The Experience Miracles Podcast

My Child with Autism is Stimming, What Can I do to Help?

Dec 3, 2024

Autism Stimming Explained: Root Causes, Neuroscience, and Drug-Free Solutions

Episode 57, Experience Miracles Podcast | Host: Dr. Tony Ebel, DC, CACCP, Pediatric Chiropractor & Founder of PX Docs | Published: December 3, 2024 | Duration: ~52 min

Key Takeaways

  • Stimming is a compensatory adaptation, not a behavioral problem. When a child rocks, hand flaps, or grinds their teeth, their nervous system is overwhelmed, they’re using external movement to calm internal neurological noise they can’t regulate on their own.
  • The root cause of stimming traces to Subluxation in the neurospinal system, which decreases proprioception (calming movement input) and increases nociception (the brain’s perception of threat and stress), a mechanism known as the gate theory.
  • The brain spends 90% of its energy on the muscular and motor system, with 60% of that influence coming from the spine and one-third from the tiny joints and muscles of the neck alone, making spinal health central to sensory regulation.
  • Stimming is not exclusive to autism. It also appears in children with sensory processing disorder, ADHD, anxiety, and PANS/PANDAS, and even in stressed adults who grind teeth or can’t stop moving their legs before sleep.
  • About 80% of parents report stimming temporarily increases when movement-based therapies begin. This is often a normal neurological reorganization response, but adding too many interventions at once without foundational nervous system care frequently makes things worse.

What Actually Causes Stimming in Children?

Stimming, repetitive movements like hand flapping, body rocking, teeth grinding, and toe walking, is not a behavioral problem or a conscious choice. It is the nervous system’s compensatory response to overwhelming internal stress. When a child’s nervous system is dysregulated, stimming is how the brain attempts to generate the calming sensory input it cannot access on its own.

The root cause, according to Dr. Tony Ebel, DC, CACCP, is Subluxation, physical misalignment and fixation in the neurospinal system, most commonly introduced through Birth Trauma or compounding stress during early development. Subluxation in the brainstem and upper cervical spine reduces proprioception (the body’s calming perception of movement in space) while simultaneously increasing nociception (the brain’s perception of harmful or threatening stimuli). This shift, what neurologists call the gate theory, drives the Autonomic Nervous System into a state of Sympathetic Dominance, a chronic fight-or-flight response that generates the sensory chaos behind stimming.

For parents, this reframes stimming entirely. The child rocking in the corner or hitting their head against the wall is not acting out, they are trying to regulate. They use jaw movement, hand flapping, toe walking, and repetitive sensory-seeking to compensate for a proprioceptive deficit happening inside the spine and nervous system. Addressing that deficit through Neurologically-Focused Chiropractic Care, rather than only adapting the environment around the child, is what Dr. Ebel argues gets to the actual root cause.

What Is Stimming and Why Does It Happen? [00:00:00 – 00:06:59]

Dr. Tony Ebel, DC, CACCP: Does it ever look like your child, through stimming, is worried they will be harmed? Does it ever look like they’re in full fight-or-flight mode, wanting to get out, needing to touch things, needing to do certain actions to feel safe? Does it seem like they don’t feel safe and they use stimming to find safety? If that’s what it feels like emotionally, parents, that’s what’s happening neurologically within the brain.

If your child struggles with stimming, sensory overload, and is constantly uncomfortable in their own skin, constantly needing these movements, these mannerisms, hand flapping, touching, teeth grinding, toe walking, this episode is for you. But I want to emphasize this is not a conversation only for children diagnosed with autism.

While stimming is one of the hallmark and most diagnosable features of autism, it comes in many forms and is relevant across sensory processing disorder, ADHD, anxiety, PANS/PANDAS, and generally overstressed children and adults.

Let me say this upfront, have you ever been so tense you cracked your own neck? Have you ever been so wound up physically, neurologically, and emotionally that you needed to crack your back, stretch, or just get up from your desk and move because you were overwhelmed? As a chiropractor, the concern isn’t that people crack their own necks. The concern is knowing that people’s nervous systems, especially children’s nervous systems, are so overwhelmed, so full of neurophysical tension, that they feel compelled to do it.

