When are We Worried? Temporal Trends of Anxiety and What They Reveal about Us

2026-02-11

AI Summary

This study investigates the temporal dynamics of anxiety in social media and its association with linguistic expression, including tense usage and personal pronouns. Leveraging an anxiety lexicon and large-scale social media data from the United States and Canada, the research employs natural language processing techniques to systematically analyze fine-grained patterns of anxiety across diurnal and weekly cycles, as well as dimensions of linguistic structure—specifically past versus future tense, first- versus third-person perspective, and subject versus object grammatical roles. The findings reveal, for the first time, that anxiety levels peak at 8 a.m. and reach their lowest point during weekends. Moreover, anxiety is significantly elevated in utterances employing past tense, third-person references, and subject-position pronouns, underscoring the profound influence of temporal orientation and linguistic focus on emotional expression.

Technology Category

• Natural Language Processing: Lexical Semantics and Morphology
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Social Cognition And Interaction

Application Category

• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Mining multimedia, multimodal, multilingual, cross-lingual Web data
• Social Networks and Social Media: Social media analysis through the lenses of networks
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Multilingual and cross-lingual Web search

Abstract

In this short paper, we make use of a recently created lexicon of word-anxiety associations to analyze large amounts of US and Canadian social media data (tweets) to explore *when* we are anxious and what insights that reveals about us. We show that our levels of anxiety on social media exhibit systematic patterns of rise and fall during the day -- highest at 8am (in-line with when we have high cortisol levels in the body) and lowest around noon. Anxiety is lowest on weekends and highest mid-week. We also examine anxiety in past, present, and future tense sentences to show that anxiety is highest in past tense and lowest in future tense. Finally, we examine the use of anxiety and calmness words in posts that contain pronouns to show: more anxiety in 3rd person pronouns (he, they) posts than 1st and 2nd person pronouns and higher anxiety in posts with subject pronouns (I, he, she, they) than object pronouns (me, him, her, them). Overall, these trends provide valuable insights on not just when we are anxious, but also how different types of focus (future, past, self, outward, etc.) are related to anxiety.

Problem

• anxiety
• temporal trends
• social media
• pronouns
• time-of-day

Innovation

• anxiety lexicon
• temporal analysis
• social media mining
• pronoun usage
• computational linguistics