Before I start, here is my caveat: I do not, and will not ever, attempt to speak for anyone else, neurodivergent or not. Everyone’s brain is different. Everyone is an individual and should be respected as such.
I do not know what it feels like for other people to stim, but I can tell you what it felt like for me. Mind you, I am 55 years old. When I was a kid growing up, very little was understood about any of this, and punishment was all the rage. Had I started rolling around on the floor and spinning in circles, I likely would have gotten a smack upside the head and been called an idiot.
When I got stressed, it felt like every pore in my skin, from head to foot, had a hot needle being pushed into it. It was not pleasant, but I had to grin and bear it. I do not know what others go through, but for me, that really hurt.
I had to learn to self-regulate, because I had a temper. When I lost my temper, I would see red, and I knew I had to get away from whatever was stressing me out.
In my 20s, I took up fly fishing. I quickly realized there was nothing quite like being out in the wilderness, alone and up to my ass in an ice-cold river, to find a real state of peace. That action was me changing my environment to one that did not stress me out. Finding that quiet space allowed me to get inside my own head and figure out who I actually was.
Do you really know yourself? I thought I did. I didn’t.
Around that same time, I discovered behavioral psychology—reading the works of Freud, Skinner, and Jung—and that is what truly changed everything for me. It gave me the simple understanding that my behaviors were not a choice. They were not an act of free will. The environment causes behaviors. That is all a behavior is: your body’s physical reaction to something happening in the environment around you.
The problem is that most autistic environments today are completely unhealthy. They are pure chaos, paired with a constant state of social or physical punishment. Under those conditions, you never find that state of peace.
That peace is not just a nice feeling—it is a physical requirement. It gives your nervous system a chance to undergo a true somatic reset. When you remove the constant physical threats, the sensory noise, and the social pressure, your body stops dumping stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline into your bloodstream. Your nervous system finally gets the room it needs to settle down and heal.
A real state of peace means the absence of any need for an emotional response to your environment. When there is no harm to escape from and no threat present, cortisol and adrenaline have zero reason to exist. When the environment stops triggering you, the need to stim or blow up simply disappears. Those behaviors undergo extinction on their own, because they no longer serve a purpose.
Once you hit that reset, you can look at the stresses in your life with a clear head.
For years, I stressed over things I knew I was not capable of doing. Other people made it worse by trying to force me into boxes I did not fit in, demanding I do things I simply could not do. The turning point came when I stopped wringing my hands over my limitations. I stopped apologizing for what I cannot do, and I completely shifted my focus to the things I can do.
That shift puts you on a path to real self-discovery—finding the things you are actually good at. You have to feed that self-directed learning that autistics not only excel at, but desperately need. When an autistic mind is allowed to lock into something logical and structured without someone constantly demanding obedience, the speed of learning is incredible.
Then there were the video games. I was one of the early junkies back in the day: Wolfenstein 3D, Duke Nukem, Quake, Doom. I was hooked, and it was doing me no favors. It was constant, relentless brain stimulation—a non-stop loop of high-frequency reward and punishment. The games were quietly stealing my peace and directly altering my behavior. I cannot touch video games today. That addiction never truly goes away, and it is entirely too easy to slide right back into that pattern of internal chaos.
That brings us to the main crisis facing kids today: they never, ever get to experience a state of peace.
Their entire world is built on hyper-stimulation. Between screens, social media algorithms, unpredictable demands, and constant sensory input, their nervous systems are bombarded 24 hours a day. They never get the chance to shut off, reset, or calm down. I know what that constant state of hyper-arousal feels like. I have lived it, and I could write a book on it.
Eventually, I came to a simple realization: living life in a calm state is far better than living every single day stressed, agitated, and on the edge of blowing up.
And there is a huge bonus to finding that baseline. When you are truly calm—not faking it, not suppressing it, but grounded in real peace—your presence acts as a stabilizer. When everything around you is erupting in chaos, your regulated state helps the people around you chill out, too. You become the anchor in the room instead of adding to the fire.
That is the magic of the empath—that is the power of the autistic empath. Your peace is what brings healing to others. You don’t need or want to carry their baggage. Your peace allows them to put down the baggage.
Find your peace. It is a whole lot better than living life in chaos.