Fidgeting

I fidget. A lot.

• I chew on the clip of pens. All the pens in my room and in a five-foot radius around my desk at work are missing their clip.
• I toss and turn while sleeping. I fall sleep on the right side of the bed straight as a stick and wake up diagonal on the bed with my legs and arms splayed.
• I spin writing utensils in my hand. When I was in school, I thought spinning a pencil around a finger was the COOLEST trick.
• I swivel in my chair. I was on a Zoom call one time and the other person actually asked me to stop swiveling, as it was difficult to focus on the conversation with my head floating left and right on the screen. Oof!
• Whether I’m siting or standing, I’m constantly either tapping my feet, crossing and uncrossing my legs, or fiddling with my fingers.

The irony is that I don’t fidget for the reasons called out in this definition:

Fidgeting is a response to anxiety or boredom. Anxious fidgeting occurs because the body has elevated levels of stress hormones, which are prepping your muscles for sudden exertion. If you don’t have any tigers to run away from at that moment, all that energy has nowhere to go and jiggling your leg or biting your nails is a way to partially relieve that.

I’m not a particularly nervous or stressed person, and I’m certainly not bored at work. But it has gotten more pronounced over the past year, and my working hypothesis is that I’m just an energetic person that’s being forced to release this energy in different ways as I’ve become increasingly sedentary during quarantine.

That being said, maybe it’s not even an issue at all. There’s an increasing amount of literature that claims fidgeting may actually be a good thing; improving focus and creativity, relieving stress, and even increasing blood flow. I don’t know what to believe yet, but I do know I’d probably explode if I couldn’t fidget.