With the days getting shorter and the sun setting earlier, a familiar unease might start to creep in. Maybe it takes the form of panic or guilt about how fast time passes, or a quiet crankiness that your day has already ended before you were ready for it to.
This overarching sense of loss and dread is called sunset anxiety (which, to be clear, is not an official diagnosis—nor is there much research on it). Still, the lack of hard evidence doesn’t mean the phenomenon doesn’t exist.
“What I know is that everyone’s anxiety is universal but also very unique to them,” Debra Kissen, PhD, psychologist and CEO of the Light On Anxiety CBT Treatment Center in Chicago, tells SELF. In other words, there are lots of reasons why dusk can stir up discomfort. For some, it’s tied to a sensory shift—the fading light, the sudden quiet. For others, it’s more existential: the reminder that time is passing quickly, yet there’s still so much left undone.
Read on to understand what might be behind your sunset anxiety—plus, how to ease the melancholy when it hits.
What causes “sunset anxiety”?
As you might expect, people who are naturally more anxious or have been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder may be more likely to feel uneasy at sunset. Some research also suggests that “evening types” (or night owls) are more likely than morning people to experience nervousness and racing thoughts from the afternoon onwards.
Besides a propensity for worry, however, a lot of other things could be at play.If the mantra behind your sunset anxiety is “I didn’t do enough,” or it resembles Sunday scaries, “productivity guilt” could be to blame. “Productivity guilt happens when we have unreasonable expectations of how much we can accomplish within a given period,” Israa Nasir, MHC-LP, therapist and author of Toxic Productivity: Reclaim Your Time and Emotional Energy in a World That Always Demands More, tells SELF. Then, when we fail to meet them, we feel bad.
“Anticipatory anxiety”—when you’re worrying about the future in the present—can play a role too. “As the day ends, we’re reminded of everything we didn’t do,” Nasir says. “On top of that, we know that the next day will begin and have its own tasks, so the things we left incomplete may feel even heavier”—an internalized pressure that tends to hit especially hard for perfectionists.
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