The kid who squirms in his seat during class.

The teen who jiggles her leg under her desk while writing a test.

The young adult whose post-secondary lecture notes are covered in doodles.

The working adult who clicks pens during meetings.

The stay-at-home mom whose feet twitch constantly while she’s reading a picture book to her preschooler.

It’s annoying to other people. Sometimes it’s annoying to us. It makes people think we’re nervous. It makes them think we want to be doing something else.

It’s fidgeting.

Fidgeting is the common word for the little things people do to help ground themselves and maintain their focus. Neurotypical people don’t do it as often as neurodiverse people do, but they do it all the same. Sometimes our stuff is more obvious than the neurotypical stuff, is all.

It’s all a type of stimming.

“Stimming” is short for “sensory stimulation” and it refers to the things we do to positively impact our sensory systems. You’ll usually see it used in conjunction with autism, because autistic people do it the most, but all people who have developmental disorders stim, and that means ADHDers stim, too.

Stimming can calm us if we’re feeling overwhelmed.

It can help us focus if we’re struggling.

It can keep our bodies in motion so that our ears and eyes can do their jobs better.

Sometimes a stim or fidget is disruptive, and that’s when we have to find other ways to get the same sensory input. It makes no sense to replace pacing with tapping your knee if what you need is the gross motor vestibular input. Rocking on an inflated rubber seat cushion would probably work much better in such an instance.

The important thing to remember is that we often don’t do these things consciously, and if we do make the conscious decision it’s because we recognize how we’re feeling and have realized that doing this particular thing makes us feel better. So finding ways to accommodate fidgeting/stimming is vital to our success.

How do you fidget or stim, and in what situations?