Health Care Anxiety

That big birthday is coming up and you start feeling nervous about the medical tests you need to take. Or maybe it's a check-up you've been avoiding for years. You know you should go, but all the scary thoughts make you want to stay away. Even if you finally go to the appointment, you might worry even more while waiting for the results.

People naturally want to know what's going to happen and feel in control. But life keeps reminding us that we can't always predict everything.

If you struggle with worrying about medical tests, you're not alone. Many people feel this way. One reason we worry so much is something called Automatic Negative Thinking Traps, or ANTs for short. There are two main types of ANTs that show up when we're thinking about medical tests:

1. Fortune-telling: where we make assumptions about how things will turn out. We might think, "I just know something will go wrong."
2. Disaster-making: where we assume things will turn out so horribly, we won’t be able to handle them. You might think, "If the test results are bad, I won't be able to handle it."

These ANTs can make us feel really overwhelmed. When we feel overwhelmed, we often try to avoid the thing that scares us. But what if instead of letting these thoughts control us, we try to catch them and let them go? Just noticing when we're falling into these thinking traps and trying to replace those thoughts with more balanced ones can help a lot.

Living with uncertainty doesn't mean we’ll feel comfortable all the time. It means learning how to keep going, grow, and even do well even when you don't know what will happen next. Like learning any new skill, this takes practice and patience.

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