Restless in your own skin

This one is strange because there is no urge inside it. You are not craving anything. You simply cannot sit down. You stand up in the middle of a program you were enjoying, walk to the kitchen, look at nothing, come back. Your legs want something. Your hands keep starting jobs they do not finish. It is agitation with no object, and if you sit still and let it build for an hour it starts to feel like dread, like there is something bad you have forgotten to deal with.

There is nothing you have forgotten. Your nervous system is running hot and hunting for a reason. For years it got turned down on a schedule, several times a day, by nicotine, and now it is running without that brake and has not yet relearned how to idle. What that feels like from inside your own skin is precisely this: restlessness, over alertness, a body slightly too ready for something that never arrives. It is a setting, not a signal. Settings reset, and yours is resetting already.

The mistake is to interpret it. Sit still and your mind will helpfully attach the feeling to your job, your money, your marriage, your health, and by evening you will have built a whole anxiety with a story on top of a body that simply had energy in it. Do not narrate this. Spend it. Take the stairs twice. Walk fast for fifteen minutes with no phone. Carry something heavy across the house. The feeling is physical, so make the answer physical, and skip the part where you decide what it means.

Then notice what happens afterward. The agitation does not so much leave as get used up, and what it leaves behind is tiredness of the good kind, the sort that sleeps. Every time you spend it through your body, you teach a jumpy system that nothing is actually wrong. That lesson lands faster than you would expect. Ask God for steadiness in a body relearning how to be still, and in the meantime, put your shoes on. Restless is not a warning. It is fuel with nowhere to go.