20 Things To Do During the Two-Week Wait (From Someone Who Did It Countless Times)

Infertility is one long waiting game. You wait for your period to start so you can call the clinic. You wait for bloodwork. You wait for the ultrasound tech to count follicles. You wait for the nurse to call back. You wait for retrieval, for the fertilization report, for the transfer. And then, after all of that waiting, you get handed the longest wait of all: the two-week wait, where there is absolutely nothing you can do to change the outcome and absolutely no way to stop thinking about it.

After more IUIs and embryo transfers than I'd honestly like to count, I became something of an unwilling expert at this stretch. But in full transparency, it never gets easier. Days one through four feel manageable. Then somewhere around day five, the symptom-spotting kicks in. You start analyzing every twinge, every wave of nausea, every time your boobs feel slightly different than they did an hour ago. Days six through eight are the worst — too early to test, too late to distract yourself with procedure logistics. By day nine you're negotiating with the universe. By day ten or eleven you're either testing in secret or white-knuckling it to your beta.

This piece won't cure any of that, but it is a way to get through, and sometimes, getting through is enough.

First, the thing that will save you the most anguish

Before a single list item, this: if you are on progesterone supplementation (suppositories, PIO shots, oral capsules, any of it), symptom-spotting can't tell you anything. Progesterone can cause sore breasts, fatigue, bloating, cramping, and nausea, and those are, unfortunately, also the symptoms of early pregnancy. You can spend hours cataloguing every sensation in your body and you will not get one inch closer to an answer, because the symptoms you're reading are being written by the medication, not by a pregnancy. Everyone still does this anyway, including people who know exactly what I just said. The goal isn't to achieve some perfect calm; it's to loosen the grip just enough that you're not spending four hours on Reddit comparing your 7dpo cramps to a stranger's.

The same goes for early testing if you had a trigger shot. hCG from a trigger typically takes about 10 to 14 days to fully clear your system, depending on your dose and your own metabolism — which means testing early can give you a positive that isn't a pregnancy, and a day later, a negative that isn't a reliable negative yet.

What to do during the two-week wait: 20 ideas

1. Binge-watch a show that won't ambush you. Before you start anything new, check whether there's a surprise pregnancy storyline. "Infertility-friendly" isn't a genre, but it should be. Safe bets right now: a rewatch of The Bear, Severance, Slow Horses, or anything on your list that's more espionage than family drama. Save the emotional gut-punches for a time when you have more bandwidth.

2. Go to a movie theater. Not to stream something at home, to physically go sit in a dark room where your phone is off for two hours. No Instagram pregnancy announcements. No "just checking" the countdown app. No Googling "6dp5dt symptoms." The movie doesn't even have to be good. The darkness and the forced phone separation are the point.

3. Start a puzzle. A real one, with physical pieces. A 1,000-piece puzzle occupies exactly the right amount of your brain: enough to keep your hands and eyes busy, not enough to require actual cognitive energy you don't have right now. Find one with art you actually like (Rifle Paper Co. and independent shops on Etsy make beautiful ones).

4. Cook something that takes forever. Think: a braise, a soup that simmers for hours, or homemade pasta. The kind of recipe where you can't rush the process even if you want to. There's something about a dish that also requires patience that feels less annoying than everything else requiring patience right now.

5. Move your body gently. This isn't a "hit the gym hard" recommendation. After a transfer, most clinics advise avoiding intense exercise. But a walk, a restorative yoga class, or a swim can help burn off some of the anxious energy sitting in your chest. Moderate movement during the luteal phase is generally associated with lower anxiety in the fertility research, without evidence that it harms outcomes. Check with your clinic on what's cleared for your specific protocol.

6. Read fiction. Not self-help. Not fertility books. Not "mindset" books. Fiction, where you get to live inside someone else's problems for a while. Mad Mabel by Sally Herpworth, Our Perfect Storm by Carley Fortune, and The Favorites by Layne Fargo have been some of my recent distractions.

7. Leave the house for no reason. Go to a bookstore. Wander a home goods store and touch throw pillows. Walk through a farmer's market and buy something impractical like a jar of local honey you'll forget about. Breaking up the geography of your waiting is key here.

8. Try a meditation app designed for fertility. Circle + Bloom has guided visualizations specifically for IVF and IUI waits. If guided meditation makes you want to scream, that's fine, skip it. But if you're someone who finds a voice in your earbuds grounding, this is more targeted than a generic "calm your mind" session.

9. Learn something completely useless. Download Duolingo and start learning Italian. Watch a YouTube tutorial on calligraphy. Look up how to identify constellations. The more unrelated to your reproductive system, the better.

