Dr. Sue Varma

speaker

1,488 appearances 2 recordings 2 series first heard May 2026 last heard 23 Jun

Dr. Sue Varma’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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unPAUSED with Dr. Mary Claire Haver · Train Your Brain To Thrive Through Menopause · 23 Jun 2026 podcast

And on the other hand, I have a lot of patients with severe health anxiety where they'll say, I know I have a mammogram due this year.

I have not scheduled it.

And I was like, what are you waiting for?

It's going to be horrible.

I said, tell me a little bit more.

Where is this thinking coming from?

What does the evidence suggest in your family?

Who has breast cancer?

Who has cancer?

No, nothing.

Nobody.

I just cannot deal with the knowledge.

So that extreme pessimism that it's going to be horrible, I'm going to get cancer, I'm not going to be able to handle it, that is the extreme pessimism.

And the pessimists also don't act.

So if you see these two ends of the spectrum, the extreme optimist buries their head in the sand because it'll all figure itself out.

The extreme pessimist is engaging in avoidance and procrastination and also burying their head in the sand because they don't want to see potentially the bad things, right?

And they also end up getting frozen in their tracks.

And what we need instead is to marry a little bit of healthy skepticism, right, that the pessimists bring, because we do know that pessimists are more accurate, right?

They do more thorough research.

The problem is they become paralyzed into inaction.

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