Fat boy stim

Stimming. Sounds fun, right?

Lovely word, isn’t it? Kind of like ‘romp.’ The sort of word normal people don’t use but tabloid headline writers just love. A bit titillating, like something you’d do in public and hope no one notices. 

Yeah, well the joke’s on you, you mucky pup. Absolutely everyone knows when you’re stimming. 

Stimming is the habit of self-soothing through repetitive, self-stimulatory behaviour. It calms the mind and helps to focus attention. Despite doing it for my entire life, I only learned what it was about three months ago. Getting an ADHD diagnosis really is a wonderful eye opener. Every day is a bit like at the end of the Usual Suspects where Chazz Palminteri pieces it all together. There’s a dropped coffee cup moment around every corner.

When I first learned I had ADHD I did a lot of reflecting back over my life, and I remembered that some years ago I used to work with a guy who was a rampant pen tapper. It was like there was a tiny Charlie Watts under his desk, paradiddling away relentlessly. Poor lad would get shouted at by the rest of the team every day. “Shut up tapping for fucksake¹ I'm trying to work!” Confession time: he was my patsy. I was using him as cover for my own relentless stimming. 

I have inattentive type ADHD. I am thoroughly convinced that I went undiagnosed for so long because I have hardly any hyperactive traits. Quite the opposite, I am inactive to a fault - the Big Lebowski wishes he could be this sedentary. Except that’s not entirely true, is it? Because of all the fucking stimming.

Every single day, my extremities are going like hummingbirds. I am always tapping my feet on the floor and my thumbs on the desk. I would love to be a drummer, unfortunately I have all the coordination of a landslide. I’ve tried the drums, I bought a kit when I was 21. Sadly my feet and my hands just do not cooperate with each other. I sounded awful, like a couple of dinosaurs falling down the stairs.

You know what doesn’t sound awful? Air drums. Air drumming is one of my favourite stims and I sound fucking perfect every time I play. I’ve got double kick drums and more tom toms than Neil Peart. If I’m working from home I can (and do) air drum entire setlists throughout the working day. Not much of an issue in my own gaff, although I can slip into actual desk top drumming, slapping my work surface so hard I bruise my fingers. It’s slightly more problematic when I’m in the office. I can just about keep it under control until a particularly good fill comes along and then I can’t help it, the arms start flailing. And people really notice that shit. 

So, like all good maskers, I stamp down my own base instincts and try to suppress the stimming. You might as well try and stop Boris Johnson from lying. The urge is uncontrollable and before five minutes have passed I’m tapping incessantly on the side of my keyboard, whacking out a little backbeat with not a care in the world for anyone around me. It helps me think, okay? 

I’m quite fortunate that my employer is not only fairly understanding and accommodating of neurodivergence, but also treats me like a grown up - so I can sit in a corner with headphones in to ensure I’m not distracted. By actively shrinking the immediate world around me, I’ve recently managed to get the stimming down to a slow and steady head nod and constant foot tapping. (I wasn’t kidding about the double kick drum set up, both feet are going, all day long.) These two cover me maybe 90% of the time.  Occasionally a particularly enjoyable Clutch² album - or Deftones out of nowhere on shuffle - will break through and the stim takes over. 

Ah, but Lew - you could just not listen to music. Not so, amigos. Without music keeping my attention on rails, I reach for the pencils and start properly tippy tapping away. Without music I am unrestrained. It is worse for all concerned if I try to go through the day without my headphones in.

Tappy tappy stimming isn’t even the worst of it. I am a prolific gum popper, tongue clicker and whistler. I’m not a good whistler but that doesn’t stop me. A couple of tuneless notes brightens everyone’s day, right? The gum popping really needs to stop, I’m a hairy great middle aged man, not Violet Beauregard. As for the tongue clicking, I’m not sure that’s an issue for anybody. Well, except for me after I saw Hereditary. 

I also have a fairly strong impulse to copy noises that I hear around me. For a while when I was a kid I thought I might have Tourette’s, after the BBC documentary John’s Not Mad brought it to everyone’s attention. Not so, but the mimicry tic can be a form of stimming. The water fountain at work makes a weird little ‘ush ush ush’ noise when it’s low on gas. See if you can guess who’s been caught, on more than one occasion and by total strangers, ‘ush ush ush’ing back at it? Correct. Absolutely none of you win a prize, I’d be skint.

Listening to the same song over and over on repeat can be a stim. In the dark old days of last December, when I was at my lowest and before therapy, I could listening to the same five or six songs on repeat for entire days. They were all either nostalgic or angry and it probably wasn’t a healthy little playlist but fuck me, it kept my head on my shoulders at the time.

My playlist has broadened back out following diagnosis, however on days when there’s a lot going on around me all I can do to self-soothe and get through it is whack on Dillinger Escape Plan or Faith No More. If the music is fast, heavy, angry (or all of the above), it seems to cancel out everything going on around me on both the micro and the macro level. Dillinger, especially, are superb for drowning everything out and calming the storm inside. It seems I am most at peace when my eardrums are being shredded. Check it out, see if it soothes you.

1. Kids, it might sound nuts to your Gen Z ears, but you could swear like a docker in the average office 20 years ago. Every corporate space was like a Scorsese movie. Tremendous fun at the time, toxic as fuck looking back. 

2. Sometimes I legit think I could keep up with J.P. Gaster out of Clutch, then I remember that he’s one of the best rock drummers on earth, while I’m just a guy flailing away like an octopus on a barbeque. Look at him, magnificent.