10. Plant something. Yes, I know the symbolism is so on-the-nose it's almost embarrassing. Plant the thing anyway. There's something stubbornly hopeful about putting something in dirt and believing it will grow, and if you can't be stubbornly hopeful right now, at least you'll have herbs in two weeks regardless of what your beta says.

11. Make plans for the second week. Fill your calendar between days seven and fourteen with things to look forward to: a dinner reservation, a friend date, a matinee. The first week is survivable. The second week is where time stops, and having things on the calendar that aren't "pregnancy test" gives the days some structure.

12. Take a bath. If your clinic has cleared you for baths (some advise avoiding them post-transfer, so check), a hot bath with magnesium flakes is about as good as it gets for the kind of tension that lives in your shoulders during this stretch.

13. Clean out one drawer or closet. Not a full Marie Kondo overhaul. One junk drawer. One shelf. The satisfaction of a small, completable task when everything else in your life is dangling without resolution is genuinely therapeutic.

14. Write a letter to someone. An actual letter, on paper, with a stamp. Write to a friend you haven't talked to in a while, a grandparent, a college roommate. The act of thinking about someone else's life and what you want to say to them redirects your attention outward in a way texting doesn't.

15. Listen to a podcast that has nothing to do with fertility. Try Normal Gossip for low-stakes drama about strangers, Heavyweight for emotionally satisfying storytelling, or Maintenance Phase for debunking health myths (the irony of this recommendation is not lost on me). Your podcast feed can be a fertility-free zone for two weeks.

16. Do something creative with your hands. Knitting, embroidery, watercolors, adult coloring books, whatever gets your hands busy and your brain into that slightly zoned-out flow state. You're not trying to make art. You're trying to make time pass.

17. Rewatch your comfort show. The one you've seen four times. The one where you know exactly what happens and nothing can surprise or hurt you. Predictability is a gift right now.

18. Treat yourself to one ridiculously nice thing. A fancy pastry from the bakery you always walk past. A candle that costs more than it should. A face mask that makes you feel like a person who has her life together even though you spent twenty minutes this morning staring at your boobs in the mirror trying to determine if they were more sore than yesterday.

19. Show up for someone else. Call the friend going through a hard time. Send the "thinking of you" text. Drop off flowers. When you spend months being the person everyone is worried about, there's a particular relief in getting to be the person who shows up for someone else. It reminds you that you're more than this wait.

20. Let yourself feel however you feel. Some days you'll be optimistic. Some days you'll be convinced it didn't work. Some days you'll feel nothing at all, and that blankness might scare you the most. None of those feelings are predictive. None of them mean anything about the outcome. Let them move through without assigning them significance.

What not to do

• Don't test early. An early negative when it's too soon to know will gut you. An early positive from residual trigger will elate you. Both will be unreliable, and you'll spend the next three days testing again and again, watching lines get lighter or darker, trying to decode something a blood test will answer definitively.

• Mute the TTC subreddits and pregnancy announcements for two weeks. You can unmute everything after your beta. Right now, other people's results, positive or negative, are noise you don't need.

• Stay off Dr. Google, especially at 2 a.m. Nothing good has ever come from searching "is it normal to have no symptoms at 8dpo" at two in the morning. The answer is always yes, and you will not believe it, and you will keep scrolling.

• Don't make a decision about the next cycle while you're inside this one. Whether it's "I can't do this again" or "I want to do back-to-back transfers" — those decisions don't belong here. You don't have enough information yet, and you're making them from inside the most emotionally compromised version of the process. Wait.

The two-week wait is genuinely designed badly. You're being asked to do the hardest emotional labor of the entire process during the phase where you have the least control and the least information. Protecting yourself from unnecessary suffering is the smartest thing you can do.

If someone you love is in the middle of this

Don't ask how it's going. She'll tell you when she knows. The question, even from a place of love, forces her to narrate the uncertainty out loud, which makes it bigger.

Check in the day after the beta, not the day of. The day of, she's sitting by her phone waiting for the clinic to call, and every notification that isn't them is a tiny jolt of adrenaline followed by disappointment. The day after, she knows. That's when she needs you.

Be someone she doesn't have to explain herself to. Don't ask what the acronyms mean. Don't suggest relaxing. Don't tell her about your coworker who got pregnant the month she stopped trying. Just be there and let her lead. Perceived social support is consistently linked to lower anxiety in women undergoing fertility treatment. It's one of the more reliable findings in this research area, even if the exact size of the effect varies study to study.

However you get through it counts

I can't help you speed up time. Nobody can. The two-week wait will feel long regardless of how many puzzles you do or baths you take or Italian phrases you learn on Duolingo. Some of those days will be fine and some of them will be unbearable and most of them will be somewhere in the weird, messy middle.

You don't have to spend these two weeks well. You don't have to be productive or positive or zen. You just have to get to the other side of them, in whatever way that you can.