What is Scanxiety and How can Therapy Help?
If you or someone you love has been diagnosed with cancer, you may already be familiar with feeling the subtle but ever-present dread in the days or weeks leading up to a scan. The racing thoughts, difficulty sleeping, and pit in your stomach every time you look at the calendar. The way your mind goes to the worst possible place even when you're trying to stay positive.
There's actually a term for this: scanxiety.
What Is Scanxiety?
Scanxiety refers to the anxiety that cancer patients and their caregivers can experience before, during, or after medical imaging — CT scans, MRIs, PET scans, and any other tests used to monitor the progression or remission of the cancer. While the term is relatively new, the experience is anything but. For many patients, scanxiety is one of the most emotionally draining aspects of living with cancer.
It often shows up as:
• Difficulty concentrating or completing everyday tasks in the days/weeks before a scan
• Intrusive thoughts about what the results might be
• Physical symptoms like headaches, stomach upset, or fatigue
• Irritability or emotional withdrawal/avoidance
• Trouble sleeping or relaxing
• A sense of dread that intensifies as the scan date approaches — and sometimes doesn't lift until well after results are received
For caregivers, scanxiety can be just as intense. Watching a loved one prepare for a scan — and waiting alongside them for results — carries its own profound emotional weight that often goes unrecognized.
Why Is Scanxiety So Common?
A cancer diagnosis and the treatment that follows brings an immense amount of uncertainty, and scans are the moments when that uncertainty can feel most acute. Each scan is, in a sense, a reckoning — when you have to face the facts about whether the treatment is working, whether the cancer has returned, whether life as you know it is about to change again. It makes complete sense that our body and mind would respond to this with anxiety. Scanxiety isn't a sign of weakness or catastrophizing. It is a natural and understandable response to a genuinely difficult situation. And yet many patients and families feel pressure to stay positive and focus on the best-case scenario. While optimism has its place, suppressing anxiety rarely makes it go away — it often makes it harder to manage.
How Therapy Can Help
Working with a therapist who understands the emotional landscape of cancer can make a meaningful difference in how you experience the scan cycle. They can support with things like:
Building a toolkit for the waiting period.
Many therapy modalities can help you build various tools to identify, challenge, and process the patterns that perpetuate scanxiety — helping to create some breathing room between the fear and your reaction and allowing you to feel more in control of your mindset and emotions. These include
Mindfulness and grounding practices.
Mindfulness-based approaches can help you stay anchored in the present rather than spiraling into future-focused fear. This doesn't mean pretending everything is fine — it means learning to be with uncertainty without being consumed by it.
Processing what's underneath the anxiety.
Scanxiety is rarely about the scan itself. It's often connected to grief, loss of control, changes in identity, fear of death, the exhaustion of treatment, and the strain on relationships. Therapy offers you a space to explore all of it — not just the surface-level worry.
Support between appointments.
The scan cycle can feel relentless. I often have clients talk about how their lives, including their emotions and mindset, feel dictated by the appointment schedule. Therapy offers a consistent, dedicated space to process what you're going through — before the scan, while waiting for results, and after, whatever those results bring.
You Don't Have to “Put on a Happy Face”
Living with cancer — or supporting someone who does — is one of the hardest things a person can face. The anxiety that comes with it is not a character flaw or a lack of resilience. It is a human response to an extraordinarily difficult experience. Therapy won't change the fact that the scans are frightening. But it can help you feel less alone in facing them, and more equipped to handle what this season of life is asking of you.
If you're a cancer patient, survivor, or caregiver in Massachusetts and you're struggling with scanxiety or the emotional weight of a diagnosis, I'd love to connect. I offer virtual therapy across Massachusetts and welcome you to reach out to schedule a free 20-minute consultation call.
