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Waiting for Medical Results: What the Research Actually Shows
The honest headline is that the evidence here is adjacent, not direct. The two studies we could verify followed people waiting on high-stakes news, mostly law graduates waiting for bar exam results, not patients waiting on a scan or a biopsy. In that research, anxiety was higher before the news than after it, and people who were more mindful, or who were taught to meditate, braced for the worst later in the wait and rated themselves as coping better. Neither study tested journaling.
On this page
What the wait feels like, compared with the answer
A 2015 paper in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin compared the emotions people feel while awaiting uncertain bad news with the ones they feel once it arrives. The first study drew on people's own experiences of waiting for news that turned out badly. The second followed law graduates who were waiting for bar exam results and went on to fail. Participants were divided on whether waiting or receiving the bad news was harder. But the emotions were different in kind. Anxiety was higher before the news. Anger, disappointment, depression and regret were stronger afterwards.
Bracing for the worst, and when people do it
A 2017 paper in the same journal starts from the observation that people often wait for uncertain news and that their natural coping strategies tend to be ineffective. It looked at one thing people do while they wait: bracing for the worst. The finding was about timing. Law graduates who were more mindful managed their expectations better by bracing for the worst later in the wait, and they rated themselves as coping better.
The two mindfulness studies
The 2017 paper reports two studies of law graduates awaiting bar exam results. In the first, 150 participants reported how mindful they were as a trait. In the second, 90 participants were instructed to practise mindfulness meditation, and were compared with a control condition. In both, more mindfulness went with bracing later and with better self-rated coping. In the second study, participants who were low in dispositional optimism and high in intolerance of uncertainty benefited most from meditation relative to the control condition. The authors' own conclusion is that mindfulness offers a simple way to wait better, especially for those most vulnerable to distress.
What this does not show
Neither study involved medical tests. Waiting on a bar exam result and waiting on a biopsy are both high-stakes waits with a fixed answer coming, but they are not the same experience, and we were not able to verify a study of medical waits for this page, so none is cited here. The studies also tested mindfulness, not journaling, and not voice recording. Coping was rated by the participants themselves. And we read both papers through their indexed summaries, which give no effect sizes, so we cannot say how large any of these differences were. Nothing here is medical advice, and none of it speaks to what your results will be.
What that means if you want to try it
The practical reading is modest. Bracing for bad news is something people do, and the research does not say to stop. It suggests that doing it for the whole wait is not what the better copers did. Attention on the day in front of you, with the bracing left for nearer the answer, is the pattern those studies describe. Phi's 60-second voice entries are one way to say what today actually contains, out loud. That is a format, not a tested treatment: the studies above tested mindfulness meditation in people waiting on exam results, not voice journaling during a medical wait.
Sources
Sweeny, K., & Falkenstein, A. (2015). Is waiting the hardest part? Comparing the emotional experiences of awaiting and receiving bad news. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 41(11), 1551–1559.Sweeny, K., & Howell, J. L. (2017). Bracing later and coping better: Benefits of mindfulness during a stressful waiting period. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 43(10), 1399–1414.Say it out loud instead.
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