Instead of biting my nails or playing with a fidget toy, is there a skill I can learn/practice?
Like rolling a pen/coin through my fingers or something like that.
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Lockpicking maybe? Just recently got into it as a bucket list hobbies but it’s actually really entertaining. They sell practice cutaway locks that fit easily in one hand as you fidget about with the lock picks.
This is a great idea! Lock picking is fun and super impressive to laymen (haha).
Just don’t tell anyone but your closest, most trusted friends (haha). Also, tell them to keep it a secret! Why? So your neighbor doesn’t knock on your door at 2AM because they locked themselves out of their apartment.
Also, you don’t need cutaway locks! They’re neat toys but nothing more. What you really need is a variety of locks to play with.
Head to your local hardware store and pick up a bunch of cheap locks. Or just ask friends if they have any old padlocks they’re not using (most people will have one or two).
True, cutaway locks aren’t needed. I recently heard of a neat idea where you can call around various storage businesses and ask if they have cut locks from people who lost their unit. It won’t be useful to lock anything but great for practice. Unfortunately the one near me throws theirs away regularly so I need to call around more to see what I can find.
You can get training locks where the back of each cylinder unscrews so you can put in as many or as few pins as you want, and try it again with different pinning each time.
Yup! Thats like the one I have from Sparrows. I got their Tuxedo Reloaded set and it comes with all sorts of driver pins and keys to setup yourself.
Whenever I have my lockpicks and a few padlocks available, I end up picking nonstop while doing things like watching youtube
That’s what stimming is for, kid!
Stimming is a natural source of the “try mind” zen practitioners speak of. Do a perfect impression of Jon Stewart. Why? Why?? Hell no there’s no why.
I drum with my fingers. The first time I picked up a tabla someone was pissed that I got it “immediately”. No! That’s the result of hundreds of hours of practice.
Stimming is a fusion reactor in the autistic mind, just waiting to be hooked up to something useful. We can practice a task orders of magnitude more than most people can, because we literally can’t get tired of it.
If nothing else, go play some music. Stimming with music is how culture began. Somebody’s gotta drag these numbskulls through their passivity to new levels of beauty. Stimming is the hacksaw that cuts the prison bars shoddy workmanship.
After I quit smoking, I wanted to do something with my hands so I bit my nails until it hurt.
Crochet was/ is something I can do with my hands and at the end I get a cool hat or a nice scarf. Yarn gets expensive, tho.
Not a useful skill, but you could try speedcubing
More of a slowcuber myself
Absolutely knitting or crocheting. It’s very soothing.
My most frequent stim for YEARS involves me playing along doing saxophone fingerings to whatever music I’m listening to or is stuck in my head. So, maybe a wind instrument!
+1 for almost any instrument
What do you mean by “stimming”? Being on stimulants?
Edit: In case it was not clear, I am literally asking what this word means as I have not heard it before.
I hadn’t heard of this before either, but after seeing the Wikipedia article, I’m not sure if this is correct, but I’d summarize it as the activity of fidgeting.
Fidgeting in a repetitive way that provides sensory feedback.
Thank you! I thought it might have been new slang that I was unaware of rather than something that I may have experienced and may need to look into further.
ADHD here. Speedcubing. It’s a wonderful hobby for me. When I’m interested in it, I can learn some new things and time myself to see how I’m doing. When I’m not interested in it, I can solve it and it helps me to focus on watching TV. Even if I’m not solving it, it feels great just to twist in your hands.
Look up a good budget speedcube (not Rubik’s branded) and invest yourself as much or as little as you fancy.
Just recently learned CFOP from someone (still really slow at it) and it’s a great fidget. I use it during a few of my more droning zoom meetings and it makes me feel like I’m doing something semi productive while I fidget.
At some point soon you’re going to solve it in front of someone whilst you’re fidgeting, not even really focussing on it and you’ll blow their freaking mind and you’ll feel great.
Remember the GM of a TTRPG session I was playing was running a session and he noticed I’d been solving it when he’d assumed I’d just been fidgeting. He literally interrupted the session to exclaim ‘Oh my God, you solved it!’ and it took me a good few seconds to realize what he was talking about, as my attention was primarily on what he was saying and I was just idly solving.
Enjoy it when it comes :)
I learned to count to 31 on 1 hand using binary. I’ve gotten more than a few free drinks via bar bets with that skill lol.
I’m going to learn this skill and wonder why people are counting to 4 in front of me.
4 and 5 are some of the most popular numbers out there, apparently.
Was it a bar at a software companies happy hour?
Who would bet a drink against your ability to count in binary?
Who would bet a drink against your ability to count in binary?
Shit talking and making odd claims about talents are a good way to pass the time drinking in bars with strangers/acquaintances.
That’s… Barely a skill
It’s a little over 30
Coin tricks. Especially knuckle rolling coins and learning how to change the position of the coin between various palming techniques.
Drumming
Related: get a Digitakt or Syntakt from Elektron and make music while you stim with clicky buttons 🤩
Digitakt is awesome
I’ve thought so much about this because I stim by bouncing my leg and strumming my fingers on stuff; I’m already basically playing drums!
Chisanbop or chisenbop (from Korean chi (ji) finger + sanpŏp (sanbeop) calculation 지산법/指算法), sometimes called Fingermath, is a finger counting method used to perform basic mathematical operations.
You might be already doing this. If you strum your fingers of your right hand by pressing your index, middle, ring, and pinky to your desktop, and then do the same thing again starting with your thumb, you’ve just counted from 0 to 9. Do the same on your left hand and you’ve gone from 00 to 90. It’s really easy to do simple math this way by counting on your fingers.
For stimming purposes, you might just start by counting up or counting down, then maybe counting up by twos or counting down by threes.
This is the approach that I’ve known for many decades now. I’ve seen YouTube videos of kids doing amazing fast calculations like multiplying large numbers using what looks like a different method in that their hands are in the air. I’ll leave it to you to Google the other approaches if this direction interests you.
Shuffling cards, rubix cube, ukulele, traveling coin,
Maybe knitting?
I second knitting, and its 100% something you can do while watching tv without needing to devote much concentration, its almost subconscious once your going.
Drawing. I set myself the strict rule to be completely unambitious about my coloured pencil drawings. I do them only for myself, and the enjoyment while doing it is the main purpose. So sometimes I just draw some squiggles and then I fill them with colours, one layer over another. One drawing can take weeks, I do a bit every evening and it is so relaxing. Now with time they start looking really neat as a cool side effect, so I have been thinking about framing them.
