones, puts music on, and runs circuits around our house with a kind of furious joy that I have never seen him produce anywhere else. He'll do it when he's happy, when he's excited, when he's overwhelmed, when something moved him and he doesn't yet have the words.

We came up with that title, stimming for the Olympics, because stimming has a PR problem. A lot of people hear the word and think of something unusual, something to manage, something to redirect. And yes, there are moments where context matters. But the fundamental truth about stimming is this: it's what a nervous system does when it needs to regulate itself. All of us stim. We just don't all call it that.

The clinical definition says stimming, short for self-stimulating behaviour, refers to repetitive physical movements, sounds or actions used to manage emotions, sensory input and stress. When you tap your foot under the desk, that's stimming. When you click a pen until the person next to you says something, that's stimming. When you twirl your hair, crack your knuckles, or rub your finger across a familiar texture without thinking, stimming.

For many neurodivergent people, stimming is more intense and more frequent than what most people do. And crucially, it serves a specific function. I had a student in a year twelve classroom who asked me the same question repeatedly over the course of a lesson. 'What's your favourite sport? Can you explain it?' Same question, same phrasing, every time.

Later I understood: she was asking because she already knew what my answer would be. Getting the same response each time, predictable, consistent, reliable, was regulating her. It was giving her nervous system something it could count on. That was her stim. A question that always had the same answer.

“The stim came first. The body processes before the mind can articulate. Flapping, running, rocking, these aren't interruptions to communication. They're often the beginning of it.”

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Emily's daughter got her hair cut recently, quite dramatic, a significant change. She was excited but nervous. And when she saw herself in the mirror and the emotion hit, she didn't have words yet. What she had was her hands: she started flapping, and then the smile came, and then finally the words. The stim came first. That's the order it happens in. The body processes before the mind can articulate.

What we've learned as a family is to let it be. If our son is in the middle of running laps of the house with his headphones on and we don't have to interrupt him, we don't. You can tell when he's in the zone, he's somewhere else, processing whatever it is that needed processing. And when he comes out the other side, he'll walk over with this look on his face and just start sharing. Did you know this? And you're about to get forty-five minutes of the most interesting information you've heard all week.

The stim did something. It opened a door.

Emily started carrying fidgets after our son's humanities teacher handed a basket of them to the whole class on the first day of high school. Everyone chose one. Everyone got to say what superpower their fidget had. No one was singled out. It just became part of the room. That teacher, in her first year, in her first school, understood something it takes some people decades to figure out: when you normalise a tool for everyone, no one has to be brave to use it.

Stopping someone's stim without offering an alternative is like taking away a crutch and telling them to walk. The need doesn't disappear when the behaviour does. It goes underground, and the cost of keeping it there is paid somewhere else, in anxiety, in shutdown, in the meltdown that comes later.

Stimming is normal. We all do it. The scale and frequency differ. The visibility differs. But the mechanism is the same: a nervous system doing what it needs to do to stay upright.