Sunset anxiety; it's not a macabre allusion to a trendy indie screenplay, but a growing, yet often misunderstood, facet of mental health. You don’t have to be Van Gogh obsessing over 'The Starry Night' to feel a chill as Dusk makes her grand entrance, you might just be part of the 19% of Americans grappling with invisible chains of anxiety disorders, a fraction of who experience a heightened sensitivity as the moon usurps the sun. It triggers the eerie feeling of losing opportunities and possibilities as day transitions to night, often leaving victims under a cloud of ‘should haves’ and ‘could haves’.

Call it an anxious person's twilit curse, or an unseen cost of exhausting social expectations, sunset anxiety is as real as Santa's chimney PTSD. However, its invisibility in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) keeps it in a twilight zone of misunderstood disorders that don’t get the attention they deserve, despite validating nods from mental health professionals.

Are you one of those souls who find the sunset sublime but awfully uncomfortable, associating the end of the day with a sense of loss or missed opportunities? Does sunset for you often translate to an evening of anxiety and unease? It can also mean gearing up for the post-sundown parental circus of dinners, baths, bedtimes and sporadic wake-up calls, for those with young night-roaming rascals. If you equate the decreasing rays of sunshine in winter with a feeling of entrapment, you might want to pull up a chair and stay awhile.

Let’s keep this straight though, sunset anxiety is not seasonally affected depression’s younger cousin. While both disorders share a fondness for dilapidated light levels, they're two separate beasts, each with a unique set of symptoms and impacts.

And here’s where it gets interesting. A study in Psychiatry Research revealed that your internal chronotype is a snitch, it hints at the possible peak of your day’s anxiety. Night owls, it seems, have a special reservation for evening anxiety attacks, compared to their chirpy early bird counterparts.

So here's the bottom line, folks. Sunset anxiety is sneaky, as real as a midlife crisis, and just about as welcome. Just because it's not clinically anointed doesn't make it any less valid. But hey, don’t surrender to despair just yet. A few strategic lifestyle tweaks and professional help can help send your evening worries packing. And remember, having your mental sunset can also mean looking forward to a new dawn.