Unhealthy Stimming

What unhealthy stims do you do/or have done?

Mine would be grinding my teeth, biting my lips and pulling my hair or chewing it. And bending my fingers.

I’m not aware I’m doing it though. People point them out to me, or, I suddenly realise my lips are bleeding where I’ve bitten too hard and too deep. Part of it is caused by anxiety as well. I have generalized anxiety disorder, constantly worrying about all sorts, though I can never work out what it is I’m actually worried about! Can never find the reason/trigger. I guess I worry sub consciously. It all leads to my stimming unhealthily which is a total nightmare. My lip biting has resulted in altering my smile, not that I had a cute smile to begin with but it’s sad to see and know.

Healthy stim for me is hopping and dancing. Both I love so much.

Parents
  • My stims are largely okay, in that they aren't hurting me in any way. 

    Apart from my itching. I will get an itch on my body and I will scratch and scratch and scratch, until total distraction. I'll scrape off all the skin and bleed and then it will leave a big scab and that will scar. Sometimes they're small but sometimes they're really big, and then I'll itch them by mistake when they're healing, and they'll bleed again and heal again and it's a bit of a cycle. 

    I'm trying to be more mindful of when I find myself mindlessly scratching now to say "NO" and focus on something else. 

    It's the mindlessness that gets me, I don't even notice it's happening until too late sometimes. 

  • Yeah, I ended up mentioning a few of these types of things during my PIP assessment, saying that it’s largely-subconscious and I just can get lost in it, only realising later that is was an issue.  
    But I then had a GP contact me asking for a routine check-up for “something”. I thought ‘NHS? Check-up? Routine? I didn’t know the NHS was even aware of those three words’. 
    When he phoned me up I got all of this ‘Self-harm’ scripted dialogue, then he said that I’d been flagged because the PIP woman railroaded me into this whole psychological-drama, after I spent 20 minutes explaining the difference to her.
    Then it was almost impossible to stop the GP riding the self-harm train, I just thought this the NHS and Civil Services must have no training for autism at all, you’ve literally got to inform them in-call.. 

Reply
  • Yeah, I ended up mentioning a few of these types of things during my PIP assessment, saying that it’s largely-subconscious and I just can get lost in it, only realising later that is was an issue.  
    But I then had a GP contact me asking for a routine check-up for “something”. I thought ‘NHS? Check-up? Routine? I didn’t know the NHS was even aware of those three words’. 
    When he phoned me up I got all of this ‘Self-harm’ scripted dialogue, then he said that I’d been flagged because the PIP woman railroaded me into this whole psychological-drama, after I spent 20 minutes explaining the difference to her.
    Then it was almost impossible to stop the GP riding the self-harm train, I just thought this the NHS and Civil Services must have no training for autism at all, you’ve literally got to inform them in-call.. 

Children
No Data