Everyday and clinical experience suggest that the sense of time, what is known as psychological or experiential time, is an essential factor in the determination of the quality of affects.

In order to feel either anxiety or depression, one must first perceive a given situation as dangerous, and then assess oneself as inadequate. The result is a painful tension, but not yet anxiety or depression. What determines whether this tension—felt as a decrease in self-esteem or as a state of helplessness—will assume the specific quality of anxiety or depression is the individual's orientation in time. When perceiving the noxious influence—in essence, inadequacy—as something in the future, only potential and therefore avoidable, one experiences anxiety. When perceiving oneself as inadequate in the past, one experiences depression.