I used to pop my neck constantly—sharp, compulsive movements that served as my body’s pressure valve. They weren’t soothing so much as inevitable, especially in high-stress situations. There was no conscious intention behind it—just a buildup of internal voltage that needed to ground out somewhere, somehow. At the time, I didn’t have the language for “stimming,” let alone an understanding of how sensory and motor rhythms could actually help regulate that voltage. I just knew I was tense. Always tense.
By the time I was 30, I’d been involved in more than one road rage incident. The kind that starts with someone cutting you off but escalates into something more volcanic. I wasn’t reckless—I was raw. Driving wasn’t just a mode of transportation; it was a battlefield for my nervous system.
That started to change in the early 2000s when I stumbled across research about music, movement, and self-regulation in autism. It described how stimming—those repetitive, rhythmic movements often used by autistic individuals to cope with sensory overload—wasn’t just an odd behavior or nervous tick. It was adaptive. A neurological strategy. Something that worked with the brain’s timing circuits and prediction loops, rather than against them.
The science was strangely poetic: when a movement syncs with music—say, a finger tap on the beat—it minimizes what’s called prediction error in the brain. Your cerebellum predicts the timing of the tap, your motor cortex executes it, and if it lands correctly, you get a little internal "ding." A dopamine burst. Do it over and over, and the system learns to anticipate the pleasure. Execution becomes reward. Rhythm becomes regulation.
That idea stuck with me.
So I started experimenting—gently, almost unconsciously at first. I’d be driving, music playing, and I’d extend my left hand out the window. And I’d let it dance.
At first it was subtle. A few finger flicks. A kind of phantom saxophone solo. Then it became ritual: an invisible keyboard in the breeze, a series of gestures patterned loosely after typing, drumming, or improv conducting. The wind became a tactile metronome. The music set the emotional key. And for the first time, I enjoyed driving.
This wasn’t some dramatic transformation all at once. My neck still popped—still does, but only in allowed contexts now. The difference was that I’d found a new loop. One that didn’t escalate tension, but discharged it. One that converted latent aggression into expression.
Over time, this became non-negotiable. If it’s over 36 degrees outside, I don’t drive with my window closed. We’ve even calculated the wind chill across the back of my hand at various speeds. That’s how precise—and daily—this practice has become. It’s no longer a workaround. It’s a form of embodied intelligence.
I now understand what I was doing: aligning my internal rhythms with something external and predictable. My fingers, rehearsed in keyboard layouts and instrument miming, became the perfect outlet. As each tap or flick aligned with the beat, I got a micro-reward. A sense of timing. A click of coherence. The anxiety that once scattered my attention was drawn into rhythm. Into timing. Into flow.
Some researchers call this micro-flow—those short bursts of deep attention and satisfaction that happen when your skill matches the challenge, and the feedback is immediate. I wasn’t playing a saxophone or typing a novel, but my brain didn’t care. It was enough that I was on beat.
And that was the revelation: my stim didn’t need to be eradicated. It needed to be refined. Re-patterned. Given rhythm.
I may meditate. I may breathe with intention. But most days, I drive with my hand in the wind, orchestrating invisible symphonies of survival.
What once looked like fidgeting became fluency. What once escalated became integrated.
If you’d seen me during one of those early road rage incidents, you might have thought I was the problem. And maybe I was. But you also would’ve missed the system underneath—the overclocked tension, the lack of discharge, the absence of rhythm. I wasn’t angry in a vacuum. I was a body with no tempo.
Now? I have one. And it has a soundtrack.