EEF- Excess Energy And Frustration
A Name for a Feeling
For years I had a name for a feeling that I assumed was just mine.
I called it EEF: Excess Energy and Frustration.
It wasn’t anxiety. At least, it didn’t feel like anxiety.
It happened after days when I had done almost nothing. I’d spend hours sitting around watching movies or scrolling or simply existing without really moving my body. Eventually a strange sensation would arrive. My body felt like it was vibrating. Restless. Irritated. As if there were energy trapped inside me with nowhere to go.
The odd part was that I didn’t want to move.
If someone had suggested I go for a run, I probably would have laughed. The feeling wasn’t one of motivation. It was almost the opposite. I felt heavy, sluggish, unable to begin anything, while simultaneously feeling overcharged.
The best relief I ever found was unexpectedly simple.
I would ask my husband to lie on top of me.
Not forever. Just enough that I could feel the weight of another body pressing into mine. Something about the pressure settled whatever was happening inside me. It wasn’t emotional comfort as much as physical organization. My body seemed to remember itself.
I never thought much about it.
Then I started watching children.
Children whose days are increasingly spent sitting, looking at glowing rectangles, moving from chair to chair, classroom to car, couch to bed. Children whose bodies are flooded with stimulation while receiving remarkably little resistance. Less climbing. Less carrying. Less roughhousing. Less wandering. Less getting gloriously dirty. Less pushing against the world.
I began wondering whether what I had called EEF wasn’t just my private quirk.
What if many of us are living with bodies full of accumulated energy that never finds an outlet?
What if what looks like laziness is sometimes immobilization?
What if what looks like bad behavior is sometimes a nervous system asking for gravity?
The Body Has Words for This
It turns out I hadn’t invented something. I had rediscovered it.
What my body was asking for has a name. Occupational therapists call it deep pressure — a form of proprioceptive input. Proprioception is the quiet sense that lives in our joints and muscles, the one that tells the nervous system where the body is. And, in some deeper way, that the body is.
Firm, sustained pressure is one of the most reliably calming things you can offer a nervous system. It is why weighted blankets exist. It is why a tight hug can end a tantrum that no words could touch. It is why my body, without any training or theory, asked for weight.
Children have their own version, and it has a name too. Therapists call it heavy work: pushing, pulling, carrying, hanging, climbing. Resistance against gravity. It is prescribed — literally prescribed — for children who present exactly the way I did on those restless evenings. Wired but unable to settle. Overcharged but unable to begin.
Children who are often misread as badly behaved, when their bodies are simply asking a question no one around them knows how to answer.
A Theory About Screens
Here is what I have come to believe. I offer it as a theory grown from lived experience, not a settled finding. But I believe it.
For the whole of human history, arousal and action were a matched pair.
Something alarming happened. The body charged up. And the charge was spent — through running, fighting, climbing, carrying, trembling, or being held. Energy in, energy out. The circuit completed itself.
Screens break the pair.
A screen is extraordinarily good at generating arousal. Novelty. Urgency. Comparison. Outrage. Threat. It pours all of this into a body that is seated, still, and going nowhere.
Charge in. No discharge out.
Do that for an hour, and you get an evening of EEF.
Do that for years, and I suspect you get something else. A nervous system perpetually activated, with no motor completion — activated for so long that it no longer remembers what action the activation was for.
That is not a bad description of anxiety.
And depression, I think, enters through the other door.
Stillness is not neutral. To a body built for movement, sustained immobility reads as something closer to shutdown. Meanwhile, the inputs that tell the brain you have a body, and it is somewhere — pressure, effort, gravity, the warmth of another person’s skin — dwindle toward nothing.
Without that grounding signal, attention migrates to the only territory left.
The head.
Rumination is what a mind does when it has nowhere else to live.
It does not seem like a coincidence to me that two of the best-supported non-drug treatments for depression are exercise and behavioral activation — which are, said plainly, prescriptions to reintroduce movement and contact with the physical world.
Nor does it seem like a coincidence that screens give us all the signal of connection with none of its weight. The faces without the arms. The voices without the pressing warmth of another actual body. Co-regulation’s ghost.
What I Am Not Saying
I want to be careful here.
The research on screens and mental health is genuinely contested. The correlations are real but modest, and honest people disagree about what causes what. I am not claiming that screens are poison, or that content rots minds, or that any single thing explains the rising tide of anxious and depressed people, young and old.
My claim is quieter than that.
It is not mainly about what screens put in.
It is about what they crowd out.
Every hour spent motionless in front of a glowing rectangle is an hour the body did not push against the world. Did not carry anything heavy. Did not climb, hang, wrestle, wander, or lean its full weight into another person.
The screen may be innocent. The stillness is not.
What the Body Asked For
I don’t know whether EEF will ever be a scientific concept. Probably it will remain what it has always been — my own small language for an experience I now believe many people share.
But I do know this.
When my body asked for relief, it didn’t ask for another screen.
It asked for weight.
It asked for movement.
It asked for contact.
It asked to remember that I have a body at all.
Maybe that’s all EEF ever was.
A body reminding me that it was never designed to live only in my head.
And maybe that is what the restless child is telling us, and the vibrating evening, and the strange peace that arrives under the weight of someone we love.
The body keeps asking.
It is waiting, patiently, for us to answer with something heavier than light.
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