In this article, I explore why fidgets may improve focus for many of our autistic, ADHD, and neurodivergent students. I’ve talked about my experience offering fidget tools in the speech therapy room and how I feel my neurodivergent students have benefited from access to fidgets. But I don’t want to stop there. I want to understand why fidgets work and how they help our neurodivergent students better focus in the classroom.
Today I’m going to explore and discuss:
A note about research/evidence base
To be honest, the research is pretty dubious on the matter. There’s not much concrete evidence currently available in research studies as far as I’m aware that can prove the effectiveness of classroom fidgets. Nor is there adequate research into understanding the underlying “why” or “how” fidgets help our neurodivergent students. Our research is behind.
But research is only one piece of evidence-based practice. The 3 components that make up evidence-based practice are research, therapist experience, and client experiences. Anecdotal evidence and client values are still valid resources of information to inform our practice.
Neurodivergent advocates support fidget use
Even thought it’s not at this moment backed by formal research, there is a strong push to incorporate fidgets into the classroom. And that push comes from actual neurodivergent people sharing their personal experiences in how their brain works. Many autistic and ADHD peeps are sharing that having access to items to fidget helps their brains focus.
But why is that the case? (And why does it matter?)
As an autistic person, I’m constantly seeking clarity, wondering why or how something works. Understanding how helps me organize the information in my brain and understanding why helps me retain the information. Especially when the information isn’t readily intuitive. So I’ve done my own investigating, exploring why autistic people are advocating for fidget use and describing fidgets as helpful for focus. Here’s what I’ve found.
How fidgets help autistic people focus
On the surface, it’s easy to assume that fidgeting would distract and take away from focus, not help focus. Adding in body movement introduces multitasking, which splits focus between two tasks, such as listening to a teacher and fidgeting with a fidget cube. This shifting attention sounds like it would make listening to a teacher more difficult. My curiosity on the topic only deepened, why would people’s personal experiences indicate that fidgeting was actually helping them focus instead of distracting them.
In Agony Autie’s video – Stimming. What’s that?, she offers an incredibly simple explanation. She describes that for the autistic brain, output blocks input.
Let’s break that down further. Motor output (i.e., movement) blocks sensory input (i.e., environmental stimuli). When our nervous system initiates a motor response (fidgeting), the nervous system blocks some of the processing of sensory information in our environment. In the classroom, our students’ brains are not only processing a teacher’s lecture, but rather, they’re processing every stimulus in that room.
In other words, your neurodivergent students are already multitasking or distracted. Fidgeting doesn’t add a distraction; instead, it takes focus away from other competing stimuli in the room. And that explains how fidgeting can help some of your neurodivergent students focus.
The guide: Understanding the Autistic Mind, available for free on the Neuroclastic website, describes in greater depth how the autistic brain functions differently from a neurotypical brain. The guide explains that a neurotypical brain is excellent at filtering out unnecessary stimuli and tuning in their attention on processing desired stimuli, (such as a teacher’s lecture if it’s engaging). However, an autistic brain struggles with filtering out background stimuli (e.g., humming of air conditioners or electronics, each movement of peers, the sensation of their clothing touching their skin).
The autistic brain cannot filter out or tune in to a desired stimuli. Therefore, in a classroom setting, it’s difficult to direct an autistic person’s attention to focus only on the teacher’s lecture. The ADHD brain tends to encounter a different problem – a lack of novelty in stimuli to continue to attend.
An ADHD brain often requires greater interest to focus, so they can struggle with sustaining focus on one subject for extended periods of time. When there’s a lack of novelty in sensory input, the ADHD brain tends to alternate or shift attention between tasks, and the constant presence of novelty helps to focus.
Many autistic people also have co-occuring ADHD, so it’s important to consider both perspectives and what is really influencing the person. So while your autistic person is struggling with needing to multitask in the classroom and their attention being stretched all across the room, your ADHD person
So while an autistic person may struggle with sensory overload from processing too much stimuli individually one-by-one, an ADHD person may struggle with lack of sensory stimulation that maintains or draws their attention back to the desired stimulus.
Sensory overwhelm impedes focus
It’s no wonder why autistic people become overwhelmed from stimuli. Due to the constant barrage of environmental stimulation, the autistic brain has a lower threshold for overload at baseline. If the autistic brain is actively processing significantly larger amounts of sensory information compared to a neurotypical brain, then it is going to be far easier for them to reach sensory overload.
Sensory overload is a form of overwhelm; the person is overwhelmed by the sensory information they’re taking in. To better understand what’s going on when we experience sensory overload, let’s consider overwhelm in general. What causes us to feel emotionally overwhelmed and how do we overcome it?
Once I learned more about emotional overwhelm in general, I started to see the connection between sensory overload and emotional overwhelm, and how an emotional component often leads to the tipping point for sensory overload. But that’s a topic for another day.
A video by psychiatrist and YouTuber, Dr. K – If You’re Feeling Overwhelmed Watch This – describes emotional overwhelm in more detail and tries to help people understand how to better manage overwhelm. I recommend watching if you’re interested.
What are active & passive challenges?
Dr. K emphasizes that feeling overwhelmed doesn’t come from being faced with too many challenges. The more challenges someone experiences isn’t necessarily what causes them to feel overwhelmed. Instead, what causes people to feel overwhelmed is not just facing a lot of challenges, but facing more challenges that are “passive” than “active” challenges. In essence, there’s a distinct element of autonomy that can make or break our overwhelm.