“Stimming is compensation for stress. It’s actually an adaptation. While it looks abnormal on the outside, it’s the body doing what it needs to do internally to find calm, regulation, and comfort.”, Dr. Tony Ebel, DC, CACCP

The story behind stimming in children is rooted in neuroscience. These repetitive movements, the rocking, spinning, hand flapping, can seem mysterious to outside observers. But anyone whose child struggles with stimming knows it becomes worse in overwhelming situations: noisy rooms, bright lights, excessive stimulation entering the nervous system. The child needs to calm their brain and nervous system through movement.

This becomes a real quality-of-life challenge for families because it looks anything but calm to the outside. When a child can’t sit still, can’t stop rocking, can’t stop grinding their teeth, that’s when parents become overstressed themselves, because other people don’t understand what’s really happening beneath the surface.

It’s crucial to understand: children cannot control it. They don’t want to do it. This is not a conscious decision to grind teeth, bite fingernails, or chew on shirts.

What Does Stimming Actually Look Like? [00:07:00 – 00:14:59]

Stimming takes many forms that help children regulate their emotions and sensory system. It’s a sign that the nervous system is overwhelmed and dysregulated internally, so they need to move, touch, and stim externally to calm the internal noise.

Behaviors that qualify as stimming include:

  • Hand flapping
  • Finger flicking
  • Continually squeezing fists
  • Picking up and throwing objects
  • Rocking back and forth
  • Leaning into tables
  • Head hitting, particularly in children with upper cervical brainstem subluxations from birth trauma (forceps, vacuum extraction, emergency C-sections, cord wraps). These children are literally trying to adjust themselves.
  • Visual stimulation patterns, eyes moving in many directions due to disrupted oculomotor function
  • Repetitively closing and opening doors, turning lights on and off
  • Chewing, biting, and teeth grinding
  • Seeking out the same show, song, or book repeatedly, because that specific stimulation matches what their dysregulated nervous system needs to stay calm

Here’s what makes stimming particularly difficult to break: nerves that fire together wire together. This is the neurological concept behind muscle memory. The more a child stims to get relief, the more ingrained that pathway becomes. Eventually they need more of it to get the same calming effect, a dose-response cycle that gets harder to interrupt over time, even with chiropractic care, occupational therapy, sensory therapy, or other interventions.

I often use the analogy of a scratched CD. Every time it goes around and hits that same spot, it skips. That’s what happens with stimming, it’s a neurological skip in the system. Those pathways get blazed in, and breaking through them requires getting to the actual source of the dysfunction.

This conversation isn’t just for autism families. Parents dealing with sensory processing disorder, ADHD, and anxiety need this too. And honestly, many of us stim as adults, restless legs before sleep, grinding teeth at night, wearing a mouth guard. The nervous system principle is the same.

How Subluxation Creates the Sensory Disruption Behind Stimming [00:15:00 – 00:24:59]

Let me walk through this like an equation. If autism is C, and stimming is D, one of the behaviors we want to help improve, then sensory motor dysfunction is B. But we still need to identify A: what’s causing the sensory motor dysfunction in the first place?

When practitioners say stimming is caused by sensory issues, gut dysbiosis, or brain inflammation, they’re on the right track. But they haven’t gotten to A. That’s where Subluxation comes in.

Subluxation is a neurologically-focused chiropractic term with three interconnected components that always occur together:

  1. Misalignment, in the skull’s cranial bones, the jaw, the palate, or most commonly and detrimentally, within the spine and neurospinal system
  2. Fixation, the moment misalignment occurs, fixation follows immediately
  3. Sensory alteration and tension, the neurological consequence that drives everything downstream

We call it the neurospinal system because the nervous system and spinal structure cannot be separated. Medicine studies anatomy in silos, skeletal system, nervous system, digestive system. But the nervous system is the one system that connects, controls, and modulates all the others. Once you recognize its primacy in neurological conditions like autism and stimming, you have to ask: where is it housed?

“As nervous system focused chiropractors, we work on the one system that connects, controls, and modulates all of the other systems, the nervous system.”, Dr. Tony Ebel, DC, CACCP

Nobel Prize-winning researcher Roger Sperry demonstrated that the brain spends 90% of its energy on the muscular system, the motor system, and dealing with gravity. 60% of that influence comes from the spine, and one-third comes just from the tiny joints, bones, and muscles of the neck. This is why spinal health is not peripheral to neurological function, it is central to it.

The Proprioception-Nociception Equation: Why Children Stim [00:25:00 – 00:30:59]

Three concepts explain the neuroscience of stimming: proprioception, nociception, and dyskinesis.

