Temporal experience in anxiety: embodiment, selfhood, and the collapse of meaning Kevin Aho 1 # Springer Science+Business Media B.V., part of Springer Nature 2018 Abstract This essay explores the unique temporal experience in anxiety. Drawing on first-person accounts as well as examples from literature, I attempt to show how anxiety not only disrupts our physiological and cognitive timing but also disturbs the embodied rhythms of everyday social life. The primary goal, however, is to articulate the extent to which human existence itself is a temporally structured event and to identity the ways that anxiety disrupts this structure. Using Martin Heidegger ’ s account of human existence (or Dasein) as a point of departure, I show how the mood of anxiety has the power to alter our self-interpretations by closing down or constricting our experi- ence of the future. I argue that a constricted future impedes our ability ‘to be’ because it closes off the range of projective meanings that we would ordinarily draw on to create or fashion our identities. Keywords Anxiety . Befindlichkeit . Death . Embodiment . Moods . Narrative identity . Emotions . Phenomenology . Temporality . Heidegger One of the initial difficulties in addressing the psychopathologic aspects of ‘anxiety’ is getting clear about what we mean by the term. The heterogeneity of the experience is clear in the latest incarnation of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) which lists a wide range of anxiety disorders each with its own distinct diagnostic criteria including: selective mutism, separation anxiety disorder, social anxiety disorder, panic disorder, agoraphobia, substance and medication-induced anxiety disorder, and generalized anxiety disorder (American Psychiatric Association 2013, 189–233). Among these disorders, there is the further question of how to classify them as affective states. Is anxiety, for instance, an emotion or a mood? The mental health professions generally regard emotions as being acute, episodic, and short-lived experiences that have determinate causes and are intentionally directed at specific objects or events. The fleeting Phenom Cogn Sci https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-018-9559-x * Kevin Aho kaho@fgcu.edu 1 Florida Gulf Coast University, Fort Myers, FL 33965, USA