I can do the injection. It is the ninety minutes before it I cannot do

Started 15 October 2025 · 7 replies · 326 hearts · read 2.4k times

LeniLeipzig, DE · 15 October 2025

9 months ago

Leipzig. Anxious, improving, journalling — and this is the thing I journal about most, so I may as well bring it here.

The injection takes about fifteen seconds and does not hurt. I have done it forty-one times. I am not frightened of the needle and I have never once had a problem with the act itself.

The ninety minutes before it are the problem. It starts in the afternoon, on a Sunday, as a sort of tightness behind my ribs. By six o’clock I am checking the clock. By seven I have found four reasons to do something else first — a load of washing, a phone call to my mother, tidying a drawer that did not need tidying. I have talked myself into eight o’clock, then half past, and by the time I actually do it I have spent the best part of an evening in a low hum of dread about fifteen seconds of nothing.

Then afterwards I feel completely fine and slightly foolish, and I promise myself that next week I will do it at six, and next week the tightness starts at four.

What I have noticed is that the anticipation is not really about the injection. It is about the whole thing being real once a week, on a schedule, with no way to not think about it. The needle is just where all of that has to go.

Has anybody actually shortened the ninety minutes? Not by being braver. I am not short of courage on a Sunday, I am short of a way through an hour and a half.

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EsiFacilitatorToronto, Canada

Leni, this is the most accurate description of anticipatory dread I have read on this site, and what you are describing responds to something quite specific.

The ninety minutes is maintained by the avoidance rather than by the injection. Every time you find the washing to do, the dread gets a small confirmation that there was something worth avoiding, and next week it starts earlier. That is not a character problem. It is how the loop works, in everyone.

What people here have found helpful, offered as things that worked rather than instructions:

Shrink the window on purpose. Not by being brave at six — by deciding the night before that the pen comes out of the fridge at a fixed time, and that the fixed time starts a short boring sequence rather than a decision.
Put something immediately after it rather than before. The dread ends when the fifteen seconds ends, so give the evening somewhere to go.
Do it in company on a call for a few weeks. It is not a big favour to ask.

The one thing I would stop is promising yourself six o’clock. That promise is part of the loop now.

55me too 13

NixLeith, UK

Neurodivergent, routine is everything. What worked for me was making it the second thing rather than the first thing.

I have a Sunday sequence: kettle on, pen out of the fridge onto the plate, feed the cat, injection, then the good coffee. The pen going on the plate happens before I have decided anything, and by the time the cat is fed I am at the injection without having crossed a threshold.

Sequences carry me over things that decisions cannot.

47me too 11

ClémenceNantes, FR

Nantes. Careful, kind, keeps a beautiful journal — and I had this for the whole of my first year.

Mine ended when I moved it to the morning. Not because mornings are easier in themselves, but because in the morning I have not had all day to build it. It was three in the afternoon before, and the building started at breakfast.

Worth asking your prescriber about whether the time of day matters for you, because for me the answer was that it did not, and that was the whole solution.

39me too 8

TaaviTallinn, EE

Digital healthcare, analogue anxiety, Tallinn. I did the calls that Esi mentions for about six weeks and I want to describe what actually happens on one, because I put it off for months imagining something excruciating.

Somebody comes on, asks how your week was, and talks about nothing much. At some point you say you are going to do it now, and they carry on talking about nothing much. That is it. There is no ceremony and nobody watches. The whole point is that it becomes an ordinary thing that happens while somebody is talking about their neighbour.

51me too 9

JunoBrighton, UK

Sceptical, anxious, staying anyway. Mine is Wednesdays and I have the same hum. The thing that helped me was noticing that I do this with everything with a fixed time in it — dentist, MOT, phone calls to the bank.

So it was never about needles. It was about appointments existing. Oddly comforting to realise the medicine had not invented a new problem for me, it had just given the old one a weekly slot.

44me too 12

HéloïseGeneva, CH

Geneva. Precise and private. I use a timer. Four minutes, out loud, on my phone, from the pen leaving the fridge. At the end of four minutes it is done, and if it is not done the timer has still gone off and I do it then.

Removing the open-ended nature of it was the entire fix for me. Ninety minutes cannot happen inside four.

42me too 7

LeniLeipzig, DE

The loop explanation is the thing I did not have. I had been treating the ninety minutes as the weather and it turns out I have been watering it.

New sequence, borrowed from Nix and Héloïse, starting Sunday: pen on the plate at seven while the kettle is on, timer for four minutes, then the programme I am saving. And I have asked about a call for the first two weeks.

48me too 6

Facilitator note — Esi

Facilitator note — Esi. I hold injection-anxiety and I want to be clear about what this circle is and is not.

It is a place to make a weekly ten seconds boring again, mostly through dull, graded, repetitive practice and the company of somebody who is not making a fuss. That works for a great many people and it worked for everyone in this thread.

It is not treatment. If the dread in your week has grown past the injection into other things, or if it is stopping you taking a medicine you want to take, that is worth raising with your own clinician, and there are real therapies for it that a peer circle cannot provide. Saying so is not us getting rid of you. We will still be here on Sunday.

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