Written by Emma Marsh
You walk into the hardware store feeling vaguely competent and walk out wondering why natural white, neutral white, clean white, classic white, antique white, ivory white, bone white, and linen white all look exactly the same – yet are made to feel impossibly different. The salesperson waits. Your brain freezes. You stare back like a fawn caught in brainfog-white headlights.
Researchers have identified this state as ‘decision fatigue’ (Baumeister et al., 1998) and it offers a useful analogy for cognitive overwhelm. It comes from a well-established model of self-control showing that humans’ capacity to regulate ourselves is finite.
Every act of choosing, focusing, or suppressing an impulse draws on the same limited mental energy. When that energy is depleted, everything feels harder: concentrating, coping, regulating emotions, tolerating noise, or making yet another choice. Decision fatigue is why people become more impulsive, more emotionally reactive, and less able to self-regulate when overwhelmed.
Now imagine living in a world where your hyperconnected brain is being called on to respond to greater levels of sensory stimuli every second, and your environment is louder, brighter and more chaotic as a result.
Then a state of ‘decision fatigue’ becomes your baseline operating level, and this, for me, is where repetition comes in.
In a moment of overwhelm, repetition re-establishes the comfort of low cognitive loading, low anticipation, low expectation, and low risk. When everything else feels chaotic, repeating something familiar becomes an anchor.
When this is your status quo, “restricted, repetitive patterns of behaviour” are not useless pathologies as the DSM-V would have us believe. They are highly adaptive and organising nervous-system strategies.
In moments of stress, uncertainty, or overload, repetition:
So repetitive behaviour is not “pointless” – it is regulation.
Indeed, people of all neurotypes rely on repetitive behaviours for comfort when under strain.
Some tap their pen in meetings. Some sway when public speaking. Some eat their comfort foods when sick or sad. Some rewatch their favourite TV shows. Some play their favourite Spotify playlist. Some do laps of the same pool. Some make the same cup of tea, the same way, every time.
Twiddling your thumbs, tapping your fingers, running on a treadmill and wringing your hands are considered perfectly normal behaviours in non-autistic people.
So why is flapping our hands pathologised?
If anything, Autistic repetitive behaviours (often called stimming, short for self-stimulating behaviours) should be more expected and better understood, rather than less so, because the sensory world is louder, the cognitive load is higher and the nervous system reaches overload faster in Autistic people.
In times of collective stress – pandemics, social upheaval, school transitions, family instability – repetition becomes even more vital. It is how we stop the cup from overflowing.
During COVID lockdowns, millions of people began decluttering cupboards, reorganising drawers, alphabetising books, labelling containers, and resetting rooms, trying to control the only thing they could in their environment. We didn’t call it rigidity. We called it getting organised. We called it self-care. We called it Marie Kondo.
Similarly, telling an Autistic person to stop stimming is a bit like telling someone they’re not allowed to have downtime when they’re at breaking point or organise their desk when they can’t find anything in the mess – simply because it looks odd to someone else.
Suppressing stimming doesn’t make an Autistic person “more functional”. It makes them less regulated and, in turn, less functional.
What’s refreshing is whose voices we’re finally listening to.
A 2025 participatory research study heard from Autistic participants that stimming plays an important role in social connection. In a survey of 131 Autistic participants, 63% reported that stimming helped them connect with other Autistic/neurodivergent people, and 73% of participants reported being able to recognise what another Autistic person might be feeling simply by observing their stimming.
A 2025 constructivist grounded theory review that centred Autistic young people’s own descriptions of their repetitive behaviours found something striking: from the inside, these behaviours aren’t experienced as meaningless symptoms at all. They:
Autistic participants described repetition as something they choose because it helps them cope with sensory overload, emotional intensity, and constant cognitive demand.
Professionals and caregivers, by contrast, were more likely to interpret the same behaviours as problems to be reduced.
That gap matters.
Because when you actually ask Autistic people what repetition does for us, the answer is simple: it helps us succeed.
Lining up our toys can offer a way of literally getting “our ducks in a row”.
For me, returning to the same things again and again isn’t about being stuck. It’s about the comfort of low anticipation and low expectation. Repetition means calm. It means organisation. It means success. When the world feels too loud and too demanding, familiar patterns give my nervous system somewhere to rest.
We’re often told that growth requires novelty, challenge, and constant change. But nervous systems don’t grow when they’re in a state of chaos. They grow when they feel safe.
Repetition creates a baseline of safety from which exploration becomes possible. Children ask to be reread stories so they can master emotional themes. Adults replay music to stabilise their mood. Autistic people repeat interests, movements, or phrases to regulate sensory and cognitive load.
This is not avoidance. It is self-preservation.
Don’t ask:
“How do we stop this?”
Ask:
“What is this nervous system trying to survive?”
Because repetition is not a failure to adapt. It is how humans adapt when the world is too loud, too fast, and too uncertain.
And in a world that increasingly feels like the paint aisle at Bunnings, we all deserve a few things to stay the same.
Baumeister, R. F., Bratslavsky, E., Muraven, M., & Tice, D. M. (1998). Ego depletion: Is the active self a limited resource? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74(5), 1252–1265. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.74.5.1252
Morris, I. F., Sykes, J. R., Paulus, E. R., Dameh, A., Razzaque, A., Esch, L. V., Gruenig, J., & Zelazo, P. D. (2025). Beyond self-regulation: Autistic experiences and perceptions of stimming. Neurodiversity, 3. https://doi.org/10.1177/27546330241311096
Petty, S., Clegg, V. Expanded Descriptions of Autistic Repetitive Behaviours: a Constructivist Grounded Theory Review Exploring the Perspectives of Autistic Young People and Other Stakeholders. Rev J Autism Dev Disord (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40489-025-00505-1
The Reframing Autism team would like to acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the lands on which we have the privilege to learn, work, and grow. Whilst we gather on many different parts of this Country, the RA team walk on the land of the Awabakal, Birpai, Whadjak, and Wiradjuri peoples.
We are committed to honouring the rich culture of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples of this Country, and the diversity and learning opportunities with which they provide us. We extend our gratitude and respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, and to all Elders past and present, for their wisdom, their resilience, and for helping this Country to heal.
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