Active challenges are those you choose to take on, and passive challenges are those assigned to you rather than chosen. Like paying my taxes in April is a passive challenge; calculating taxes is not a challenge I’m choosing, it’s a challenge the government tells me I must do. An active challenge might be writing this blog article. Although writing is not an easy task, it’s one I’m choosing. This distinction between active and passive challenges is key to our experience of emotional overwhelm. Consider if we applied this logic to sensory overwhelm as well.
Fidgeting increases autonomy & control
Similar to being faced with tasks that are active or passive challenges, we can experience sensory stimuli actively or passively as well. When we proactively engage in receiving sensory input, that input is within our control. When the sensory input is not within our control, we are merely reacting to it.
Reactive sensory input might include listening to the heater turn on and off at varying intervals throughout the day; I do not control when I experience the sounds of the heater turning on. I do not control when other students make noise or when the teacher walks around the room, all of which are stimuli I’m receiving. But what input can I control? Stimming.
I can control the sensory input I receive from running my fingers through my hair or biting my lips. Or from fidgeting with a keyring or using putty. Instead of reacting to the sensory input out of my control, I am proactively choosing the sensory input I receive. This ability to choose increases our sense of autonomy, and in turn, reduces the likelihood of overwhelm.
In the aforementioned video, Dr. K proposes the solution to overwhelm is not to reduce the number of challenges we’re facing. In fact, he recommends what at first seems like the opposite – to increase the number of challenges – but specifically, increase the number of active challenges you’re facing. We want our active challenges to balance out or exceed our passive challenges to prevent overwhelm.
Completely counterintuitive advice, add challenges to reduce overwhelm. Just like it’s counterintuitive to add distractions to increase focus. But once I thought through and applied the advice, I found the explanation to actually make sense.
As a personal example, when I first watched the video on overwhelm, I was feeling overwhelmed by passive challenges inherent to sustaining a long-distance relationship, challenges that I was not at all in control of. So I decided to try out the advice. Instead of trying to avoid or ignore the passive challenges that were overwhelming me, I added active challenges in my life. I designed a website and started posting on neurodiversity SLP topics. And even though I now had more challenges than ever, I felt less overwhelmed by navigating the logistics of a long-distance relationship that were out of my control. I felt empowered that I could tackle these challenges.
The problem of overwhelm or overload is greatly influenced by our sense of autonomy and control over our experiences.
Fidgets reduce sensory overwhelm and improve emotional perception
Now that we have those concepts set as a foundation, let’s return to discussing fidgets in the classroom. We’ve already established that our autistic students can be easily overwhelmed by sensory stimuli their overactive nervous systems need to process.
The students are not choosing to tune in to the sound of the air conditioner/heater. They’re not choosing to be aware of how their clothes feel against their skin. They’re certainly not choosing to take in distractions from other students in the room. All of these extra sensory stimuli are passive. The student doesn’t choose to process them, they can only react, as that’s how many autistic brains and nervous systems work. Each stimuli is processed individually.
Now let’s say we add a fidget cube to the equation. This fidget cube is considered proactive sensory input, as the student is actively in control of the tactile sensory input they are taking in. The student can freely choose to start and stop taking in the sensory input from the fidget cube. By using the fidget cube, the student now has access to a form of sensory input that they are in control of receiving.
We cannot reasonably balance the equation here of proactive and reactive stimuli. But I think it’s reasonable to conclude that adding active sensory input (fidgeting) may reduce the overwhelm of being in a room bombarded by sensory stimuli. Output blocks input. Interacting with the fidget, a motor output response, helps to block some of that extra sensory input.
When we spend less energy trying to block out competing stimuli, we have a greater capacity to tune into desired stimuli. A student reacting to all the sensory input in the room may struggle to attend to a teacher’s lecture. But giving them a fidget, allowing the student control over some of the sensory input they’re receiving, can reduce the pressure and overwhelm of processing sensory information.
Having a sense of autonomy and control also improves feeling safe within an environment. When students feel safe to learn and learning is a positive experience, they are expending less energy on anxiety. They are less likely to enter into overload and overwhelm. And that energy conserved can be put toward focus and concentration.
Lowering overwhelm and increasing autonomy can reduce barriers that may be impeding concentration and empower the student to greater focus.
Try out these concepts for yourself and see them in action in your classroom!
Now that we have a better understanding of how and why fidgets can improve focus in our neurodivergent students, let’s put that understanding into practice! I encourage you to offer a variety of fidgets in your classroom and encourage your students to actively decide whether a fidget would help them listen, learn, or stay calm/emotionally regulate themselves.
Let’s look at some ways you can encourage and support using fidgets in the classroom.
Consider fidgets that target different sensory needs. There are fidgets that provide tactile stimulation but also ones that provide visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and even olfactory stimulation as well. More students may find a fidget that works best for them if they are presented with a variety of different types.
Model is one of the easiest and most effective ways to show that you support responsible fidget use in your classroom. You don’t have to call specific attention to it, but have a fidget or few on your desk and pick it up every once in awhile. Students will feel more comfortable and less singled out if they see adults also using fidgets.
Incorporating movement breaks into your class period or day gives all students an opportunity for proactive sensory input, so the students who need movement are naturally accommodated. Allow students to complete their work or projects in alternate places rather than only confined to their desk. Movement breaks can serve a similar purpose to using fidget tools as movement can also improve self-regulation and reduce states of overwhelm.
I’m curious to hear about your experience with incorporating fidgets into your classroom or therapy room.
What do you think of this association between sensory overwhelm and emotional overwhelm? I’m sure there are multiple reasons that fidgets may benefit concentration or focus of students, but this is the insight that clicked with me so I wanted to share.
Let me know if this explanation resonated with you or if you found value in sharing. And I’d love to hear about your experience with incorporating fidgets into your classroom or therapy room. How did it go? Let me know in the comments below, thanks!