What Helps with Anticipatory Anxiety?

Four things reliably help: postponing the worry to a set window instead of letting it run all day, a few slow breaths to calm your body first, staying with the event instead of avoiding it, and bilateral stimulation, the technique behind EMDR, to lower the charge of the scene you keep replaying.

Maybe it’s a work trip two weeks out, a scan you’re waiting to schedule, or a hard conversation you know is coming this weekend. The event itself hasn’t happened yet, but your stomach has already been living in it all day.

That’s anticipatory anxiety: dread about something that hasn’t happened yet, rather than fear of something right in front of you. It’s common, and it responds well to a few specific, testable things.

Why doesn’t telling yourself to “just stop worrying” work?

A future event doesn’t resolve the way a solved problem does, so your mind keeps returning to it, replaying the same scene whenever it has a spare moment. Trying to suppress the thought outright tends to backfire; worry that gets pushed away has a way of coming back louder.

What actually interrupts the loop is giving the worry somewhere specific to go, instead of leaving it free to run all day, and lowering the charge of the imagined moment itself. Both are things you can do today.

Does scheduling your worry actually help?

More than you’d expect. In a now-classic 1983 study in Behaviour Research and Therapy, chronic worriers were asked to catch themselves mid-worry during the day, briefly note what it was about, and postpone thinking about it until a set window later on, instead of following it in the moment. Confining worry to that window, instead of leaving it free to run all day, measurably cut down how much people worried overall. This approach is sometimes called worry postponement.

You can try a simple version tonight. Pick a specific 10- to 15-minute window, not right before bed, and tell yourself, “not now, I’ll think about this then.” Write the worry down in one line so your mind doesn’t feel it has to hold onto it to avoid losing it. When the window arrives, you can actually think it through, or notice it doesn’t need the airtime it was demanding that morning.

Can a few slow breaths calm it down first?

A little. A 2023 study in Cell Reports Medicine compared several short daily breathing exercises to mindfulness meditation and found that breathing with a long, slow exhale, sometimes called cyclic sighing, improved mood and lowered physiological arousal more than meditation did, in as little as five minutes a day.

It won’t touch the scene you’re dreading. But a calmer body is easier to work with, which is why it’s worth doing first: two short breaths in through your nose, one long breath out, before you move on to anything else here.

Does avoiding the event make it worse?

Usually. Skipping the call, rescheduling again, begging out of the trip: each one brings instant relief, and that’s exactly the problem. A 2022 review in Frontiers in Psychiatry describes how that relief teaches your nervous system the event really was dangerous, priming it to dread the next one even harder.

That doesn’t mean gritting your teeth through everything alone. It means the goal is lowering the dread enough that you can still show up, not avoiding the trigger until the dread disappears on its own. It rarely does.

If this kind of dread shows up often, not just before one event, it’s usually connected to a wider pattern. Our guide to calming anxious feelings goes deeper on where that tends to start.

Where does bilateral stimulation fit in?

This is the part that works on the scene itself, not just your body’s reaction to it. Bilateral stimulation (BLS) is the rhythmic, left-right technique at the center of EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) therapy, and it’s been studied specifically on imagined future scenes, not only past memories. A 2010 study in Behaviour Research and Therapy found that holding a vivid, dreaded future scene in mind while making eye movements made it noticeably less vivid and less emotionally charged than simply picturing it did.

A simple version, the butterfly hug: cross your arms over your chest, one hand resting on each shoulder, and tap left, right, left, right, slowly, for 30 to 60 seconds while that one scene sits loosely in mind. This self-administered method is described by the EMDR International Association. Pause, check how the scene feels now, and repeat if it still has a charge.

EmEase, a self-guided EMDR app, offers the same left-right pattern as a moving on-screen target or alternating tones, if you’d rather follow a rhythm than set your own, at app.emease.com, with a 7-day free trial. For the complete step-by-step version of this practice, see how to deal with anticipatory anxiety before it happens.

When does anticipatory anxiety need more than this?

Most anticipatory dread eases within a few rounds of the steps above, especially once the event happens and turns out smaller than the version you rehearsed. A few patterns are worth bringing to a licensed professional instead: the dread grows rather than settles as the date gets closer, you’ve started avoiding things you used to push through, or physical symptoms escalate toward a racing heart or a sense of losing control.

If your mind runs the moment ten different bad ways instead of replaying one scene, see how to stop catastrophizing every situation. If it’s specifically the week ahead you dread rather than one event, our piece on the Sunday scaries covers that version.