Stimming Isn't a Quirk. Suppressing It Is a Productivity Tax.

When Kelsie Colley was job hunting in December 2022, she applied only to remote positions. But she wasn't just looking for any remote role. She’s autistic and has ADHD, and she had already learned through jobs that measured engagement by face time — what a bad environment looked like. She wasn't going back to that.

She wanted a company where being fully present didn't require being fully visible. She found it at Zoom — yes, the Zoom. At that time, camera-off was normalized there. Participation was measured by what you contribute, not how you appeared on screen. "People here understand I can be fully engaged on the occasions when I have my camera off," she said, "and they encourage me to take care of myself so I can execute on job-specific tasks." When she joins without her camera, she's not absent she's in the conversation. In other meetings she’s represented by an avatar she controls. "I still have a full range of options to communicate other than my facial expressions."

Within her first week she launched Neuro @ Zoom — a Slack channel where neurodivergent and neurotypical colleagues could talk openly about navigating work and advocate for every Zoomie's success. It became a hub for myth-busting: "countering the narrative that there is only one right way to get to the same outcome."

Kelsie's story is worth sitting with — not because it's unusual, but because of what made it possible. She didn't get an accommodation. She didn't file a request. She joined a company that had already built the system. Your company probably hasn't. The best remote-first companies have. And what they built for scale turns out to be exactly what the science says works best for neurodivergent employees — and increasingly, for everyone.

Stimming — short for self-stimulatory behavior — is not a nervous habit. It's not a quirk. It's not a symptom to be managed out of someone. It's the nervous system doing its job.

When an ND brain needs to process a complex environment, regulate sensory load, or maintain focus during a cognitively demanding task, stimming is one of its primary tools. Rocking. Leg bouncing. Finger tapping. Pen clicking. Humming. These aren't distractions from the work. They're the engine running underneath it.

Research from the UC Davis MIND Institute puts numbers on this: children and adolescents with ADHD who moved more intensely performed significantly better on attention-demanding tasks. Professor Julie Schweitzer is direct: "We have good evidence that fidgeting itself seems to be associated with better attention." Movement compensates for the executive function challenges that ADHD creates — when working memory is taxed, the body reaches for physical regulation to stay engaged.

So the tool works. The environment bans the tool. And then everyone wonders why the output isn't what it should be.

I see or hear this almost nightly with my son. He’ll be rocking back n’ forth in his chair building the next big thing. Not because he’s rockin’ to the beat of some great trance music like I do. But as a hack to get laser focused in what he’s doing.

That 72% isn't just a statistic. It's a hiring and retention signal. As Gen Z enters the workforce in significant numbers — a generation where self-identification as neurodivergent is higher than any previous cohort — you are not dealing with a fringe use case. You are dealing with a growing proportion of your incoming talent, many of whom have already spent years being told that how their brain self-regulates is the problem.

You might assume that working from home solved this as providing a hidden environment away from the view of colleagues. ND employees are in their own spaces. Away from the open floor. Away from the conference room performance pressure. They can stim freely.

BUT…..Then you turned the cameras on for every meeting.

That is not a figure of speech. That is what happens when two concurrent processing demands run simultaneously at full load — the work content of the meeting, and the continuous sensory and social management that a camera-on environment requires. Tracking faces. Reading cues. Monitoring self-presentation. Suppressing the movement or the rocking or the tapping that would be helping the brain stay regulated. All at once. For an hour.

The meeting didn't cost an hour. For that employee, it cost the rest of the afternoon.

For ADHD employees, Fister makes a distinction worth understanding. The cost is different — it's not the recovery time after, it's the movement suppression during. ADHDers often process better while in motion, but cameras create an implicit expectation that you're still and attentive. Staying motionless to look like you're paying attention is itself where the bandwidth goes. Not to the meeting content.

When stimming is suppressed, the nervous system doesn't stop needing what stimming provides. The need is still there. The body is just being prevented from meeting it through the most efficient route. That resource demand has to come from somewhere. It comes from the same finite cognitive budget your employee is supposed to be spending on the actual work.