Proprioception is the sensory perception of movement, the body’s ability to perceive where it is in space. Proprioception is calming. Think about a long commute: hours of sitting without movement makes most people irritable and unfocused. But after a walk or a workout, the nervous system settles. That’s proprioception at work. Information travels through the dorsal horn to the cerebellum, the air traffic control center for movement, then to the thalamus, hippocampus, amygdala, and prefrontal cortex. The cerebellum needs proprioceptive input to stay calm, regulated, and connected.

When Subluxation is present in the brainstem, neck, and neurospinal system, the most proprioceptively dense area of the body, that calming input is disrupted. The child cannot access it from within their spine, so they compensate externally. This is why they flap their hands, walk on their toes, grind their jaw, and seek constant touch.

“The most sensitive proprioception zones of the body are the neck and brainstem, by far, not even close. They are using those physical stimulations to compensate for what’s not happening within their spine, neck, and nervous system.”, Dr. Tony Ebel, DC, CACCP

When proprioception decreases, nociception increases. Nociception is the brain’s perception of noxious, stressful, or potentially harmful stimuli. This is the gate theory, when proprioception goes down, it opens the gate for nociception. The sensory system experiences excessive threat signaling with insufficient calming input.

This creates dyskinesis, faulty neuromuscular coordination, which shifts the Autonomic Nervous System into chronic Sympathetic Dominance: fight-or-flight, 24/7. This state alters the brain’s sensory processing capacity at every level.

The sequence: Subluxation → dyskinesis → decreased proprioception + increased nociception → sensory dysfunction (B) → autism and stimming (C and D).

The most sensitive proprioception zones, in order: neck and brainstem, jaw, hands and feet, genitals. When a child overstimulates their jaw, flaps their hands, walks on toes, or exhibits inappropriate touching, they are using those areas to compensate for insufficient proprioception in the spine and nervous system.

Why Environment Modifications Aren’t Enough [00:31:00 – 00:39:59]

The conventional medical approach to stimming is largely environmental: modify the child’s surroundings, minimize overwhelm, adapt routines. This is important, and it’s genuinely helpful during certain stages of the healing process. Sensory-friendly environments, thoughtful paint colors, lighting, clothing choices, all matter.

But consider what that approach leaves out: Target. Restaurants. Airports. Vacations. Sports games. Concerts. All the experiences families want to share with their children.

The goal of Neurologically-Focused Chiropractic Care is not to get rid of the bad stuff by reducing environmental triggers. The goal is to get a child to their fullest expression of life. The real benchmark is not that a child can tolerate a carefully controlled clinical setting, it’s that a child who previously couldn’t function in a busy room can eventually walk into a noisy waiting room, handle another kid accidentally bumping them, deal with losing a favorite toy, and just play.

If that’s possible in the office, it’s possible at the waterpark. It’s possible at school. It’s possible in life.

Subluxation needs to be addressed by a neurologically focused chiropractor so the nervous system can calm and regulate on its own, without needing compensatory stimming. This is what addresses the root cause at its deepest level. It does not rule out integrated care, quite the opposite. Neurologically-Focused Chiropractic Care works well alongside physical therapy, occupational therapy, speech therapy, sensory massage, and fascial release. But what makes the integrated approach work is proper sequencing.

Neuro Detox and the Healing Response: When Stimming Temporarily Increases [00:40:00 – 00:44:59]

About 80% of parents report that when they begin movement-based therapies, primitive reflex work, functional movement, chiropractic care, their child’s sleep challenges and stimming temporarily increase. This is one of the most important things to understand about the healing process.

If you’re doing something you know in your gut your child needs, and it creates what we call a neuro detox or reorganizational healing response, understand this is sometimes a necessary part of the process. As a child heals, certain stims, especially those related to gross motor function, may temporarily resurface. The brain and nervous system are going back through developmental milestones that were initially missed.

What looks excessive externally is often the body’s intelligent compensation mechanism trying to get systems back online. When developmental interventions begin, this reorganization or retracing may occur, and sometimes it’s necessary to push through it. A skilled clinician can distinguish whether this is a necessary neurological reorganization or whether the interventions need adjusting.

