Do deadlines make you particularly anxious? Do you constantly worry that you’ll be late for appointments? If so, you have been experiencing a condition called time anxiety, and it can rob your productivity. Time anxiety is a general sense of stress or unease related to time. It involves feeling pressured, overwhelmed, or anxious about time-related factors like dates, appointments, and being late. While time anxiety presents itself in many ways, there are also solutions and treatments for this often-debilitating condition.

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‍Identifying Time Anxiety

‍Most people experience anxiety when they are late, or if they have missed an important meeting. However, when you live with time anxiety, your feelings about time-related concepts often exist without concrete reasons or triggers. Time anxiety is accompanied by various features that manifest in an individual's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in the following ways:

• Constant Worry: People with time anxiety often experience continued worry about the passage of time. They often feel pressure when faced with deadlines, often worrying that they won't have enough time to complete tasks. This worry can extend to worries about lateness and about missing appointments, or manifest as an overall unease about the day getting later.

• Fear of the Future: There is often an underlying fear of the future associated with time anxiety. People may worry about potential negative outcomes of planned or unknown activities. Those with this feature of time anxiety may worry about specific events in the future or may deal with existential dread, a generalized worry about the passage of time and the unknowable future.

• Sense of Urgency: The average person feels motivated to complete time-limited or urgent projects. However, people with time anxiety may feel a heightened sense of urgency in their actions. always rushing to complete tasks or meet deadlines, even when the situation might not require immediate attention.

• Procrastination: Though they are obsessed with lateness and deadlines, some people with time anxiety may also engage in procrastination. The fear of not having enough time can be overwhelming, and that fear can lead to avoiding tasks until the last minute. Unsurprisingly, procrastination feeds on existing anxiety and causes further worry.

• Feeling uneasy when you don’t get around to everything you had planned to: ?When Alex Lickerman, MD, described this factor of time anxiety, he used a vacation as a metaphor. When you go away, you make plans and create timelines. Before a trip, you may look at upcoming plans with pleasant anticipation. However, if you don’t complete all your plans, you may become more preoccupied with the sites and attractions you missed than with those you could see. This dwelling on the negative can turn into obsession with what was missed, and a self-renewing cycle of anxiety and regret.

• Impaired Time Management: Paradoxically, even with their intense focus on time and time-related concepts, people with time anxiety may struggle with effective time management. The anxiety may interfere with their ability to plan and prioritize tasks efficiently. Procrastination falls under this umbrella, as do misjudging the time it takes to complete a task or misunderstanding the tools needed to keep an effective schedule.

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Treatment is Available for Time Anxiety

The good news is that time anxiety can be treated with intervention by mental health professionals and others who treat mental and emotional maladies. Treatments for time anxiety are like those for other types of anxiety. They range from the clinical to the recreational. The Cleveland Clinic notes that these four treatments are effective for people with time anxiety:

• Talk therapy - A licensed therapist will help you uncover the source of your condition and provide a safe space to explore the lifestyle components of your time anxiety.

• Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) – CBT deals with identifying the thoughts that trigger compulsive activities, and then “retraining” the brain to choose healthier responses to anxiety.

• Hypnotherapy – A licensed hypnotherapist uses focus and breathing to bring you into a calm, dream-like state. In that position, you can feel safe to explore experiences and trauma that may have led to time anxiety. A hypnotherapist can also give you a post-hypnotic suggestion, which will replace anxious thoughts and behaviors once you wake up.

• Meditation – Many people use meditation to treat various forms of anxiety, and it can be used to treat time anxiety. Meditation trains you on how to breathe and focus your mind in a particular way that calms your mind and reduces your stress response. In a calmer state, your anxiety will lessen.

Time-related mental conditions like time anxiety can be very debilitating. Fortunately, once it is identified properly, you can receive treatments to make it less of a disruption to your life.