I found this sentence in a book about anxiety and how to treat it, but I don't understant the meaning of this expression. Is it an idiom?
“Doesn’t everyone feel like they want to crawl out of their skin at
times?”
There are further rethorical questions in the same context: “Isn’t everyone struggling to get a good night’s sleep and wake well-rested?” "Well, doesn’t everyone get shakiness in their hands before a first date?”
Best Answer
Google Books claims 2,850 hits for crawl out of my skin, so I guess that's common enough to say it's an "idiom". I doubt many if any of those hits are literal usages (a Wild West trapper waking up and crawling out of the bearskin he slept in, for example). It just means to feel so (psychologically) uncomfortable that you wish your conscious mind could somehow escape / slink away from your body.
(answer transcribed from comment)