What Does Your Therapy Appointment Time Say About You?

I know some of my friends’ therapists’ names. I hear the phrase “my therapist says” with enough frequency that I feel like I get extra therapy just by association. Lately, I’ve been discussing with a co-worker whether we should stop therapy, because apparently many people could stand to, at least according to the Atlantic. (We decided we should not.) What I’m saying is that therapy is far from an underdiscussed or underexamined topic in my life. But it did strike me recently that I have no idea when anyone I know goes to therapy.

The hour a person wakes up says something about them. Does the time you have therapy say anything about you? Is there an ideal time to have therapy? I confess this probably never would have occurred to me as a thing to think about if it weren’t for my longtime therapist informing me a few months ago that our time, the hour we’d been meeting at for more than a decade, would need to change. True to form for someone with the kind of neuroses that land one in therapy in the first place, I found it disconcerting. I had a claim on Thursdays at 6:30 p.m. for so long that it felt like I had tenure. Wasn’t I a thing to be scheduled around, like Friends in the Must See TV era? Apparently not.

Typical me, getting attached to a time slot. Such a delicate flower! I once read a memoir by a woman whose beloved therapist suddenly died, so I know I got off easy. Still, didn’t that time slot act as a constant for me during some pretty formative years? Through different jobs, apartments, and relationships, I could count on Thursdays at 6:30. That 45-minute time block gave a structure to my weeks, even if it meant I always had to say no to Thursday-night plans. For many years, it also meant a weekly pilgrimage to the Upper West Side, a neighborhood I almost never went to otherwise, but I liked that, because the Upper West Side felt like where a proper New York therapist was supposed to have an office. I had regular after-therapy spots, too—yoga studios and dessert shops and Fairway.

I missed a lot about this ritual when the pandemic started and we switched to video sessions (think of all those empty offices uptown), but the time slot still felt like an anchor, something I could rely on to keep the days from blending together into an indistinguishable blob. I liked having that one immovable fact of my life, because sometimes everything else seems almost too moveable. I should feel grateful for that, and I do, but I also feel unmoored, and then a little dumb for feeling unmoored about this, of all things. Then again, I also miss subway routes I used to take, long-discontinued varieties of soda, Regis Philbin … none of which I spent as many cumulative hours with as I did in therapy at this specific time.

I haven’t permanently committed to a new appointment time yet, but we’ve been doing a trial run of Monday afternoon sessions for the past few weeks, and it feels all wrong. When you have therapy on Thursday evenings, you spend the weekend and then the work week that follows naturally accumulating things to talk to your therapist about. On Monday, nothing’s even happened in the week yet. You arrive to therapy feeling like you haven’t done the homework. You start getting—and I dislike this juvenile phrase but it’s the truth—the Sunday Scaries in anticipation. Afterward, there’s no sense of accomplishment like there is when you get through the Thursday evening session that was standing between you and the weekend. I figure you have to be an alpha type to want to go to therapy on Mondays, the kind of person for whom the phrase “hit the ground running” holds meaning.

What about the other days? I can see therapy on Tuesday suiting an anxious mindset, someone who wants to get ahead of the week to come, and leave later days open for socializing. Wednesday therapy seems like a nice balance, not too late to talk about the weekend or too early to think about the next one. (I tried Wednesday at 4, but having the appointment smack-dab in the middle of the week gave it too much centrality and power, like it was a Facehugger threatening to suffocate my whole calendar—I never said I was balanced.) If you go on Fridays, there’s almost too much lead time and you risk ruining the preamble to your weekend. Weekend therapy? For people who think of therapy as a replacement for brunch.

I’m still workshopping my taxonomy of therapy times. I don’t know how my new time slot—whatever it ends up being—will affect me in the long term. But what I can say for certain is that these past few Thursdays without therapy have felt bizarre. I’m just on my own? They’re gonna let me, who has no experience being a free adult woman on a Thursday evening, roam these streets? Is that even safe? There used to be a narrative flow to the week, and I knew every up and down. Weeks have lost that sense of meaning they’d been accruing for a decade. On some level, this was inevitable because, well, weeks are fake, an arbitrary unit of time. But I do recognize that, rather than confronting my therapist with the argument that the week is a bourgeois invention of urbanization and an unnatural rhythm for human life, I’m going to have to just pick a new appointment slot.

Annoyingly, I can see all the ways that switching times might be good for me. If you can’t tell, I struggle with being flexible. But I know I’m also searching for a way for time to feel like it used to, before the pandemic and technology conspired to stretch and warp the pace of everything. Oh, and I also just plain miss an era in my life when I was younger and had more reasons to leave the house, even reasons as uncool as therapy.

I’m pretty sure that lurking under all my anxiety about time is the fear that other people are spending it better than I am. I recently heard Jerrod Carmichael say something related to this, in his new HBO show, that I found weirdly comforting. Someone he knew was avoiding him, and had said he was too busy to go to an event with him. Carmichael joked, “He’s not that busy. Rich people are never that busy. Julia Roberts is just at home right now. She’s got nothing to do.”

Maybe everyone is a little confounded by time. If not therapy, we worry about the best time to exercise, schedule a dinner party, or leave for the airport. Maybe Julia Roberts sometimes looks at her wide-open calendar and also has existential dread about when to schedule appointments. Maybe she feels extra bad about this because she used to be so busy and wish for free time. I do think a lot of therapists would rearrange their schedules to fit her in. But constraints can be a good thing, or so I hear.