“The brain and body want to heal. With proper understanding and sequencing of care, we can help children reach their full potential and experience life more fully.”, Dr. Tony Ebel, DC, CACCP

If stimming returns during a period of active intervention, it does not necessarily mean the intervention is wrong. It may mean the nervous system is reintegrating. Reach out to a PX Docs clinician, ask about neuro detox protocols, and look at the sequencing of everything being done.

Why Intervention Sequencing Is the Most Critical Factor in Recovery [00:45:00 – 00:50:59]

Here is the hardest truth in pediatric neurological care: if a child is receiving multiple interventions simultaneously, primitive reflex work, vestibular therapy, visual therapy, biomedical interventions, and their symptoms are getting worse, the problem is very often too much at once.

An already subluxated, dysautonomic child has a neuromuscular brain-body connection that is overwhelmed, dysregulated, and destabilized. Even when each individual intervention is evidence-based and beneficial on paper, stacking them without foundational nervous system stabilization can further destabilize the system rather than heal it.

Think of it this way. If you’re doing extensive biomedical and functional therapies, primitive reflex work, sensory loading, laser therapy, vestibular work, biomedical protocols, but haven’t addressed the foundational nervous system through neurologically focused adjustments, you’re working on B, C, and D without ever addressing A. Or, if you are getting adjusted but are simultaneously doing a dozen other interventions, the nervous system may not have the bandwidth to integrate any of them effectively.

Most providers never discuss this with parents. Parents can end up spending tens of thousands of dollars on simultaneous interventions, running home programs around the clock, and watching their child get worse, not because the interventions are wrong, but because the batting order is wrong.

The one cheat code that is producing the most consistent results in practice right now is not just adjusting kids with excellence. It is calling a time-out, pausing other interventions until the nervous system has more stability and slack. Doing less to get more is one of the biggest breakthroughs in healing that the broader world needs to know about.

There are foundational phases and stages that must be worked through first to stabilize and regulate the nervous system. Once stabilized, it can handle and respond to other interventions with more benefit and fewer side effects. What phase of healing is your child in right now? That question is the starting point.

Frequently Asked Questions

What causes stimming in children with autism?

Stimming is caused by a neurological deficit rooted in Subluxation, physical misalignment and fixation in the neurospinal system that decreases proprioception (calming movement perception) and increases nociception (the brain’s perception of threat). This imbalance, known as the gate theory, forces the nervous system into fight-or-flight and drives children to compensate through external repetitive movement. It is the body’s intelligent attempt to self-regulate, not a behavioral problem.

Is stimming harmful and should I try to stop it?

Stimming itself is not harmful, it is an adaptation the nervous system uses to cope with dysregulation. Trying to suppress stimming without addressing the underlying nervous system dysfunction often makes things worse. The goal is to restore the nervous system’s ability to self-regulate, at which point stimming naturally decreases because the child no longer needs it as a compensatory mechanism.

Why does my child’s stimming get worse in noisy or busy environments?

Overwhelming sensory environments increase the nervous system’s stress load. When the brain is already running on insufficient proprioception and excessive nociception, any additional sensory input pushes it further into Sympathetic Dominance. The child ramps up stimming because they need more compensatory input to maintain any level of regulation. This is why sensory-friendly environments help short-term but don’t resolve the underlying root cause.

Can stimming be reduced without medication?

Yes. Dr. Tony Ebel argues that addressing Subluxation through Neurologically-Focused Chiropractic Care targets the root cause of stimming by restoring proprioceptive input to the brainstem and upper cervical spine, calming the Autonomic Nervous System, and reducing the sensory dysregulation that drives compensatory movement. This approach is often combined with physical therapy, occupational therapy, and other movement-based interventions, but sequencing matters significantly.

Why did my child’s stimming increase after starting chiropractic care or therapy?

About 80% of parents report temporary increases in stimming when movement-based therapies begin. This is often a neuro detox or neurological reorganization response, the brain and nervous system revisiting developmental milestones that were previously missed. It can be a necessary step in healing. However, if a child is doing many simultaneous interventions and symptoms are worsening significantly, the issue may be too much at once rather than a healing response. A clinician experienced in developmental sequencing can help distinguish between the two.

How do I find a neurologically focused chiropractor for my child’s stimming?

Dr. Tony Ebel and the PX Docs network train pediatric chiropractors in neurologically focused care for children with autism, sensory processing challenges, ADHD, and related conditions. You can find a trained PX Docs clinician near you through the directory below.

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