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

TL;DR

This study analyzes social media data to reveal temporal patterns of anxiety, showing fluctuations throughout the day, week, and in relation to tense and pronoun use, providing insights into when and how anxiety manifests.

Contribution

It introduces a lexicon-based analysis of social media to uncover detailed temporal and linguistic patterns of anxiety, revealing new insights into anxiety's dynamics.

Findings

Anxiety peaks at 8am and is lowest around noon.

Weekends show lower anxiety levels than weekdays.

Higher anxiety is associated with past tense and third-person pronouns.

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.