Highlights•Language on social media by suffers of anxiety and/or depression differed from healthy controls.•Anxious/depressed posts referred to non-present time more and used more proximal time frames.•Anxious/depressed posts used more low-certainty, and more bouletic (about desires) language.•Anxious–but not depressed–participants construed future events as more temporally distal.•This caused anxious–but not depressed–participants to devalue delayed outcomes relatively more.