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

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.10400 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.10400/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 4 of its 27 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Feb 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Best Practices in the Creation and Use of Emotion Lexicons](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07206/) (2022)
- [Evaluating Emotion Arcs Across Languages: Bridging the Global Divide in Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02213/) (2023)
- [WorryWords: Norms of Anxiety Association for over 44k English Words](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.03966/) (2024)
- [The relationship between linguistic expression and symptoms of depression, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts: A longitudinal study of blog content](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.02750/) (2018)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.