Research published in Diversity & Inclusion Research (Hazlett, 2025) is explicit: masking depletes emotional resources and leads to autistic burnout characterized by severe fatigue and cognitive deterioration. Not a future risk. Daily depletion.

Those numbers don't come from different people. They come from the same people, with less cognitive overhead.

If you've ever sat in a long meeting and found yourself doodling — congratulations, you were stimming. It was helping you stay focused. Now imagine being told you couldn't. Hands folded, eyes forward, absolutely still, for the entire call. How long before your retention drops? That's what we're asking ND employees to do as a baseline expectation, every day.

When an ND employee shows up in a performance review with "engagement issues" or "participation below expectations," there's a real chance what the manager is measuring is suppression debt — not capability. Not commitment. Not interest in the work.

Think about eye contact. Many autistic employees find sustained eye contact — in person or on camera — genuinely activating in a threat-response sense. A manager who doesn't understand this will score a 1:1 where the employee wasn't making eye contact as low engagement or low confidence. They're wrong. The employee was regulating. Working harder to stay in the room than the manager was.

Something else I see my son struggle with. I regularly bring him onto zoom calls with founders and startup builders I speak with. In part to show him what I do and also as an opportunity to ask questions and get some mentoring. Because anything dad says, is never right. One thing I find myself doing somewhat often during these calls is giving an out of camera view nudge and whisper to look at the camera.

Or team dynamics. Neurodiverse employees may participate less in informal rituals — the banter before the meeting, the post-work drinks, the energy at all-hands. Not because they're disengaged from the work. Often the opposite. They just can't simultaneously perform social enthusiasm, regulate a sensory environment, and do the job. Something has to give.

When performance reviews are built around visible participation, energy display, and social engagement — which most are — you're not measuring contribution. You're running a masking test, and calling it a performance evaluation.

You may be reading this and thinking: we're not a remote company. What does any of this have to do with us?

A lot, actually. The underlying principle — interrupt less, recover more — applies everywhere. All of this happens during 1:1 and team meetings sitting in your conference room.

This section is not about vague principles. The best-operated remote companies have already built these systems and published their playbooks. Here's what they've shared, and what you can take directly.

Make cameras earn their cost. They earn it in 1:1s — the relational and feedback value is real. They don't earn it in a team standup. They definitely don't earn it in an all-hands.

"Async" gets thrown around. Let's be precise about what it means and when to use which format, because getting this wrong is where most teams stall.

Doist publishes a communication pyramid most teams could adopt directly: written text as the base layer, collaborative docs in the middle, video calls reserved for genuine complexity or relationship, instant messaging only for true emergencies.

The 70/30 rule makes space for ND employees who need a moment before they respond, or who don't feel safe interrupting in a fast-moving synchronous discussion. Communication norms in remote meetings have to be taught, not assumed.

For stimming specifically: one sentence in your manager training. Stimming during a conversation — rocking, tapping, spinning a pen, looking away — is a regulation signal. It means the person is working to stay present. Interrupting it is like pulling someone's noise-canceling headphones off mid-sentence. This applies in video calls exactly as it does in person.

Put a bowl of stress balls on the conference table. Order a few fidget cubes. Leave them out without comment. The signal this sends about what kind of workplace you're running costs forty dollars. If you’re remote, include these in your welcome package with the macbook and noise cancelling headphones.

The manager who pulls one out first and uses it during a meeting has done more for ND inclusion than a two-hour training ever will. What you're modeling is that physical regulation is welcome here — and the person who needed permission to stim but was waiting to see if it was safe just got it, without disclosing anything

I'd love to hear what brought you here. Reply directly — I read every message.

If this resonates, share it with a CEO or HR leader in your network. The conversation needs to start somewhere.

And if you're past the conversation stage and ready to actually build the systems — reach out. That's exactly what I do.