I've been in a few earthquakes, and even the little ones, like 5.0, can feel terrifying if you're several stories up in a building. It's magnified the higher up you are. There's something deeply unsettling, right down to the lizard brain, about feeling the ground under you become unreliable. A 5 on the ground floor won't trigger that reaction. Consider yourselves lucky! An interesting thing to do -- assuming nothing is falling on you -- is to keep track of the time lag between P waves, the first to arrive, and the S waves, which cause shaking at right angles to the P waves. The more time between them, the further away the epicenter is. (So, if you can feel it well enough to count and observe, but not so well that you can't count and observe, something big is going on a few hundred miles away....)