If you’ve ever been reading a book or watching TV in the evening and felt a strange, powerful urge to move your legs, you may have experienced the characteristic symptom of restless legs syndrome (RLS), also known as Willis-Ekbom disease.
People may variously describe the feeling as creepy-crawly, jittery, or electrical. The hallmark of RLS is “the uncontrollable urge to move the leg, that comes on at rest [while awake],” says Suzanne Bertisch, M.D., a sleep physician at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.