If you start feeling anxiety and aren’t sure why, there are actually certain points during your day that can give you more stress without you even realizing it. These are called “micro-transitions” and allude to the time when something is ending and something else is starting, like different points of your day.
Psychologist Jeff Temple of the University of Texas Medical Branch explains, “Whether it’s called triggers or micro-triggers, we all certainly have things that set us off. There’s anticipatory anxiety, which is anxiety about being anxious, as opposed to actual things to be anxious about.”
Here are four micro-transitions in your day to look out for.
- Sunset. Dark thoughts tend to come out when the sun sets and it’s dark out. We tend to think about negative events that happened during the day at night. It’s also harder to control emotionally negative info at night.
- The end of a fun event. If you’ve spent weeks preparing for something, and then it ends, what a buzzkill! Or if you had high expectations for it, and it fell short, that’ll bum you out.
- “Audience” transitions. You may change your behavior when different people are present without even realizing it. This can affect your anxiety for sure.
- Conflicting obligations. Like not being able to be two places at once or needing to pick and choose what you’re attending.
Source: Huffington Post
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