Over the years when I transitioned out of childhood, into my teens and then into adulthood I noticed the range and intensity of my stims change over time, at first I thought it was the additonal biochemistry of puberty having another reffect on my brain or that I was masking better. But now I realise after a resurgence of stim types that I hadn't experienced in years that it may be the intensity or scope of the stim movement/motion actually increases with the amount of background and active stress.
My daily stim, which almost nobody realises is a stim because the motion is so small, is rubbing my thumb across fingers on the same hand, or into the palm of the other hand. And for a long time I only had this stim. But more recently I had to start being social again to rejoin education as a mature student and I realised during a lecture that I had been rocking my whole body back and forth because the pressure to sit still and struggle to hear the lecturer from across the room with my terrible vocal processing was making me increasingly anxious that I was missing out on vital information. I realised the hand rubbling clearly wasn't enough to cope with this as I was doing both at the same time. But it was realy odd to me because I hadn't bodily rocked back and forth since I was around 8. (I'm in my 30's now.)
Does anyone else experience a change of stim type or intensity (not necesarrily the frequency, but the scale) and if so have you noticed if it's linked to increased stress or excitement, or maybe another heightened emotion?
