Anxiety While Waiting for Test Results: Easing the Wait

Anxiety while waiting for test results is your nervous system reacting to uncertainty, not the outcome itself. To ease it, name the exact scene you keep imagining, the call, the portal, the doctor’s face, then run a few minutes of bilateral stimulation while it sits loosely in mind, and set one specific time to stop checking.

You sent the sample in, submitted the application, or had the scan, and now there’s nothing left to do but wait. Except your body doesn’t experience “nothing to do” as nothing. It runs the scene on a loop, checks your phone for the tenth time this hour, and treats an ordinary notification sound like a small emergency.

That’s not a sign you can’t handle bad news, and it’s not overreacting. It’s what an alarm system built for immediate threats does when you hand it a problem it can’t solve right now: an outcome that already exists, sitting somewhere you can’t see it yet.

Why does waiting for results feel worse than almost anything else?

Not knowing turns out to be its own stressor, separate from whatever the news eventually is. A 2023 meta-analysis in the Journal of Anxiety Disorders found that how well someone tolerates uncertainty predicts their anxiety levels directly: treatments that improved people’s ability to sit with not-knowing reduced their anxiety right along with it. Waiting for a result puts you in about the most uncertain state there is, an answer that already exists but hasn’t reached you.

Most people fill that gap by rehearsing it. You picture the phone lighting up, the portal updating, the exact look on someone’s face as they deliver the news. Researchers call these vivid, repeated mental previews “flashforwards.”

A 2010 study in Behaviour Research and Therapy found these imagined scenes carry real emotional weight, not just background worry but something your body reacts to directly. A 2011 follow-up in the Journal of Anxiety Disorders found the same held for flashforwards that kept recurring on their own, unprompted, which is exactly how a pending result tends to surface: uninvited, all day, whether you asked for the replay or not.

This is a sharper, more deadline-bound version of anticipatory anxiety: dread with a specific moment attached, rather than dread about an event you can at least prepare for. And once the mind starts rehearsing, it’s rarely one version. It’s a dozen “what if” branches running at once, part of why waiting is so hard to think past.

A 2016 meta-analysis of 177 samples in Psychological Bulletin found that anxiety reliably shrinks working memory, the mental space you use to focus on anything else. That part isn’t just in your head: waiting on a result measurably narrows what your mind can hold that day.

If this particular kind of waiting, a verdict from someone else, always hits you harder than it seems to hit other people, that reaction sometimes traces back further than this one result. Our guide to calming anxious feelings goes into where a pattern like that tends to start.

How do you calm anxiety while waiting for test results?

You can’t speed up the answer and you can’t change what it says. What you can do is take some of the charge out of the loop your mind keeps running in the meantime.

1. Name the exact scene. Not “I’m anxious about this,” but the specific moment you keep replaying: the phone lighting up, the portal loading, the words themselves.
2. Rate it. On a 0–10 scale, how intense does that imagined scene feel right now?
3. Hold it loosely, and add bilateral stimulation. Bilateral stimulation (BLS) is the rhythmic left-right technique at the center of EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing). Cross your arms and tap opposite shoulders, the butterfly hug, a self-administered method described by EMDRIA, move your eyes slowly between two points, or use alternating left-right tones if you have headphones. Run 20 to 30 seconds while the scene sits in the background, not front and center.
4. Pause, breathe, and re-rate. Most people notice the image feels a little flatter: more like a fact they’re waiting on than a rehearsal.
5. Repeat 3 to 5 short rounds, checking in briefly between each.
6. Set one specific check-in time, and put your phone somewhere else until then.

That last step carries as much weight as the technique itself. Checking early feels like relief, but it rarely is: it restarts the loop without moving the timeline forward, which is why the urge to check again comes back within minutes.

Counting rounds and resisting your phone at the same time is a lot to hold while you’re already keyed up. EmEase, a self-guided EMDR app, runs this same left-right technique for you, a moving on-screen target or alternating tones, paced however you like, in the web app. Your own hands or eyes work just as well; the app just takes the counting off your plate.

When does waiting-anxiety need more than a reset?

This practice softens the loop. It doesn’t touch the outcome, and it isn’t a reason to put off a call you should be making, like following up with an office that’s running behind schedule. If what you’re waiting on is a medical result and the worry keeps returning even on ordinary days, not just during an active wait, our guide to quieting a health-anxiety spiral goes deeper on that specific pattern.

Reach out to a licensed professional if the wait stretches into weeks and the dread never eases, if it’s costing you sleep, work, or time with people you care about, or if it starts tipping toward hopelessness rather than worry. A short reset is built for the sharp edge of not-knowing, not for carrying a heavy wait entirely alone.

The result already exists, whatever it turns out to be; you just haven’t seen it yet. Spending the meantime a little calmer doesn’t change what’s coming, but it changes what the wait costs you before it arrives. For more resets built the same way, our anxiety and stress relief hub has the full set.