What to do while waiting for therapy

Therapy waitlists often run 6 to 10 weeks or longer, so treat the wait as active time, not dead time. Call more than one provider and ask about cancellation lists, consider telehealth (often faster), build a daily routine around movement, sleep, and connection, and try a few minutes of bilateral stimulation, EMDR’s core technique, when stress spikes.

Getting a therapist’s name, then a callback that says “we can see you in nine weeks,” is its own small gut-punch, especially once you’d worked up the nerve to make that call. The wait doesn’t have to be wasted time. Here’s what shortens it, what genuinely helps in the meantime, and when to reach for more support right now.

How long are therapy waitlists right now?

Long, and you’re not imagining it. A 2023 study in General Hospital Psychiatry called 948 psychiatrist offices across five states and found only 18.5% had an opening for a new patient. Among those that did, the median wait was 67 days for an in-person appointment and 43 days for telehealth.

Availability also depends heavily on where you live: rural areas start with fewer providers, which stretches the wait further once you do reach someone accepting new clients. None of this means you did anything wrong by looking, or that you should just sit with it quietly until your name comes up.

How can you shorten the wait?

A few tactics make a real difference:

• Call more than one provider. Ask each to put you on a cancellation list. A surprising number of first openings come from someone else rescheduling.
• Ask about telehealth specifically. In the study above, telehealth appointments had a shorter median wait than in-person ones, 43 days versus 67.
• Look for a Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinic (CCBHC). These federally backed clinics report much faster access: about half offer same-day appointments and 93% see new patients within 10 days, against a national average of roughly 48 days for behavioral health appointments generally (National Council for Mental Wellbeing, 2021).
• Check for an Employee Assistance Program (EAP). Many employers offer a handful of free counseling sessions, separate from insurance and often bookable within days (SHRM).
• Call SAMHSA’s National Helpline (1-800-662-4357), free, confidential, and available around the clock, for referrals to sliding-scale or state-funded treatment near you (SAMHSA).

If cost, not just time, is the barrier, cheaper alternatives to therapy and what to do if you can’t afford therapy go deeper on that side of it.

What actually helps while you wait?

Two ordinary habits have real evidence behind them.

Movement is the best-supported one. A 2023 overview of 97 systematic reviews, covering more than 128,000 people, found regular physical activity had a medium-sized effect on reducing depression, anxiety, and general distress across healthy adults and people with diagnosed conditions alike (Singh et al., British Journal of Sports Medicine, 2023). You don’t need a gym membership; a brisk 20-minute walk most days counts.

Writing about what’s on your mind is the other. In a meta-analysis of 146 studies, people who wrote about an upsetting experience for 15 to 20 minutes across a few days showed a small but statistically real improvement on mental health measures compared with people who didn’t (Frattaroli, Psychological Bulletin, 2006). Small is the honest word here. It won’t resolve what’s weighing on you, but it’s a real, free thing to do with the churn in your head.

A steady sleep and wake time, and at least one recurring point of contact with another person (a friend, a support group, a class), round out a workable list (JED Foundation). Neither is glamorous. Both are things a waitlist can’t stop you from starting today. For more no-cost options, see free ways to calm anxious feelings.

Is there something you can start today, on your own?

Yes: bilateral stimulation, the left-right rhythm at the core of EMDR therapy, is simple enough to try right now. The butterfly hug is the easiest version: cross your arms over your chest, and alternate tapping your left and right shoulder, slowly, for 30 to 60 seconds while you let your breathing settle. Full instructions, including eye-movement and audio versions, are in our beginner’s guide to self-guided bilateral stimulation, and the glossary entry covers how it works in plain terms.

This is a tool for the everyday stress of waiting itself, racing thoughts at 11pm, dread before a hard day, not a way to process whatever brought you to a waitlist in the first place. If you’d rather be guided than count taps yourself, EmEase, a self-guided EMDR app, runs the same technique with a moving on-screen target or alternating tones at app.emease.com, for $14.99/month or $69.99/year with a 7-day free trial. Our anxiety and stress relief collection has more short protocols for the moments that tend to spike while you wait.

When should you reach out for more support right now?

If distress is escalating, don’t wait it out. A warmline, staffed by trained peers rather than clinicians, is built for exactly this in-between moment: not an emergency, but more than you want to carry alone until your appointment (American Psychiatric Association). If what you’re feeling tips into crisis, that’s a different threshold, and it means calling or texting 988 (US) now, not after your intake appointment. Our crisis resources page has more immediate options.

The wait for a first appointment is real, and so is your frustration with it. Treat these weeks as preparation, not a waiting room: shrink the wait where you can, lean on what the evidence actually supports, and keep the number for urgent help somewhere you won’t have to search for it.